Muslim & Christian Places of Worship side by side in the Holy Land (Jordan)

Photograph is a composite of two images that I took whilst working in Jordan a few months ago. It shows the Al Bishara Christian Coptic Church and the King Abdullah 1 Mosque which lie adjacent to each other on Abdali Street in central Amman. It represents physical proof, in a time of almost unprecedented levels of human suffering, ethnic cleansing and religious conflict in the Middle East, that Christians, Muslims, Jews and other faiths can co-exist peacefully in this region. The Holy Land (Jordan, Israel, Palestine) , the Levant and Mesopotamia belong to all its inhabitants no matter what their faith, culture or social class are.

I was given the opportunity this year to take on the role of a master mentor in an ambitious coding educational initiative known as Refugee Code Week(RCW). Led by the German software company SAP, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) and our very own Galway Education Centre(GEC), this ambitious programme aims to help play a role in overcoming the unemployment, despair, loss of education, forced mass emigration and social/economic/nation meltdown that has accompanied the refugee crisis in the Middle East by starting the process of equipping participants in refugee camps as well as in the schools and colleges of hosted countries with much needed coding learning skills. RCW will continue in 2017 and beyond.
My work has allowed me to teach in Syrian and Palestinian refugee camps as well as in schools, universities, community centres across Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey.

I have witnessed at first hand the best of humanity- the UNHCR workers, the refugee camp residents volunteer, the SAP/GEC team and the Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Jordanians and other nationalities who give so much to help others. These ordinary everyday people are the unsung heroes of our time.

I have walked with many of my newfound Middle Eastern friends through the streets of Amman, Beirut, Sidon, Istanbul, Cairo and Nabatieh

My earnest wish is to witness the dismantling of the refugee camps that I work in as its residents return home and to some day walk together with the same people through the streets of Aleppo, Dara'a, Palmyra, Raqqa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Mosul.
May I extend my best wishes to these friends during Christmas, a time associated with a message of a future peace and good will to all men and women.

Arab Uprisings Reminiscent of Eastern Europe

Is history repeating itself? The wave of popular revolutions sweeping across the Arab world is reminiscent of events in Europe over twenty years ago. A series of mass street protests and strikes across Poland ended the fifty-four year authoritarian rule of the Communist Party when the regime was forced to hold democratic elections in 1989. Like a game of dominoes, the success of Polish ‘people power’ caused a knock-on effect of uprisings across all of the one-party Stalinist countries of eastern Europe. The seemingly indestructible edifice of militaristic Soviet puppet governments imploded within a matter of months.

Violence though was lessened by the ground-breaking decision of the Soviet Union under a reformist Mikhail Gorbachev government not to intervene in its satellite states as it had done so often in the past.

But the struggle for liberty and democracy knows no boundaries. Within a few years the USSR itself, then the world’s second superpower, disintegrated as its own peoples finally unshackled their chains of bondage.

In 2011 the majority of the Arab states, reeling from mass popular protests, are mainly one party regimes kept in power this time by the economic and military support of the USA, the world’s number one superpower.

Egypt for instance has long being the second largest (after Israel) recipient of American aid. Yet these funds, totalling c$2bn annually, are not used to improve the quality of life of the poverty stricken Egyptian people but primarily to buy arsenals of sophisticated weaponry from American arms manufacturers to keep a hated elite in power and to help Israel maintain its illegal siege of Gaza.

Thankfully it is Barack Obama in the White House and not George Bush leading to the hope that the Arabs will be able to eject their rulers from Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Of course the struggle for freedom and justice cannot be contained and inevitably it will be the turn of the Israeli colonists in the West Bank to face the wrath of both the enslaved and the exiled Palestinian peoples supported by the freed Arab populace of neighbouring countries. Peace in a war -ravaged Middle East will possibly then have a chance to blossom in a more fertile soil.