It just won’t go away

What some of the foreign Muslims among us need to do first, however, is to show full respect, rather than arrogance, towards the laws of the land. For example, there have been frequent cases of people parking their cars in front of other people’s garages while they go inside the Paola mosque to pray.

In one such case, I am told, an irate Maltese resident, having finally had enough, went to the local police station to protest. Incredibly, he was casually asked by the duty officer “to show some patience, they’d only be in there for a very short time”. I bet he was among those flag-carrying protesters.

Audio-visual treasures

I am sure that, like me, many were those who were thrilled to learn that a total of €4.8 million in European Union funds have been allocated for the digitisation project of the audio-visual archives at Public Broadcasting Services. It is the only way to help salvage the thousands of treasures therein, i.e. those which have thankfully survived the ravages of time and the natural process of chemical degeneration, and creating access to them by locals and tourists alike.

I have the privilege of speaking from firsthand experience on this one, having spent a few years running the archives before the ethnic cleansing that occurred at PBS in 2004. Prior to that sad chapter, we had joined a pan-Mediterranean, French-led organisation, CAPMED, that was using EU funds to provide a collective data base as well as professional access to the television archives of the region, north and south, and to eventually initiate a digitisation project in those countries that had not yet undertaken this much-needed process.

We bought equipment at subsidised prices, hosted preservation and restoration experts and trainers from France’s famed INA agency and RAI, and began the viewing and cataloguing of material from the 50s and 60s in the PBS archives. We hardly even touched the tip of the iceberg, but it was a good beginning. Later attempts by well-meaning managers at the national broadcaster faced a similar fate because of lack of funds.

During the CAPMED days, I remember feeling envious when my Cypriot counterpart told me his country’s parliament had just approved a multi-million vote to help CyBC save their archives, while we were at the time more concerned with our immediate future as employees.

“It is never too late” may be a well-honed cliché, but it certainly falls in with last Monday’s news of the funds injection that will undoubtedly help this small nation preserve its manifold audio-visual treasures.