SEKEM Insight EN 10.10

SEKEM‘s Journal for Economy, Culture, and Society in EgyptInsight

Nr. 98 - October 2010

SEKEM Insight | October 2010 |

these days “social entrepreneur-ship” is on everyone’s lips. In recent years the topic has come out of the niche of public news and entered the halls of the renowned business schools and universities.

However, all too often the social and cultural commitment of a for-profit company is solely a mar-keting tool or add-on value to

“business as usual”.

At SEKEM the spiritual and cul-tural life of its co-workers with its pillars of education, arts and cul-ture, and spirituality embodied in daily communal practice is, how-ever, the basis for all life and work.

Of course, art and culture cannot easily play an equally important role in all fields of everyday com-mercial activity and in all places in a large and decentralised com-pany the size of SEKEM. However, in many locations it is. And even where spiritual matters seem to be far removed from the needs of

“daily business” the impact of the cultural life is inspiring work even far away.

In this issue we introduce you to the cultural life in SEKEM as it is shown in its latest sustainability report and explain what activities it includes to foster diversity and individual development in SEKEM.

T his month SEKEM Insight contin-ues to summarize the remaining of

the interrelated chapters of the SEKEM

Report on Sustainable Development

2009, this time focusing on the cul-

tural and spiritual life. The dimension

of ‘cultural life’ is about the free, indi-

vidual development of the individuals

within SEKEM, for the development of

consciousness forming the basis for a

comprehensive understanding of sus-

tainable development.

As symbolized by the Sustainability Flower, sustainable development at SEKEM unfolds in four dimensions of cultural life, societal life, and economic life, embedded in ecology (see SEKEM Insight 08 and 09/2010). SEKEM reports in detail on what is currently done to support the development of employees and broader community through its continuously expanding institutions and activities in the fields of arts, education, research, health, and community development in the

Culture in Daily Life in SEKEM

Editorial

Dear Readers,

Your Team of Editors

Cultural participation, personal development and self-determined living spirituality characterize the life and work in SEKEM.

New MedicineComplementary Medicine in Egypt

Social LifeCulture in Daily Life in SEKEM

MediaInterviews and Events with SEKEM

Art and the daily life belong together: the artists of SEKEM’s Eurythmy Ensemble frequently perform for the co-workers of the firms.


report that is available to all readers on request from SEKEM.

Basic Education and Life-Long Learning

The SEKEM educational institu-tions consist of a primary and high school, a kindergarten with a section for curative care, a vocational training centre, and the Heliopolis Academy employee training centre. In 2009, the Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development has finally received gov-ernment approval and thus taken the last hurdle on the way towards for-mal establishment. It will substantially extend the reach of SEKEM’s devel-opment impulse within Egypt and beyond.

So far such activities have been carried out by the numerous educa-tional ventures that have taken up many motifs of Waldorf pedagogy and adapted them for the cultural context. They continue to be admin-istrated by the SEKEM Development Foundation (SDF). In the year 2009 40 infants were enrolled in the SDF’s kin-dergarten, 161 children in elementary school, 65 at middle school level, 31 in the high school, and 24 in the Special Education Program. The Community School provided education services to 75 Children and 175 trainees were enrolled at the Vocational Training Centre. In total 75 teachers are cur-rently employed in these institutions.

In 2009 apart from continuing the teacher training programme to mod-ernise pedagogy in Egypt and improve arts and language education special emphasis was put on the further devel-opment of the SEKEM Environmental Science Centre (SESC) offering inter-active science classes and field trips

Economy

including a range of practical activi-ties in the exact sciences and on envi-ronmental awareness to schools in the greater Cairo area.

Boosting Scientific Research

The Heliopolis Academy for Sustainable Development continu-ously improves its capacity to con-duct, publish, and disseminate social and scientific research in the long-term focus areas of medicine, phar-macy, renewable energy, biodynamic agriculture, and arts and the social sciences. Its research is driven by the practical needs of the SEKEM com-panies and social institutions and is designed to address the future needs of the Egyptian society.

Since 2009 the newly established Special and Sponsored Program (SSP) Centre has been centrally developing and coordinating new research and development (R&D) projects aiming to attract third-party funding. It is also paying special attention to their align-ment with the overall SEKEM mission.

The Art Foster Personal Development

The Adult Training Centre supports individual capacity building and offers training to SEKEM co-workers empha-sizing social and teamworking skills. Weekly lectures held by Dr. Abouleish on cultural and philosophical topics are open to participation by every-one in SEKEM and frequently and on a regular basis involve employees, stu-dents, and teachers as performers.

