Issue 6, Dec 07
Review of activities September - December 2007
We would like to make use of this
occasion at the end of 2007 to wish you a happy new year and for
Christians among you a blessed Christmas!
The year 2007 was full of challenges. As it looks now we are
ending this year with a budget deficit of around US$ 20,000 which, if
not resolved, goes on the personal expense of the Hulsman family, a
larger deficit then in any prior year. We nevertheless hope donations
will reduce that deficit.
Arab West Foundation
As I
reported in our last newsletter, supporters in The Netherlands have
founded the Arab West Stichting (Foundation) as we have not yet been
able to obtain Egyptian NGO status despite our many efforts since
2003. As we want our work in Egypt to be legal - and the Center for
Intercultural Dialogue and Translation (CIDT) is registered as a
translation center, not publishing house - we have moved all of our
e-publishing activities (i.e. Arab West Report) to the new Arab-West
Foundation. You are therefore receiving an Arab West Foundation
newsletter and no longer a CIDT newsletter.
The foundation of the Arab West Stichting comes ten years after we
started with our first newsletter in 1997 and so we are celebrating
our development from a personal initiative to an institution with a
range of activities. To help share this celebration we have, for the
first time, produced a desk calendar with photos and brief
descriptions to illustrate the work we are involved in: publishing
the weekly electronic magazine Arab West Report, translation, the
Electronic Network for Arab West Understanding (ENAWU), internships,
explaining the holy family tradition, networking, etc. We are
delighted with the finished product, which was designed by our
project manager, Nick Truscott, and you can be obtain a copy for free
by emailing me at kshulsman@yahoo.com. As I said, the calendar is
available free of charge but if you would like to make a donation it
would be greatly appreciated.
UBUNTU (it means 'humanity to others' )
In the past two months we have also implemented an ambitious project
to migrate our computers and network from Microsoft operating systems
and applications to the UBUNTU (http://www.ubuntu.com) operating
system and Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org) applications. This
has a doubly positive impact: avoiding the expense of purchasing
licenses for our server, computers and applications and thereby
ensuring that our computer systems are all legally licensed. We
believe that we are the first office of our size in Egypt (and
perhaps in the Middle East) to switch completely to UBUNTU. We hope
that we will be able to promote our achievement to other
non-government organizations in Egypt who may also want to use legal,
industry standard systems and software, but cannot afford the costs
of the Microsoft licenses.
The ENAWU Project
In our previous newsletter we mentioned our Electronic Network for
Arab-West Understanding (ENAWU) project that is partially funded by
the Anna Lindh Foundation. The ENAWU project, bringing so many
similar minded organizations into one electronic network is very
exciting and very challenging because of the many different systems
being used.
Dietrich Mueller-Ehrhard, Nick Truscott and Nevine Naguib
Sawires have made an great start on the IT side of this network and
our excellent team of translators continues to work ensuring that
much of the important data is available in both English and Arabic.
The ENAWU web portal will ultimately be multi-lingual and searchable
in French, German, Dutch, Arabic and English.
Nick Truscott, Sawsan Gabra and Kees Hulsman visited from November
19-22 Lebanon for the first series of meetings outside Egypt for
building the ENAWU network. Our official partners in Lebanon are
CEDRAC, CESMO and the Melkite Greek Patriarchate and during our
visit the Lebanese Emigration Research Center (at Notre Dame
University) expressed the desire to join, and we hope to be able to
integrate the considerable archives of Wael Kheir, a prominent
Lebanese human rights activist, into the project, as well as the
Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW). We are very
grateful Minister of Culture, Dr. Tarek Mitri, received us,
expressing a profound interest in this network. We are extremely
grateful to Father Khalil Samir for hosting our visit in Lebanon and
for the generous hospitality of his team at CEDRAC.
It has become clear that if the ENAWU project is going to
enable users to search a large number of archives containing Arabic
or translated Arabic texts, we will need a common transliteration
system. This is a huge undertaking and one that is not possible
within the scope of the current funding. We have started discussions
with some partners to see how we could jointly develop a such a new
system, or perhaps join with other organisations specialising in
this field to share emerging technology that will meet our needs.
Similarly, during our Lebanon
visit it became clear that we needed to develop a method for
categorising (adding labels and tags) to each article, text, image
or media file that exists in a partner's database, different from
the type of index commonly used by librarians for books and
publications. We are very pleased to be working alongside our
colleagues at CEDRAC to develop such a list, which will also allow
other partners to add their own categories (labels and tags) for
their material, and which will be aligned with the international
Dewey indexing protocol.
Our second series of ENAWU meetings will take place at the Center
for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Prague University in the Czech
Republic between December 9 and 12. This will be followed by
meetings with the IT and library specialists at the Center for
Eastern Christian Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen in The
Netherlands. 2008 will see further meetings in Amman and Cairo. We
remain very confident of meeting the contractual obligations
attached to the Anna Lindh Foundation grant.
Our biggest challenge, nevertheless, continues to be identifying
suitably experienced IT companies and/or recruiting additional IT
specialists both for managing our office network efficiently and our
range of online services and facilities. If any of you who receive
this newsletter are IT specialists and are interested in joining the
project team (either here in Egypt or as a volunteer working through
the internet in your own country), please contact our project
manager, Nick Truscott (nick.jtruscott@gmail.com).
Interns at AWF
We are very grateful for the
continued support of the Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute for 2008
which provides funding for a unique internship program that partners
Danish and other non-Egyptian students with Egyptian students to
produce a research paper for publication through our website. These
students learn to cooperate with people of different cultures,
discuss topics from widely different perspectives and, through such
cooperation, produce valuable papers that will help others to
understand important aspects of Muslim-Christian and Arab-West
Understanding. Our partners in Lebanon were greatly interested in
this internship program and we will be investigating how this program
could be expanded to server organizations in other countries. Papers
produced by our interns will be appearing on the Arab West Foundation
website in the very near future.
Lectures in Europe, December 2007
In
our previous newsletter I referred to the abstract of my lecture on
"Christian activists' contributions to Christian migration from
the Arab world; can Christianity survive in the Arab world?, December
4 in Antwerp, to be presented during an UCSIA international workshop
on Christian and Muslim minorities in transition in Europe and the
Middle East ( www.ucsia.org). The lecture stresses the contributions
Christians have made to tensions between Muslims and Christians and
emphasis the need to practice self-critique. Only sincere
self-critique gives credibility to critique others as well. This is,
of course, not limited to Christians only. The text of the lecture
will be placed on our website after December 4.
As you can see, developments go fast and in our next newsletter we
hope to be able to give you a further progress report on the ENAWU
project and our many other activities. However, in order to realize
our goals we continue to need your support; through volunteering your
skills and expertise; making a donation to AWF or subscribing to the
Arab West Report, or helping with promoting our activities through
your own organisation or personal contact network.
Once again, our sincere best wishes for this season and the coming
year.
Yours sincerely
Cornelis Hulsman & Sawsan Gabra
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