[originaltext]Moderator: Hi, everyone! It’s a great honor for me to introdu

Moderator:
    Hi, everyone! It’s a great honor for me to introduce our keynote speaker today, Ms Laura Boushnak. Laura Boushnak is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer, whose work focuses on women, literacy and education reform in the Arab world. For her ongoing series ’’I Read, I Write’’, she photographed girls and women changing their lives through education in Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan and Tunisia. Let’s welcome Ms Boushnak.
Laura Boushnak:
    Thank you for the introduction. As an Arab female photographer, I have always found ample inspiration for my projects in personal experiences. The passion I developed for knowledge, which allowed me to break barriers towards a better life was the motivation for my project ’’I Read, I Write’’.
    Pushed by my own experience, as I was not allowed initially to pursue my higher education, I decided to explore and document stories of other women who changed their lives through education, while exposing and questioning the barriers they face. I covered a range of topics that concern women’s education, keeping in mind the differences among Arab countries due to economic and social factors. These issues include female illiteracy, which is quite high in the region; educational reforms; programs for dropout students; and political activism among university students.
    As I started this work, it was not always easy to convince the women to participate. Only after explaining to them how their stories might influence other women’s lives, how they would become role models for their own community, did some agree. Seeking a collaborative and reflexive approach, I asked them to write their own words and ideas on prints of their own images. Those images were then shared in some of the classrooms, and worked to inspire and motivate other women going through similar educations and situations. Aisha, a teacher from Yemen, wrote, ’’I sought education in order to be independent and to not count on men with everything. ’’
    One of my first subjects was Umm El-Saad from Egypt. When we first met, she was barely able to write her name. She was attending a nine-month literacy program run by a local NGO in the Cairo suburbs. Months later, she was joking that her husband had threatened to pull her out of the classes, as he found out that his now literate wife was going through his phone text messages. (Laughter) Naughty Umm El-Saad. Of course, that’s not why Umm El-Saad joined the program. I saw how she was longing to gain control over her simple daily routines, small details that we take for granted, from counting money at the market to helping her kids in homework. Despite her poverty and her community’s mindset, which belittles women’s education, Umm El-Saad, along with her Egyptian classmates, was eager to learn how to read and write.
16. What does Laura Boushnak’s work focus on?
17. What was the passion that Laura Boushnak developed for knowledge?
18. Why did Aisha, a teacher from Yemen, seek education?
19. Which is not the reason why Umm El-Saad, an Egypt woman, joined the program?