Speaking this month we have:

1. Elizabeth Gowing – The Rubbish-Picker’s Wife: an unlikely friendship in Kosovo.

   This is the story of living and learning – being confused and comforted – with the excluded Ashkali people of Kosovo; an account of the challenges and delights of what happens when you find your community but it’s a long way from home.

   Hatemja, a rubbish-picker’s wife, lives in the poorest community in the poorest country in Europe. When Elizabeth Gowing is befriended by her, the women learn with, from and about one another. How can you find the best rubbish pastures for scavenging? How can you free children to go to school rather than to go out begging? How do you then convince the local school to accept them? Can mayonnaise deal with head lice? How best to teach the 36 letters of the Albanian alphabet? How would Facebook help evacuate a family from a rat-infested hovel? How do you make baklava? And through it all, how do you maintain a precious friendship that’s helped you find out the best you can be?

   To find out more visit Elizabeth’s website www.elizabethgowing.com or Twitter.

   The Ideas Partnership’s is the charity, which Elizabeth co-founded to work with the rubbish-pickers and their families and whose work is included in the talk: visit their website The Ideas Partnership or their Facebook page.

   Elisabeth’s book is The Rubbish-Picker’s Wife; an unlikely friendship in Kosovo.

   

   

2. John Pilkington – Europe & Russia: What Next?

   Our president reports that passions are running high in Ukraine and the breakaway states of the Caucasus. Vladimir Putin’s adventures in Ukraine took the West by surprise. But John thinks in some ways they followed a pattern that goes back more than a century to the legendary ‘Great Game’ between Russia and Britain in Victorian times. Since the Soviet Union’s break-up, Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia have become Russia’s ‘forgotten’ satellite states – unrecognised and unheard of by most outsiders. Now Donetsk and Luhansk have joined the list, and Russia has full control of Crimea.

   In 2015 John met people on both sides of these disputed borders, and promises some surprising insights.

   More at http://www.pilk.net

   

   

   

   

   

London branch meetings are held at The Church of Scotland, Crown Court, behind the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden the first Saturday of each month, unless there is a UK public holiday that weekend.

Admission costs, £3 for Members and £6.00 Non-members. You do not need to be a member to attend, and we do not sell advanced tickets, please just come on the day, the doors open at 2:15pm and the program starts around 2:30pm with each talk lasting approximately 40 minutes.

There is no London meeting in August, but we start afresh each September.

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