Rashidah Pope (left) and Maemunah Doran from Canada at the Archives meeting. Rashidah is the daughter of Salamah and Abdullah Pope and grew up in Wisma Subud. She has spent 30 years living in Indonesia including at Rungan Sari. currently she is working on the history of Subud and lending her support to the Archives.

Digital Archives…Preservica…was the subject of the presentation. Lawrence Pevec films the presentation. The speaker is young man from Colombia. He and another young tech expert assisted Matthew Moir in the presentation.

From a recent email for Daniela Moneta, WSA Archivist, Amani Center…

When I was at the Subud USA National Congress in Portland a couple of weeks ago, I met Salamah O’Brien, a geologist from the USA, who worked with Ramdan and Luqman on Project Sunrise. She brought to the Congress, 9 volumes of reports she made on Project Sunrise.

She has been keeping them all of these years and finally got them to the Archives. They were so heavy, I couldn’t take them in my suitcase. So, we got someone in the Subud USA Office to mail them here to the DC area. 

Because we are one of the five international archives that Bapak designated back in 1977 and have been fully functional for the past couple of years. I am keeping the Project Sunrise vols here. They are each about 200+ pages each so it would be very expensive to ship them to Australia. They are really too much to scan and very detailed and full of facts so I am not sure that the average researcher would use them.

If an expert in Subud enterprises needs anything, I can scan the parts they might need. I can put the cover and the table of contents on the archives website and describe the contents. At least that way people will be aware of their existence. Latifah (she is 90 and at the World Congress) gives me SICA material for the archives and calls all the time to talk. She gave us a huge portfolio from Luqman of paintings and drawings of Darling Harbor. 

We have accommodation for researchers and volunteers to stay at the Amani while they are researching. My son, Howard, and I live in the house next to the Amani but there are accommodations for five more people to live here.

Now that there will be a functioning international archives in Canberra, we need one in Europe where they may have the most members. Not sure, we have a lot in Area III. There was a brilliant World Congress proposal written by Subud Portugal, mainly Raquel Alcobia (an architect) about building an international archives in the UK but it was too late to be considered for the World Congress. What a shame. It is really needed.

I did hear from some of the Europeans that a donor is willing to finance an international archive there!! I hope that is true. They don’t really need a Congress proposal anyway.

Having Rashidah Pope as the archivist for the Australian Archives is a miracle. She visited here for a couple of weeks last year and we loved her and found it hard to let her go – we wanted her to stay. She will be starting her Masters degree in library and archives as soon as the World Congress is over. She is an angel sent from heaven.