"We had our own social program of which we 've been working on every year, but after witnessing the important social movements that took place in Syria, we had to stop, evaluate what 've we done so far, and then move into working with those social groups within the program of action they 've set for themselves, and forming a kind of pressure by working on one case or one axis, so we had this introductive meeting with these groups to invite them to work with us, based on our faith of the necessity of joint work in our society's cases, and especially the cases of women".
This was what the ladies of the middle east church council (Faf Shiniara, Assaf Hennawy, Deniz Morab, Nadia Abboud, Hayat Hanna, and Heyam Hekme) pointed to, during the introductive meeting which the council held on Saturday, february 3rd, 2007.
In this meeting they talked about the Woman Program that started in 1990 goaling to enable, train, and strenghen the women through lectures, teach-ins, and training sessions. The past annual meeting was held under the title of "Converging With Others", with the participation of Dr. Buthaina Sha'ban.
Mr. Razek Suriany (chairman of the education department of the church council in Aleppo, which includes other departments such as the christian islamic relations dept, and the justice and equality dept. the education dept handles the woman program) talked of a variety of activities his department achieved in the past years, such as:
- Raising awareness by holding conferences, teach-ins and lectures, training in different fields.
- A meeting of the panarab european youth, with the partisipation of youth from both the panarab and european countries, the meeting was about cultural dialogue (christians and muslems).
Mr. Razek also pointed to the council's serious desire to take the hands of other groups that can do something important to the Syrian society, and to work alongside them, and then expanding this work to include regional and international groups.
The meeting was held with the participation of a number of civilian groups in Syria, including the Syrian women observatory, the Rainbow foundation, the Syrian women nexus, the Righteous shepherd nuns, and the Antakian woman committee.... These groups talked about their areas of work and their activities. They deliberated some thoughts aiming to reach a joint axis to work around together during the year 2007.
Syrian Women Exclusive, (The middle east church council begins a new dialogue initiative)
Translated By: Nawar El-Sabaa