Lecture: The coming into being and passing away of the Arabian Peninsula

On Wednesday, 9 October at 7.30 pm, a special kind of lecture will take place in the auditorium of the municipal comprehensive school: Lutz Jäkel and Nadine Pungs will report on their travels on the Arabian Peninsula with photos, films and their own texts. They will tell cheerful, serious and touching stories that you won't find in the news.

Writer Nadine Pungs and photojournalist Lutz Jäkel have been travelling the shining lands of the Arabian Peninsula for many years. A region characterised by negative headlines and clichés. Pungs and Jäkel dispel these in their multi-award-winning live reportage, telling of desert woes and climate change, of warmth and destruction, of growth and decay.

The two travellers were always travelling separately, as they knew nothing about each other. When Lutz Jäkel marvelled at the temple tombs of the rock city of Petra in Jordan, Nadine Pungs followed in the footsteps of a famous traveller to the Orient.

While Jäkel conducted interviews with successful businesswomen in the United Arab Emirates, Pungs spoke to migrant workers in Kuwait about precarious living conditions. In Bahrain, they experienced the sinful nightlife. Pungs spent several months exploring Saudi Arabia on his own and met a prince, while Jäkel lived in Yemen long before the war and travelled through the desert with drug dealers. Pungs just stood on the border in Oman and looked into the country.

One day, they decide to set off together to one of the most exciting countries in the Middle East, a place they have never been to before: Iraq, the former Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation. But also a country that has suffered decades of dictatorship, wars and conflicts. Together they visit magnificent Shiite shrines, talk to young Iraqis about their future, pass around forty military checkpoints and watch the sun sink into the Tigris.

In the end, Nadine Pungs and Lutz Jäkel have collected cheerful and touching stories and photographs from all the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, stories that do not appear in the news. In the West, we know almost nothing about the tens of millions of people who live, dance, laugh, argue and love on the peninsula. Yalla Yalla - Arabic for: Let's go! Infotainment at its best.

Admission is from 7 pm. During the interval, the German-Syrian Association will be serving Syrian coffee and cold drinks can be purchased for a donation.

The event is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science.

Further information, including registration, is available at the VHS Bocholt office, Industriestraße 1, the Rhede and Isselburg branches or via www.vhs-bocholt.de.