In 2009, the Adult Training Centre had three responsible staff for creative arts and maintained a small orchestra of 10 SEKEM co-workers plus a num-ber of choir groups involving co-work-ers, school children, teachers, and

a number of international guests. A large share of pupils received musi-cal lessons, some playing on their own instruments, and eight students were enrolled in the professional Eurythmy training course graduating in 2010, while concurrently also serving as teachers to the school’s children.

Highlights of the 2009 cultural year included the staging of the Goethe’s drama “Faust I” and the performance of Goethe’s “The fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily” by the SEKEM Eurythmy group with musical support from the Heliopolis Academy Chamber Orchestra. International cul-tural exchange was also expanded resulting in joint programs of the SEKEM choirs and musical groups involving international guests and

“touring” the production facilities of SEKEM subsidiaries on several occa-sions. The annual SEKEM summer orchestra succeeded to attract strong participation by SEKEM students dur-ing their summer holidays.

Grounded in Religion and Spirituality

Religion and spirituality are recog-nized in SEKEM as a central pillar of personal development while tolerance, reflection, and dialogue are furthered throughout SEKEM’s institutions. This includes, for instance, a mosque on the farm grounds and the communal celebration of religious holidays. For visitors Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish once annually holds a seminar on a holis-tic understanding of Islam, includ-ing artistic exercises such as Islamic poetry, Arabic script, Qur‘an recitals, and Arabic songs.

Magdalena Kloibhofer

All green: the sustainability report 2009 shows a thoroughly positive outlook on the progress of the social and cultural aspects of SEKEM‘s development.


S ince 1977 the SEKEM Initiative has been transforming the Egyptian

desert into a lush paradise largely through the means of hard work and biodynamic agriculture. Close to 2.000 individuals directly work for the various businesses, another con-tribute through their work on around 200 farms throughout Egypt and fre-quently involving entire families of peasants. SEKEM also cultivates medicinal plants and processes them for commercial purposes, runs a tex-tiles company, schools, an institution for curative care, and a medical centre servicing the entire region.

Anthroposophic Medicine in Egypt?

My wife, Danielle Lemann, and I had been invited to work at the medical centre on an adaptation of anthrop-osophic medical care to the Egyptian context. Answering the question of how our Egyptian colleagues could

be effectively assisted in familiar-ising themselves with a medical approach attempting to strike a bal-ance between material and spiritual aspects of health and illness quickly moved to the focus of our activities. The Western traditional medical par-adigm is indeed derived from that of Arab medicine. To this day no need for a complementary medicine seems to be perceived by Egyptian doctors; con-ventional medicine is widely accepted as „their medicine“. Still, the Qur‘an as well as the New Testament would offer ample material for an advanced understanding of human health and an expanded doctor-patient relation that could encompass spiritual dimensions. Unfortunately much of this awareness and practical training has been lost both in the global West as in the East.

In cooperation with the longtime mentor to the Medical Centre Dr. Hans Werner (based in Öschelbronn,

Alternative Medicine for the land of the Nile -Complementary medicine in Egypt

Dr. Hansueli Albonico and Danielle Lemann summarise the importance of SEKEM‘s medical trainings for Egyptian doctors in a guest article.

Strong demand: the services of the SEKEM Medical Centre have come to be much appreciated by the inhabitants of the surrounding villages.

Culture

Germany) we thus decided to inaugu-rate in 2006 a regular medical sem-inar in anthroposophic medicine in Egypt. Since March of that year it has met with great interest as the eighth repetition of the one-to three-day pro-gramme this year shows.

As holder of a Master of Medical Education Danielle Lemann attempted to give the seminars an increasingly interactive structure involving group work, “whisper groups”, and an intro-duction to „problem-based learning“ which, as still largely unfamiliar even to Egyptian medical doctors in regu-lar practice proved to be a fascinating challenge. The instrument of continu-ous training evaluation was surpris-ingly new to them, too.

„Quick Shot“ Medicine

Thematically, we tried to build on the experience of the individual par-ticipant of encountering a patient dur-ing the regular work day at the medical centre. The experiment demonstrated, for example, that it seemed to be nearly impossible for the Egyptian colleagues to not immediately treat a child carrying a fever with aggressive drugs and strong antibiotics. In Egypt antibiotic infusions are often adminis-tered even in cases of trivial colds.

