Meltha Magazine Online

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2002 May Conference page 19

Prospects for Development: Reaching out of our Ghetto

Dr. Eden NABY-FRYE

Look at us, we have suffered so much. Look at us, we were so great. These have been the two themes of the Assyrian community over the past fifty years. Both are perfectly true. Yet we end up telling these to ourselves with very little thought or planning for the way in which we can effectively convey this information and more to our children and grandchildren, and especially to the outside world. We need to break out of our cultural ghetto in order to be heard, in order to be effective, in order to survive. It is our good fortune to be engaged in this task at a time when we have unprecedented advantages: we have technology to speed our communication with each other and the outside world, we have a global community that has become engaged more seriously than at any time since World War I with the idea of small group rights, and we have a larger part of our community than ever before in Diaspora where we are politically secure, economically successful, and better educated as a group than we have ever been before.

In this presentation I would like to layout some directions that we can take for developing toward our goal and some short term concrete steps that the world Assyrian community can take in a coordinated manner even as we continue to inhabit different parts of the world.