Articles for the newsletters

We were asked to write an article about our trip to Germany for some newspapers, so I wrote this one and its going to be published soon in some newpapers, I would like to share it with you:

Hello everybody,
My name is Amira, 19 years old from Bethlehem, Palestine. I don't know from where to start talking about Germany and her people. I have just fallen in love with them. So I will just start from the beginning, I came to germany with Jacob Kraul whom I met earlier in Palestine in a youth conference which is called "walk Your Talk". As Jacob was one of the organizers of thet conference, he came up with the idea to bring people who participated in" walk your talk" to Germany to participate in another conference which is called" connecting bridges" in Schloss Hamborn.
I arrived in Germany on the 15 of July to Berlingen, Lake Constanze. I stayed the first five days in Jacob's house. Thanks to Jacob's family who hosted me, took care of me and made me feel as if I am a member of the family. Then I moved with the group who consisted of one Israeli guy, five Palestinian guys who live in Israel and another group of German youth, to The Waldorf School in Berlingen ; we stayed there for one week having a lot of meetings with students from the school to talk about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and how an Israeli and a Palestinian can be together in one place and living as human beings not as enemies. It is possible if the people of the world would just listen to one another without any borders between them.As a result there won't be anymore war and hatred. We really had a lot of fun in ÜBerlingen; even we had a cultural night in which we invited a lot of people from the area there and we performed some Palestinian folklore dancing, sang songs for peace and unity, shared our personal stories about life in Israel and Palestine and finally cooked some Arabic and Palestinian food. Thanks to all the people

including farmers who donated for us a lot of food and for the families who invited us to their houses to spend the day with them.
Thursday the 26 of July we arrived at Schloss Hamborn at 1 pm after a journey which lasted for almost 9 hours in the car; and there the organizers of the conference were waiting for us. The organizers of this conference are a group of approximately 20 young people from Schloss Hamborn (grades 10 to 13) as well as students from Augsburg and Mannheim. These students organized "The Youth Congress Connection 2007" last January. The most thing that interested me in these young people is that they are clever enough to choose two important and sensitive topics for this conference. That means they didn't choose topics about youth but also they chose topics that concerns almost everything that must be taken care of . The first topic was about the environment. For example: genetic engineering. They talked about

tools and ways we already have to do genetic manipulation. Where would the sciences lead us in the future?, which ethnic doubts we have?, and also which advantages can we get out of genetic engineering?. The second topic was about society. For example: "Eye to eye" in which I participated, we talked about how we can transform any kind of suffering that we face into positive actions. Not only workshops were held in this conference but also there was daily lectures and discussions for the public so that every participant will be able to gain a certain insight into every topic.
I was very happy to participate in such a conference. I learned many useful things from it, specially some words in Germany!!!! Good luck for you my friends and I wish you all the best!!!