The 127 freshly prepared scholarship holders of the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor Programme and the Petőfi Sándor Programme have begun their work aimed at the preservation of traditions, the State Secretariat for National Policy told the Hungarian News Agency MTI.
The State Secretariat is sending out young people committed to national causes to a number of countries around the world for the fourth time this year in order to reinforce the national identify of the Hungarians living there and to support Hungarian-Hungarian relations. At their respective stations, they organise community programmes, teach history and Hungarian, promote community life with the participation of Hungarians, and encourage ongoing communication between Hungarians living in other countries and the mother land, the summary reads.
As they said, as part of the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor Programme, 77 scholarship holders are serving for nine months as of the first of September in the Northern Hemisphere: in the United States, Canada and Europe.
The Petőfi Sándor Programme is being launched for the second time this year, with the participation of 51 scholarship holders. The Programme largely extends to the territory of the former monarchy, covering Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Southern Poland.
The scholarship holders of both programmes attended the traditional one-week training course together at the end of August this year. As Deputy Prime Minister for National Policy Zsolt Semjén highlighted at the opening of the preparatory week, an important goal of the programmes is to organise a network among Hungarians, while the State Secretariat added that they wish to encourage Hungarians beyond the borders to engage in an ongoing dialogue with one another, beyond relations maintained with Hungary.
As part of the preparatory course, the scholarship holders attended lectures on the strategy concerning Hungarian communities beyond the borders, the history of diaspora and scattered Hungarian communities, their current situation, the history of Hungarians living in the different regions, and the role of churches in these communities. They also received instruction in the procedure of naturalisation and the administration of expedited Hungarian nationality applications.
In the communiqué they indicated: the State Secretariat seeks to ensure that as much information regarding Hungarian communities beyond the borders should reach Hungary and other Hungarian-inhabited territories as possible, and therefore one day of the training course was dedicated to the improvement of the scholarship holders’ communication skills. In the interest of building good press relations, media professionals explained to the attendees of the course how to contact and foster relations with local journalists, thereby enabling Hungarian communities beyond the borders to access wider information on the work of the scholarship holders.
Based on the model of the website of the Petőfi Sándor Programme (www.petofiprogram.hu), which has operated successfully since last August, the website of the Kőrösi Programme was also launched with new features on 15 June. These websites enable scholarship holders partly to render an account of their own work during the nine months of their missions, and partly to report on the everyday lives and holidays of Hungarian communities and to introduce well-known and interesting persons, the State Secretariat pointed out.
They added: István Grezsa, the ministerial commissioner who supervises the programmes, said at the opening of the one-week preparatory course that, thanks to this year’s seven-fold oversubscription for the programmes, they were able to select excellently qualified young people for the missions.