Hi everybody im abir awad from lebanon 16 years all my pleasure to meet you all here today. Im going to talk to you about politics and protests. Some people say that a teenager talking about politics is some how silly or weird by believe me most teenagers i know are interested in politics but the only problem is that they dont have the chance to express their points of view. politics controls our lives ad our societies and being from lebanon politics has a personal effect on my life. Offscreen gave me the opportunity to deal more with politics especially when we met alan duncan a conservative member of parliament. It was interesting to meet him, i feel i benefited a lot by meeting him there were two points specifically that had an impact on me. Firstly he shared with me and everybody that was there a british point of view the oppositions point of view which was some how new for me, on topics i was concerned with with Lebanon and other countries the Middle East. For example when I asked him about the war in Iraq and he had a differnet idea, that they were somehow against whats going on there right now. the second thing is that I learnt to be more diplomatic in my opinions, which, actually, im not used to doing.
And now Brian, who i met outside parliament whos been protesting there since the beginning of the iraq war - can you imagine that?. Hes an interesting character to say the least, i had mixed feelings about brian. On the one hand i respect and admire his strength and what he stands for. But on the other hand, he told us his family abandoned him and he doesnt see his children, so i think he could do it in a way so he can keep his family and be more productive.

Someone told me once you cant have peace unless you have justice, so can never have peace because you will never have justice.. thats why I guess brian is going to stay there a long time.

But with respect to us, middle east teenagers believe we can have peace, we want peace, so we are asking you, please pave us the way.

Living in a busy city and always meeting people, make us forget the real beautiful life in nature. The visit to Hye on Wye made us realize that we need more than money and people, and discover more about who are we and what we want from life. We climbed the Black Hills, where we had the opportunity to see an incredible scene for Wales from the top. After that we went on a boat trip, which I never done before, although we have plenty of wide and fantastic rivers in Lebanon. It was little boring in the beginning but it turned to be more exciting when it became a competition between us, the girls, and the guys. Although we missed up we went through real funny accidents where some fell down and other were stuck between stones. This trip let me figure out how much we can benefit from surrounding nature and enjoy it without destroying it.

I was proud of the Lebanese cedars but I was a little confused about some posters that said ‘11% left’ with picture of it. When I knew that we were going to cut trees i was mad and upset  and thought it is murder but i knew that those beautiful Scots trees were replaced by foreign trees,so although I didn’t change my mind about it being  murder, i thought it was fair to put the original trees back in their home land. At this day I realized what those posters meant and became more conscious about the importance of our cedars and the danger they are in.

I thought working with Azooz will be difficult and that i have to do it all but the truth was that he was incridible and full of great ideas. Our work was about our adventure in offscreen using nature and other stuff made by man. We used a sign post written on it ‘Bridge’ as a sign that offscreen was a bridge for us to communicate with each other from and between different cultures and nations. We considered the idea of there being a door that separates people from different places and backgrounds and so we used a key to represent us unlocking and opening it. Also we used headphones to symbolise us lisenting to each other as we often do not and used flowers which are a part of nature that we all share. Most of the teachers and the students liked our work so we were lucky enough to get first prize.