AWR wishes for a blessed Christmas and New Year

Language: 
English
Sent On: 
Wed, 2014-12-24
Year: 
2014
Newsletter Number: 
62

 

 

AWR wishes for a blessed Christmas and New Year

 

AWR, Cairo, December 24, 2014

 

In 2014 we have produced many reports and articles and served interns with our unique network of contacts in Egypt.

 

Much effort has been made to strengthen our NGO, the Center for Arab-West Understanding. This spring a new board was elected consisting of Sawsan Gabra Ayoub Khalil as chair, Dr. Hoda Awad as Secretary, Adel Rizkallah as treasurer, Eng. Nagwa Raouf as a member, and myself as deputy chairman.

 

We have worked for almost a year on a report on the Egyptian Constitution of 2014. The report compares the Constitution made during the presidency of Mohammed Morsi with the one accepted in a referendum in January 2014. Tens of interviews were held with members of the Constituent Assembly but also experts outside the assembly. The new Constitution may not be fully perfect but is certainly a major improvement over the previous constitution.

 

That work has taken so much time is to a large extent due to our office being understaffed. There are many more projects we could be involved in if we would have the needed capacity to carry such projects out. Despite this, we have seen a number of new additions to our team!

 

In September 2014, a new editor, Robert Forster, joined us. He has worked hard on upgrading our different websites, in particular that of the Center for Arab-West Understanding (CAWU). Unfortunately, a server failure brought our websites down for 10 days delaying efforts, but we remain determined to continue building our organisation in the upcoming year.

 

Monica Michael joined our team not long after, and currently works with the RSS system developed by board advisor Marc van Oudheusden who also provided our staff with an excellent workshop in the first few days of November.

 

In addition, Khaled Hassan joined us in October and has played a major role in fostering cooperation between our NGO and the Global Forum for Media and Development. He also introduced our work to many other organizations in Egypt. He is now working on organizing a lecture for Mohammed Anwar al-Sadat. Yes, the former-parliamentary representative and relative of the late Egyptian president.

 

Mr. Al-Sadat will speak about Egypt’s parliament on January 19, 2015. That is certainly a good start of the new year. If you are interested in attending? Please send us an email to sign up to Joseph at [email protected]

 

We have thus had a year to be grateful for, but realize that fundraising activities are much needed to increase the capacity of our NGO.  Your contributions are most welcome.

 

With wishes for a blessed Western Christmas, new year which in turn is followed by Coptic Christmas on January 7. It is a season of holidays and being together with family and friends. We much hope to be able to continue, with the support of all our friends, building our NGO in 2015, wishing that through our work we will contribute to stability in Egypt.

 

 

Cornelis Hulsman

Vice President at the Center for Arab-West Understanding 

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For up to the minute news on Muslim-Coptic relations in Egypt, follow our Twitter feed.

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The Arab West Report is a weekly digest of Egyptian newspaper translations and analysis, focusing primarily on Arab-West and Muslim-Christian relations.

 

To reach a specialist or for general media inquiries, send us an email.

 

To follow our daily summary translations of Arabic media in Egypt, visit our website:

www.arabwestreport.info

 

Other websites in the Arab-West group:

www.arabwestfoundation.com , www.cawu.org , www.cidtegypt.com , www. enawu.com