At Britain Yearly Meeting (held at Friends House, London in May 2015), Friends House Moscow tried an experiment in connecting three countries together. Our programme staff, in the office in Moscow, and Alla Soroka of AVP Ukraine, speaking from Odessa, were brought by Skype into the London meeting room for a live discussion with British Friends.
Topics included the current work of FHM and the Alternatives to Violence Project in Ukraine, which is working increasingly with people displaced by the conflict in the east. The discussion was conducted in a mixture of Russian and English, and we are grateful to our Friend Bonnie Grotjahn for interpreting where needed. We are also grateful to the staff of Friends House for rigging up the complicated technical setup needed to beam our Russian and Ukrainian participants right into the room, so that everyone could hear and see them – and vice versa.
We are fortunate that the technology exists to create such linkages, in a world where understanding people face to face – and answering that of God in everyone – is so important.