Qat Hazards Control Society launches it:Third Ramadan Cultural Forum kicks off [Archives:2003/681/Local News]

Taiz, Oct. 28 – Organized by the Taiz-based Qat Hazards Control Society in coordination with the Social and Cultural Committees of the Taiz Clubs, the Third Ramadan Cultural Forum is to be held during 10-16 Ramadan (November 4-10).
The program will include the Holy Qura’an competition, caricature and chanting competition, extemporaneous poetry debate, cultural individual contests, and lectures.
The society’s chairman Mr. Shukri Abdullah Al-Furais confirmed that the program basically aims at attracting youths to this opportunity and encouraging them to utilize their intellectual creative capabilities.
A number of prizes are to be distributed to the participants during the event.
Qat Hazards Control Society is the only society that focuses through its work to create a new Yemeni generation without Qat.
The society combats the chewing and dealing with qat regularly by holding meetings, giving lecturers on Qat-related issues, and printing leaflets and posters to raise awareness among the public.
“The devil” as was described by a great Yemeni revolutionary poet Mohammed Mahmoud Al-Zubairi, was also passionately condemned back in 1958.
In his allegorical writing, Al-Zubairi compares Qat to the devil by saying:
“It grew from the earth to consume the nutrients of other innocent plants.
It made the Yemeni people lust after it, and is fighting in their stomachs against valuable nutrients for the human body.
Then, it runs in their veins like Satan, and enters their pockets to steal their money.
It can bring them to mountain peaks in the early morning but at night it will not let them sleep, leaving them in the nightmare of their hallucinations.
The Yemeni people live half their lives under its spell.
It consumes their strength and heroism.
It is a cursed tree that controls their lives.”
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