MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Eric Westervelt paid a visit to the town of Sidi Bouzid, where the first protests occurred.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
ERIC WESTERVELT: It's a sunny weekday afternoon and dozens of young men, almost all in their 20s, play cards, sip tea and smoke at a dingy no-name cafe on the outskirts of Sidi Bouzid. A faded poster of Brooke Shields hangs on the wall. Most of these men here have university degrees. They are all unemployed.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
WESTERVELT: Twenty-nine-year-old Taoufik Hamdouni sits with his friends, as he does most every day. His hair is trimmed and neat. His, shirt pressed and clean, as if he's dressed for a job interview that never seems to come. Hamdouni graduated from college nearly seven years ago with a civil engineering degree. He's been jobless ever since.
TAOUFIK HAMDOUNI: (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Unidentified Man #1: (Singing in foreign language)
WESTERVELT: Unidentified Man #2: Ah, hey.
WESTERVELT: The 26-year-old even searched outside Tunisia for work. But he was asked to pay about $5,000 to a job broker - almost five months' pay for his father, a schoolteacher.
MARWAN CHOKRI: (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Hamdouni has four brothers and three sisters. All have university degrees. Only one of them has a job, a brother who works as an elementary school teacher.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILD)
HAMDOUNI: (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Eric Goldstein is deputy director of Human Rights Watch for North Africa and the Middle East.
ERIC GOLDSEIN: It really is about jobs for them and the resentment that people in other parts of the country seem to be part of this Tunisia that everybody talks of as being a middle class country, you know, well-educated, moderate, open to the world, and they're back there struggling every day.
WESTERVELT: So an urgent issue - among the many any new Tunisian government has to face - is economic development in the rural hinterlands.
WESTERVELT: Eric Westervelt, NPR News.