This „quick shot medicine“ has many disadvantages also in Egypt: the need for a sustainable development of a healthy immune system in balance with the environment is prevented, immune and auto-immune diseases are becoming more and more frequent. Egypt exhibits an extremely high prev-alence of hepatitis C infections, too, largely as a result of previous schis-tosomiasis treatment involving mul-tiple use of syringes. Interferon and


ribavirin are unaffordable for the majority of the Egyptian population. This suggests a vast opportunity for ventures that would promote afforda-ble treatment with plant-based reme-dies. In the treatment of hepatoma as well as breast and bladder cancers the impact studies for mistletoe have also proven to be much more effective than in Europe.

Conventional or Complementary

Conventional medical drugs are almost exclusively synthetically pro-duced. They are therefore all derived from petroleum. In contrast, the Qur’an as well as Paracelsus have pointed out that all of nature is and should be available to the curative efforts of any doctor. Moreover, there is also a wide range of artistic thera-pies available. These would allow any physician the treatment of diseases in much more individual and gentle ways. His or her responsibility is then a three-fold one: in addition to the awareness that any healing efforts must affect the entire biography of a patient, the health care professional must also develop an awareness of the social dimension of a patient’s cur-rent state of health taking into account the natural environment.

Nutrition is of central importance to the present state and future devel-opment of public health also in Egypt.

Any individual not only has to take in enough nutrients but also enough life forces on a regular basis. A modifica-tion of a patient’s diet is, for example in cases of hepatitis, a key to better health. The Egyptian population pres-ently consumes enormous amounts of sugar which additionally weakens an affected liver specifically as refined sugar is essentially a dead substance.

Seminars and Exercises

The fundamental limitation of the possibilities of experience by the sem-inar-based style of educational train-ing was extended by the communal practice of eurythmy under the expe-rienced guidance of SEKEM’s artistic director, Christoph Graf.

For us visiting practitioners and sci-entists taking the trip to Egypt and meeting our colleagues at the SEKEM Medical Centre not only proved to be a tremendous advantage to our pro-fessional medical experience. It also turned out to be a formidable cultural encounter in difficult times of reawak-ening cultural and religious polariza-tion on a global scale. The essence of Islam, we learned, will only reveal itself to us through our encounters with the people - not through the headlines of the daily newsmakers.

Dr. Hans Ueli Albonico, Danielle Lemann

Culture

More information:www.enlightennext.org!

As part of its weekly webcast series Radio EnlightenNext’s edi-tor Dr. Tom Steininger, a senior editor of the German version of the maga-zine EnlightenNext, interviews people who through their work contribute to a new, holistic approach to global devel-opment issues.

The team of editors of EnlightenNext has invited Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish as a studio guest to their regular dialogue series on „Radio EnlightenNext.

The channel has been making use of the new possibilities of web radio dis-tribution for a year and every Thursday from 8 to 9pm broadcasts to a grow-ing audience on „aspects of contem-porary evolutionary spirituality“. All broadcasts are available as audio streams and reception is possible with any Internet-enabled computer. Using a telephone connection the audience can also actively participate in the interview.

Listeners can access individual inter-views live or in the form of a download-able file at a later time.

The interview with Dr. Ibrahim abouleish will be broadcast on 11 November 2010 scheduled for 8pm to 9pm. Direct access to „Radio EnlightenNext“ and the recordings of the interviews is available on the website of the station at: http://www.enlightennext.org/webcast/index.php?q=node/193

The latest broadcast can be listened to on the same site at: http://www.enlightennext.org/webcast/index.php?q=audio-germany

Source: Radio EnlightenNext

Interview with Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish at EnlightenNext

New experiences: for many peasants treatment at the SEKEM Medical Centre is an unusual experience.

You can visit SEKEM yourself:www.SEKEM-reisen.de www.aventarra.de


Impressions from SEKEM

T he progress on SEKEM’s new farms is startling for many visitors to Egypt and the friends and part-ners in the world. On the SEKEM farm in Minya that is shown in our picture SEKEM co-workers recently were able to harvest the first dill for processing into other products.

After little more than 2 years of preparatory biodynamic cultivation SEKEM can now harvest the first ingre-dients for their herbal teas. Back then a desert valley still stretched far and wide at this location cutting into the hills on the Eastern side of the Nile river depression. Minya is a well known agricultural town in Middle Egypt and is already home to many of SEKEM’s small-scale suppliers of raw materials. With the establishment of SEKEM Minya including the acquisition of approximately 2.000 feddans of land destined for cultivation SEKEM’s ISIS has now itself become engaged in agricultural production on a larger scale. The new invest-ments have been made to ensure the safety and quality of the raw produce in the very long term.

