The theme of this show is Palestine from two very different perspectives. We’ll be talking about the challenges faced by a stateless Palestinian, Nizar, who, while already a refugee in Syria, was forced to flee the war and ended up once again as a refugee in Denmark. We’ll also be hearing about a joint project called EAST which involved the University of Glasgow in Scotland and the University of Gaza in Palestine.
absolutely engineered
Ania Rolinska, who teaches on the preparation course helping foreign students get up to the required level of English to do a degree at Glasgow, talks with her colleague Bill Guariento about a collaboration between their engineering students and the engineering students of the University of Gaza who acted as coaches to the Glasgow students’ analysis of engineering problems that they chose. If you are thinking that it would have been nice to hear from the Palestinian side of the EAST collaboration story then I have a confession to make. I made an appointment to make this recording in late 2015 and got my times completely mixed up. So when we re-scheduled the meeting in early 2016 Dr Nazmi Al-Masri from Gaza was not available. Here anyway is the story of an online collaboration between a Scottish university and a university in Palestine where the Palestinian engineering students were the experts providing real local problems for the Glasgow students to explore. The Palestinian students had been given a course on how to give effective feedback before working with the Glasgow students. Let’s find out first, who the Glasgow students were. Not Scottish, as Ania told us.
You can find out more about the East project at their webpage where you will even find the whole course on giving effective feedback for free!
absolutely determined
And now from Palestine to Syria where the civil war is not discriminating against those which it makes refugees. Nizar was already a stateless Palestinian living in Syria and once the civil war took hold, was forced to leave Syria with his family to stand a chance of survival. Gwen Fox has been interviewing newly arrived refugees in Denmark and we have posted her three special podcasts on our page at www dot absolutely dash intercultural dot com. We’ll be creating an additional menu item for the Danish shows. Two were in Danish and the last one in English. Gwen’s aim was to give the refugees a voice since we talk a lot about refugees but rarely hear them speak for themselves.
So back to Nizar, who has noticed a big difference between ordinary Danish people and the Danish bureaucracy that he has to navigate very carefully. As you’ll hear Nizar is absolutely determined.
As I mentioned you can find the full interviews with all three refugees on this website on a new page we have set up for what we’re calling the Danish podcasts.
Thank you so much for listening and do tell us what you’d like to hear more of on our webpage here or on our Facebook page where this week we have been highlighting the books on our Amazon store.
The next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on November 4th so until then stay tuned!
The host of this show is: Anne Fox
