Happy Birthday to Panama!

Children in a Rwandan primary school. *Photo from Wikipedia July 1 is Independence Day of Rwanda and Burundi, celebrates the independence from Belgium in 1962. Belgian forces took control of Rwanda and Burundi in 1916, during World War I, beginning a period of more direct colonial rule. Belgium ruled both Rwanda and Burundi as a League of Nations ‘mandate’ called Ruanda-Urundi. The territory was under Belgian military occupation from 1916 to 1922 and later became a Belgian-controlled Class B Mandate (former German territories in West and Central Africa which were deemed to require a greater level of control by the

On January 13, 1991, Soviets began shooting and crushing with tanks unarmed independence supporters. *Photo from Wikipedia March 11 is the Day of Restoration of Independence of Lithuania from the Soviet Union in 1990. As Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to revive the economy of the Soviet Union, he introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Gorbachev´s political agenda went for great and deep changes within the Soviet government, as such, Gorvachev invited the soviet public into open and public discussions unseen before. For the soviet Lithuanian dissidents, and activists, it was a golden opportunity not to be missed, to bring their movements

Typical Sri Lankan dish of rice and prawns. *Photo from Wikipedia February 4 is Sri Lanka’s Independence Day, which is celebrated to commemorate its internal political independence from British rule on that day in 1948. Its geographic location and deep harbors made it of great strategic importance from the time of the ancient Silk Road through to World War II. From the 16th century, some coastal areas of the country were also controlled by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. Between 1597 and 1658, a substantial part of the island was under Portuguese rule. The Portuguese lost their possessions in Ceylon