Dragonboat competition September 29, 2021

Former CAWU board member Mary Lai has set up the Dragon Boat Egypt Academy at the Mohammed Ali Club in Giza, Cairo, Egypt and wants to provide the less fortunate in Egyptian society such as the handicapped and refugees to engage with dragon boat racing.

The Dragon Boat Egypt Academy is organizing in October the first Hong Kong Cup for Dragon Boat races and exercising needs to start now. Mary Lai would like to give our refugee students at the CAWU learning Centre the opportunity to participate at the highly reduced rate of 25 EgP per person per training session x  12 students ( this is the maximum students in one boat). The students need to participate in at least 12 training sessions with the same group of team members. Dragon Boat racing is teamwork and thus members of the team need to be committed. Principal Peter Mathias has on more than one occasion highlighted the importance of physical exercising for students at our learning centre. We sadly have no budget for this, but we hope our readers can contribute with the needed 3600 EgP. Our refugee students participated also last summer. We then were able to rent a bus, but these costs are too high. The alternative is to make use of public transportation with a ferry over the Nile costing us 864 EgP. With this the students need to walk 20 minutes to get to the Mohammed Ali Club.  The total costs are 4464,- or 223 Euro which is not in our budget. But this is such a small sum that we decided to go ahead and send out this newsletter.

We know how much our refugee students enjoyed participating in the race last year. This summer the training can be combined with the 2022 summer school that started on July 18 and will continue until August 11. During the summer school students will obtain music lessons from teacher Martin Orbidans, design lessons from coiffeur Ahmed and sculpturing lessons from French artist Bill.

Once per week our refugee students will be taken on low-cost trips such as a visit to Hanging Church and Old Cairo, the Giza Zoo, the Citadel and the Khan el-Khalili with the Hussein Mosque. Such outings are extremely unusual for refugee students. For children/youth at other secondary schools it is normal to have the opportunity to attend a summer school but students at refugee schools have no summer school activities. Our CAWU Learning Centre, however, believes that our refugee students should have similar opportunities to learn new things through summer school. We need your support.

Donations can be made in cash in Egypt or to the Arab-West Foundation from abroad, https://www.arabwestfoundation.com/donate

This is not a large sum of money. Your support will be most appreciated!!

July 26, 2022

Cornelis Hulsman, Editor-in-Chief Dialogue Across Borders