SHARJAH — The magnificent cultural event of Sharjah Heritage Days welcomed nearly 140,000 visitors in its first 10 days. It is a well-organized, unique, and impressive festival with astonishing activities. The festival immerses visitors in a multicultural atmosphere that is certainly enjoyable for visitors of all ages. The Emirate of Sharjah played a big role in creating this unique atmosphere and provided the wonderful activities that can be entertaining, cultural and educational. Ms. Aisha Ghabish, the Public Relations and Protocol Directorate, opened up more about Sharjah Heritage Days in an interview with Saudi Gazette. SG: The activities are really perfect and it is clearly shown that there has been so many efforts put in to this wonderful event that lasted successfully for 19 days in a row. So what is the goal behind having this cultural festival for a long period of time? AG: To start with, the goal is to prove that taking care of our heritage is a must for every individual. Also, we decided to have this festival to last for a long time in order to attract the largest number of visitors who can view our activities and thus, we get an idea of the things we need to add or remove for our next year. Moreover, I would like to say that we are almost more than 12 committees that collaborated together in order to reach the success of this festival. We worked hard to ensure that there will be various activities and countries that are excellent and enjoyable for any visitor. For instance, we added a totally new activity which is the poetry recital evening that is created for the first time in 15 years. SG: There has been great efforts made in the success of this festival. So I would like to ask if there is a future plan to translate all the activities held here into many languages in order for the whole world to see this wonderful Emirati festival? AG: Honestly speaking, we had a plan to translate the contents in every single exhibition at the festival and we already started translating them. However, there are almost 3 or 4 other exhibitions that we could not translate because we did not have enough time to translate them. I would also like to add that for more than 1 year, our Chairman of Sharjah Institute for Heritage Dr. Abdulaziz Abdulrahman Almusallam has always recommended that we translate all the publications we write. For example, in the 13th edition of Sharjah Heritage Days, all the publications related to the festival were translated. So what I am trying to point out is that hopefully by next year most of our publications are going to be translated. SG: It is obvious that a huge number of children are attending this great festival either for entertainment or culture. So, are you going to invest in this huge number of children for next year and provide even more cultural activities for them in order to reach a bigger number of culturally aware children? AG: I believe in this year we had various activities for children compared to the previous years. For example, we have different workshops for children just to enrich the children with heritage in an entertaining way either by games or toys or even competitions. We also have the children's village that has many participants who came from places even other than the Emirates like the puppet show which is performed by a Bahraini group. Yes, I do understand that we have very qualified people here in the country, but it is not wrong to also hire people from outside to collaborate with us. We also have a very talented woman from Tunisia who recycles any material into something useful either puppets, toys, or anything that can add to the festival and especially in the children's section. I have heard from some people that it is indeed true that the presence of children at this festival is really high and of course we aim at expanding more on their activities in order to culturally aware them as well.
