Happy Birthday to Panama!

Community health care workers in Ethiopia. *Photo from Wikipedia May 28 is Downfall of the Derg Day, a National Day of Ethiopia. The Derg is the short name of the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987. It took power following the ousting of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Tracing its roots to the 2nd millennium BC, Ethiopia was a monarchy for most of its history. During the first centuries AD, the Kingdom of Aksum maintained a unified civilization in the region, followed by the Ethiopian Empire around 1137. Ethiopia derived

Junkanoo celebration in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. Junkanoo is a street parade with music, dance, and costumes across the Bahamas every Boxing Day (December 26) and New Year’s Day (January 1). *Photo from Wikipedia July 10 is Independence Day, celebrates the independence of the Bahamas from the United Kingdom in 1973. The Bahamas became a British Crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American War of Independence, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists in the Bahamas; they brought their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. Africans constituted the

Downtown Nukuʻalofa. Nukuʻalofa is the capital of Tonga. *Photo from Wikipedia June 4 is Tonga’s Emancipation Day or Independence Day, commemorates the abolition of serfdom in Tonga in 1862, and the independence of Tonga from the British protectorate in 1970. Tonga became known in the West as the “Friendly Islands” because of the congenial reception accorded to Captain James Cook on his first visit in 1773. He arrived at the time of the ʻinasi festival, the yearly donation of the First Fruits to the Tuʻi Tonga (the islands’ paramount chief) and so received an invitation to the festivities. According to