Articles - Miscellaneous

Prince Charles visits the Holy Land Institute for the Deaf

In the June magazine Geoffrey Elliott wrote about his working visit to The Holy Land Institute for the Deaf. Geoffrey now writes:-

I was intrigued to receive an e-mail from my friends at the Holy Land Institute for the Deaf saying they were expecting a Visitor next day. I was expecting it to be the Jordanian Royal Family but soon afterwards received this photo. The need for secrecy in the circumstances was obvious, but Prince Charles was providentially also to hand to visit the victims of the coach crash involving people from the York area in their Amman hospital.

Left to right on the photo are Father Louai (I think) the local priest at Good Shepherd Anglican Church; HRH; Brother Andrew, Director of HLID; Mohammad, who is deaf-blind, hence his feeling HRH's throat, which he did to me to identify; Theresa a Swiss volunteer/ worker who translated for us into English from Arabic or Arabic Sign; and Re'uel, a German National Service volunteer, who used to do far more work than me scraping and plastering bad walls prior to my painting them. Not on the picture is Elizabeth Hume, CMS Mission Partner, who is telling Prince Charles about the Deaf-blind Unit where four children are cared for. Prince Charles was opening the STRIDE Project where teachers of the deaf from many Arabic countries will come to learn. The picture unfortunately gives little idea of the beauty of the building which was a pleasure to paint.

2 December, 2004