A boy, a girl, and the filling of a gap
Our names are Amer and Keire. Amer is from Suweida, in the South of Syria, and Keire is from Ireland. Both were living in Beirut when the idea for this podcast came about. We got the idea from a friend, who was trying to learn Arabic, and knew that similar resources existed in other languages, but couldn’t find any for Arabic. Arabic resources weren’t interesting, and didn’t teach people anything about the Middle East. Our friend approached Amer, who she thought could fill this gap. Amer asked Keire to help. Keire loves to write, and had been keeping a blog about Lebanon, about politics and culture, so it was a match made in heaven. Keire writes and researches the episodes in English, and Amer translates them into Arabic. We present them in the podcast together. We knew nothing about website-building, sound editing, or podcast creation at the beginning of the process, and taught ourselves everything we needed to know. We love the process of creating podcasts, and we realised from the reaction that we had identified a gap in the market.