The director of the Instituto Cervantes travels to Beirut to support the cultural and teaching work of the center
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, will make a working trip next week to Beirut (Lebanon) to support the cultural and educational work carried out by the center, which suffered serious damage in the devastating explosion that shook the city on August 4. In addition, he will visit in situ the Spanish base "Miguel de Cervantes", whose soldiers on UN peacekeeping missions receive training from the Cervantes Institute to teach Spanish to the local population, a humanitarian work that has benefited nearly 6,000 Lebanese since 2007.
The work agenda of García Montero, who is accompanied by the Secretary General of the Institute, Carmen Noguero, the Director of International Relations, Rafael Soriano, and the Directors of Academic and Cultural Affairs, Carmen Pastor and Raquel Caleya, respectively, will begin this Monday (at 10 am in Spain, one hour later in Lebanon), with a meeting with Lebanese and Spanish journalists that he will hold with the Secretary General of the Cervantes, Carmen Noguero, and the Director of the Center, Yolanda Soler.
After meeting with the staff of the Beirut headquarters and holding a videoconference with the directors of the Cervantes Institutes in that unstable geographical area, decisive for international peace, García Montero will visit the exhibition Patria común. Delibes illustrated, accompanied by the Spanish ambassador to Lebanon, José María Ferré de la Peña, and ambassadors of Spanish-American countries accredited in Beirut. The exhibition brings together 30 original illustrations created by 15 renowned artists, based on texts and children's characters from the narrative work of Miguel Delibes.
On Tuesday (11 a.m.), the anthology Cuadernos de Baalbek, by Lebanese poet and filmmaker Talal Haidar, will be presented. This is the first bilingual Arabic-Spanish edition of these Notebooks, converted into Spanish by the literature translation workshop of that country thanks to the agreement signed with the Lebanese University. The event will be held in Baalbek (Palmyra hotel) and will be attended by the Spanish ambassador, the governor (mohafez) of Baalbek, Bachir el Khodr, and the veteran poet (Baalbek, 1937).
On Wednesday (7:30), García Montero, the Spanish ambassador, and the governor of Beirut, Marwan Abboud, will visit the school that is being built with funds from Spanish Cooperation (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), to accommodate 600 students between 12 and 17 years old. After the explosion last August (which completely destroyed 10 educational centers in the city and caused damage to 120 schools, eight universities and 20 other educational centers), Spain is contributing with the installation of this prefabricated modular school which will contain 10 classrooms and other facilities such as a computer room, physics and chemistry laboratories and offices. The Instituto Cervantes will collaborate with Spanish teaching materials and teacher training courses.
He will also attend, at the Spanish Embassy, the awarding of the Cross of Civil Merit medal to Mohammed Bahit, a Lebanese policeman who works at the Cervantes Institute and who suffered the aforementioned explosion.
Wednesday's work agenda will conclude with a visit to the Aulario de Kaslik, one of the two classrooms that depend on the center in Beirut (the other is located in the city of Tripoli), where he will learn about the work carried out in the teaching of the Spanish language.
On Thursday (10:30 am) he will visit the military base "Miguel de Cervantes" in Marjayoun, part of the United Nations International Force for Lebanon (UNIFIL), whose soldiers have been teaching Spanish to Lebanese citizens since 2007. Since 60% of the volunteer officers and NCOs have no previous teaching experience, the Cervantes Institute prepares them for this task. Nearly 600 military personnel trained by the Institute have taught Spanish - and also the values and customs of Spanish culture - to some 6,000 Lebanese students in more than 20 localities in the country of the cedars.
At the base, Luis García Montero will also inaugurate (12:15 p.m.) the photographic exhibition En primera línea, by Diego Ibarra Sánchez (Zaragoza, 1982), who will attend the event. The exhibition brings together images of the photographer and photojournalist related to the theme "How wars affect education", the result of his work in countries such as Afghanistan, Nigeria, Libya, Tanzania, Nepal, Colombia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine and Iraq. The exhibition could be seen virtually at the Cervantes Institute in Beirut last spring.
This is the second trip to that small country by a Cervantes director, more than a decade after Carmen Caffarel did so in November 2010.
Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanism Advisor
