Introductory Presentations and Meeting our UK Partners (Tamara Alattiya, ITP 2019, Iraq)

Written by Tamara Alattiya, Museum Project Manager/ Museum Volunteer,  the Basra Heritage Office (ITP 2019, Iraq)

My name is Tamara Alattiya from Basra, Iraq. I am the newly nominated project manager for Iraq’s Modern History Museum, a new museum in Basra. I am participating in the British Museum’s ITP summer programme for 2019. Once the biographies of the ITP participants were sent earlier from the ITP team, I was very happy to see such a diverse group of people with different backgrounds, titles, cultures and countries – how exciting! I was looking forward to the day of the participants’ introductory presentations to know more.

The presentations were attended by the ITP participants, the ITP team, the BM departments representatives, and the ITP UK partners. It was a great chance to meet everyone and exchange ideas upon reflections on the participants’ presentations. Jacob Marley (ITP 2019, Ghana) was the first to present, followed by the rest of the ITP 2019 Fellows, who each gave a general overview about their institutions, their job roles their home. The presentations revealed a variety of different roles and tasks that we do our related professions of museums and heritage. This also reveals the different structural entities that such institutions can have according to the museum’s natures, its visitors, geographical area and its history and culture. A bunch of elements that are mixed and integrated to create a beautiful presentation of our history and heritage.

The presentations also helped to expose a little about each participants’ characters and qualities. We were able to recognise the confident ones, the sweetly shy ones, or the funny ones (and that I mean Ciprian Dobra, who has such a delightful sense of humour).

The precious thing those presentations have brought is the passion each participant had while talking about their home countries. You can sense the pride each one felt when speaking of their cultures and history. This pride and passion, I believe, is so essential to have when working in such a field. With these, we preserve with love our own heritage for the whole of humanity. An intimate, area specific love who’s message travels beyond borders to the whole wide world. A world that acquires its beauty in its variety, in its different colours and flavours, its different histories and stories that we preserve to share in what we call a museum.

Tamara