Aired 2013-14. Documentary Featuring Presbyterian (U.S.A.) work in Egypt With a population close to 90 million, Egypt is the most populated country in the Middle East. This Middle Eastern country swept our country's imagination with two revolutions during the last two years.
It’s also a place that captivated the interest of Mona Hennein, the daughter of Egyptian Presbyterian Missionaries Swailem and Sameera Hennein. Almost 60 years after her parents left this country, Mona returns to her birth home to learn more about her parent’s legacy as the first missionaries from the Presbyterian Synod of the Nile to southern Sudan.
In the documentary, One Hand: An Egyptian Woman Explores Faith, Ms. Hennein discovers a new Egypt, one in which Christians and Muslims work side by side together for religious freedom. She also learns that the seeds of this unity began with Egypt early Presbyterian missionaries who believed that the best way to reach out to Muslims was to open schools, hospitals and social services.
Today, The Synod of the Nile is Egypt’s oldest and largest Protestant denomination with 700 thousand members and 350 congregations. Ms. Hennein documents its beginnings and its radical thinking to open the nation’s first primary school for girls, and to send out its first missionary, her father Swailem Sidhom Hennein.