Impressions


Since 1981, World Food Day is cel-ebrated on October 16th of every year to raise awareness of the issues behind poverty and hunger. The facts are still shocking: According to the 2010 Global Hunger Index 925 million of the world‘s population do not have access to sufficient food and drink-ing water. Consequently, every day 24.000 people die of hunger. To show-case and explain existing policies that can help solve this tragic global failure, on World Food Day 2010 the Hamburg-based World Future Council Foundation (WFC) has launched a new

”Agriculture and Food” section on their policy solutions website www.future-policy.org.

The WFC‘s work in this field is based on the conviction that sustain-able agriculture and food policies are the basis for providing food security, conserving biodiversity and mitigat-ing climate change. The information on the new website section serves to help decision-makers find and imple-ment good policies in four fields: Safeguarding food security, conserv-ing genetic resources for food and agriculture, promoting urban farming and supporting organic agriculture.

Many of the policies from all over the world were found and evaluated during the extensive research for the WFC‘s Future Policy Award 2009 which was presented on the topic of suc-cessful Food Security Policies. The three winners were the Belo Horizonte Food Security Policy, the Tuscan Seed Conservation Policy and the Cuban Urban Agriculture Policy.

The other three policy areas covered extensively on www.futurepolicy.org are Renewable Energy Policies, Energy Efficiency Policies and Regenerative City Policies.

Quelle: WFC

WFC Launches Website on Exemplary Food Policies

„How can business be a fairer, more democratic, caring, and sus-tainable endeavour, as Rudolf Steiner, advocate of the concept of the three-fold social order put it?“ This was the motivating question for the com-pany “Anthrobuch” to sell books in a way that benefits all parties along the value chain. The website bear-ing the same name is „an initiative to redistribute income in favour of free education institutions.“ It sells anthro-posophic books and donates a por-tion of the revenue to a pre-selected initiative. Currently it has chosen to contribute the proceeds to SEKEM’s development.

Customers can choose from a range of anthroposophic books from dif-ferent publishing houses. They make their purchases without having to pay for shipping costs and do not need a password or account. The recipient organizations receive donations to help finance their education projects. The group of beneficiaries include free education facilities such as Waldorf schools or special education facilities.

Source: Anthrobuch

News in Brief

Anthroposophical Books With Added Value

Masthead: The editors of SEKEM Insight wish to thank all contributors to this issue.

Editors:Christina BoeckerBijan Kafi

Contact:SEKEM-Insightc/o SEKEM HoldingP.O.Box 2834, El Horreya, Heliopolis, Cairo, Egypt [email protected]

Pictures: 1,2,3,4: SEKEM

No republication without written consent by the publisher.

More information:http://www.anthrobuch.de!

Huge mono-crop areas, massive use of pesticides, and more and more genetically modified (GM) seeds - can we continue the farming busi-ness as usual? Given the prevalence of global hunger and the loss of fer-tile soils and biodiversity the 400 authors of the World Agricultural Report have been demanding a rad-ical rethinking of our priorities. On November 4th Benny Härlin of the Future Foundation for Agriculture and Member of the Supervisory Board of the World Agricultural report, and Helmy Abouleish, Managing Director of SEKEM group and advisory board member of the World Future Council will discuss the lack of a long-term per-spective of current agricultural policy-making and point to ways out of our global crisis. Tanya Busse, renowned book author, will moderate the event.

The event is organized by the organisation “No genetic engineer-ing in greater Hamburg!”, the GLS Bank and the World Future Council (WFC) Foundation. Over 4 to 7 days in November members of the World Future Council will also meet in Hamburg to pursue the promotion of the rights of future generations. WFC Founder Jakob von Uexküll: „We are very happy that the State Parliament in February 2010, across party lines, has voted unanimously against the cultivation of genetically modified organisms in the greater Hamburg area.“ Together with the initiative for a GM-free metropolitan region of Hamburg, the WFC will continue to put pressure on the Senate and demon-strate the benefits of a GM-free, envi-ronmentally friendly agriculture and a long-term sustainable perspective.

Source: Bio-Hamburg.de

Panel Discussion on „Pseudo-Solution Genetic Engineering“

More information:Date: 4. November Time: 7:30 pm Location: Saal A of the main building of Hamburg University at Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Hamburg

!More information:www.futurepolicy.org!

P.O.Box

mailto:[email protected]

http://bit.ly/aHRFKu

SEKEM Insight EN 10.10

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