Arein and Mor, our second year students from Israel and Palestine, have received an award for a joint essay about peace
The Gran Galà di Primavera is an annual gala event held in Trieste by the cultural association “Cinzia Vitale” which brings together representatives of institutions, businesses and charities who share the mission of the association. Every year the “Cinzia Vitale Award” is handed out to someone having distinguished themselves in their profession and the “Nelson Mandela” Scholarship for Peace is awarded to one or more UWC Adriatic students.
This year’s edition – held on Thursday 28 March – singled out for the Cinzia Vitale Award Silvia Marchesan, a young researcher in organic chemistry at the University of Trieste. Silvia is one of the 11 scientific “Rising Stars” of research nominated by Nature – selected among 500 candidates worldwide. «It is our duty to further our scientific knowledge, our understanding of the world and our research work and to use it all for the betterment of humanity» declared Silvia as she received the prize.
The “Nelson Mandela” Scholarship for Peace was given to two second-year UWC Adriatic students for their essay about peace: the Israeli Mor Ben Haim and the Palestinian Arein Daralnakhla. The title of their composition is a famous quote from the Dalai Lama “World peace begins with inner peace”. In it they touchingly describe how meeting and making friends at the College has made them aware of how the hatred that divides their peoples is continuously fuelled by fear: “Our optimism, our genuine hope for a better future, as far-fetched as it may appear, is not a manifestation of childishness but rather of faith. We aspire to peace because we understand the intrinsic human need for security, for a sense of belonging to a place. However, unlike many, this understanding does not lead us to hang on to our position, to our narrow perspective of the world. It leads us to the acknowledgment that our nation’s aspiration for a homeland is neither more nor less legitimate than that of the other side.”
At the Gran Galà di Primavera, held under the aegis of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, several other awards were handed out by the association chaired by Roberto Vitale, including those to Andrea Iacomini, spokesperson for Unicef Italy, the President of the Trieste Port Authority and Deputy President of the European Sea Ports Organisation, Zeno D’Agostino, as well as to the physicist Stefano Fantoni, President of the Fondazione Internazionale Trieste (FIT), which has been entrusted with the organisation of the next European Science Open Forum (ESOF 2020) in Trieste.
