By Mohammed Saifuddin

RIYADH — With over 700 attendees, Riyadh hosted a 3-day Public Speaking Conference “Saudi Arabian Toastmasters Annual Conference” (SATAC), hailed as the biggest Toastmasters Public Speaking Conference this year, under the District 79 of Toastmasters International.

This conference comes after months of intense competitions within the Toastmasters clubs where the finest of the 15 speakers across the region met up at the finale, also referred as the SATAC. The 15 contestants had to face an elimination round on the first day of the conference, of which only 6 compete at the Grand Finale.

The Conference was led by Syed Faisal as the conference chairman, along with Hassan Maghazel and Samer Kamal as the district director & program quality director respectively, of District 79. Attendees of the conference witnessed not only a fierce contest between the qualifiers, but also were treated to several educational workshops in English & Arabic.

The conference also featured two keynote presentations “When you See It” from the World Champion of Public Speaking Mohammed Qahtani while an Emotional Intelligence expert, Ricardo Cabete addressed on “Are you Emotionally Intelligent?” In addition to this the artistic & literary skills of Toastmasters fraternity under the district 79 was also featured in SATAC 2019.

One of the important things that was conducted during the conference was the elections of the new officers for District 79 for the year 2019-20 were also conducted during the District Council Meeting. Ali Shahbaaz Ali, the Region 11 adviser overseen the procedures as the Parliamentarian of the meeting.

The conference was primarily a contest in Public Speaking for 4 categories International Speech, Speech Evaluation, Table Topics also called as Impromptu Speaking and Humorous Speech contests. These contests were conducted in both English & Arabic. The English Contest Operations were run by Mohammed Mubin, while the Arabic contests were handled by Saeed AlHossainy. An exclusive women event only encompassing the same four categories was held. It was run by Maram Al Hammad.

After a nail-biting contest for three days, the winners of the contests were announced on the last day of the conference. Majar Alaraj, Ameen Ahmed, Mustafa Al Ghazwi and Abdulrahman Alanaizi were the Arabic Contest champions in Table Topics, Speech Evaluation, Humorous Speech and International Speech Contests respectively.

In the English segment, Homoud AlKhaldi bagged the first place in the Speech Evaluation followed by Rubab Fatima and Omar Khan in second and third place winners. In the Table Topics category, Sasirinda placed first followed by Mark Ashraf and Rubab Fatima in second and third place. The Humorous contest had Rose George crowned as the winner, followed by Nayil Al Enazi and Nasir AlQasim in the next two spots.

For the International Speech Contest, the winner Omar AlHusseini mesmerized the audience with his inspirational speech “Warm Hands”, while Mark Ashraf and Adel AlJuhaiman finished as the first and second runners-up respectively. Omar Al Husseini will now represent District 79 in the International speech contest.

SABIC was the main sponsor of SATAC 2019. Its HR Manager Mohammed Al Nafa appreciated the Toastmasters and specially the organizers and said such events help in recognizing talent. He assured support of SABIC for the events, which help in developing communication and Leadership skills.

Towards the end of the event, the Conference Chairman, Syed Faisal acknowledged his team Cecille Llanos, Malic Ibrahim, Mohammed Fareez, Siva Ramalingam, Shamsuri Mohamad, Seema Rizvi, Munir and the Conference Advisers Saud Al Omair, Mohammed AlHajeri, Saif Ali Sheikh and James Edward.

He thanked the sponsors. SABIC, was the Platinum Sponsor, while Saudi Electricity Company and Sipchem were Gold and Bronze Sponsors respectively. The event was also supported by NESTO, AlMarai & Dunkin Donuts as the Snacks and Beverage Sponsor.