Foreign Correspondents’ Programme 2010: Sandra Hakim to represent Egypt

This year’s Egyptian participant in the Finnish Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Correspondents’ Programme (FCP) is a 22-year-old Sandra Hakim from Cairo. Freshly graduated from MSA (October university for Modern Sciences & Arts), she hopes that the experience will give her new insight vocationally but also culturally.

FCP is organized every year to gather together young journalists from around the world to Finland, to learn about Finnish culture in various ways and also to enhance their journalistic skills.

At the moment Sandra is working as a trainee at the communications department of the League of The Arab States in Cairo. She might be returning to the same position after the FCP, but the young woman has a lot of big decisions ahead of her – whether to continue studies in a Masters’ programme or to see where the internship in the Arab League might take her. While in Finland, Sandra will also find out about possibilities to continue her studies in Helsinki.

Sandra got interested in Finland by a funny coincidence, literally “in the air”. She met a Finnish girl in an airplane five years ago, they started talking, and the girls are still in contact today. Sandra started to find out about this distant Nordic country, and was impressed by Finnish music, the level of education and Finland’s active participation in development cooperation and its long-span support to the Middle East peace process.

For the upcoming month in Finland and FCP Sandra has been preparing with meeting two former participants and joining a Facebook group that was formed especially for the FCP 2010 participants. She says that she has already gotten to know some of the other young journalists participating in the FCP through the group, and is in contact with them nearly daily.

Sandra is planning to write an article about her four weeks in Finland, for a well-known Egyptian newspaper Daily News Egypt.