Suchergebnisse

She is the only woman to have attained the rank of Senior Vice-President at the International College (lC), and the first woman at IC to have been appointed director of the secondary school. Moreover, she has served as educationalconsultant for various national and international organizations.

t took me ages to land an Interview with Captain Roula Hteit, the first and only Lebanese female pilot working for the Middle East Airlines (MEA). Hteit was muchyounger than I had expected and it turned out that we were both enrolled at the American University of Beirut in the same year. Hteit is originally from Beirut, yet, she and her family were displaced several times. She lived in the South till her university years where she left for Beirut and attended the American University of Beirut. At AUB, she majored in Mathematics and left university in her senioryear (she still had one semester to graduate) and traveled to Scotland to become a pilot.

Compiled and transliterated by Myriam Sfeir

A roundtable discussion on sexuality took place at the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World, Lebanese American University (LAU). Among theparticipants were undergraduate and graduate students from various Lebanese universities. It was moderated by Dr. Marie Therese Kheir Badawi.

Testimonies

Omar Nashabe, an instructor of human rights at the Lebanese American University (LAU) and an instructor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Haigazian University, is currently working on a voluntary basis, to improve the situation of human rights in Lebanese prisons. Nashabe earned his BA at the American University of Beirut and MA in Social Policy at the State University of New York (SUNY), and it is in those university years that he got interested in crime, deviance and rehabilitation.

In 1994 the Rene Moawad Foundation (RMF), a nongovernmental and non-profit organization whose objective is improving the level of human and social conditions prevailing in Lebanon through economic and development projects, started building an Agricultural Center in the North , with the financial help of the European Union, the Spanish government, and the Spanish foundation Promocion Social de la Cultura.

Interviewing Ms. Guita Hourani, Associate Director of the Lebanese Emigration Research Center (LERC) at Notre Dame University (NDU), Lebanon, was indispensable for this issue of Al-Raida, considering that she is a woman who heads one of the few centers that addresses the issue of migration in the Arab world. Being herself a forced migrant, her testimony is very poignant given that she experienced the alienation that migrants face when they flee their country of origin and settle in a foreign land.

You have pioneered in a most fundamental movement, persevered in nourishing its growth with dedicated purpose and sacrifice, inspite of many difficulties, and you have triumphed. You deserve the best reward Lebanon can offer - the recognition that you have made a major contribution to the revival of its village culture, without which there will be no Lebanon." (Afif Tannous)

Focus: Women's Centers

I met Dr. Nawal Al-Saadawi and her husband Dr. Sherif Hetata on their last visit to Beirut. I never expected my interview to be so informal and unconventional. It was more like a group discussion' in which we exchanged ideas, and debated many themes such as femininity, masculity, sexuality, virginity, circumcision, love, marriage, freedom, etc. The article is a summary of what we talked about.

An Interview with CAWTAR's Executive Director Soukeina Bouraoui

Personal Status Laws were the subject of a round table discussion held at the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World in January 2005. The participants were Dr. Bechir Bilani, Attorney at law, Mohammad Matar, Attorney at law, Ahmad El-Zein, Attorney at law, Judge Arlette Juraysati, and Dr. Ibrahim Najjar. The moderator was Dr. Najla Hamadeh. Also present were Dr. Dima Dabbous-Sensenig, Acting Director of the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World, and Myriam Sfeir, Assistant Editor of Al-Raida.

How do you define activism? Tell me about the pioneering work done by the Jordanian National Commission for Women and what it has achieved in the area of women's political rights?

hile in England I had the chance to meet Dr. Mai Yamani, a social anthropologist and editor of the Feminism and Islam. Dr. Yamani and I decided to meet in a hotel in Knightsbridge. Given that I had never met her before we started exchanging hints as to how we were going to recognize each other. She told me that she was apetite with dark hair and explained that she looked very Arab. I had difficulty recognizing her at first for I expected her to be much older. After chatting for a while I started my interview.