Happy Birthday to Panama!

San Salvador, the capital and the most populous city of El Salvador. *Photo from Wikipedia September 15 is Independence Day, celebrates the independence of South American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica from Spain in 1821. The colonization of the area began in 1524. In 1609 the area became a captaincy general. As part of the Bourbon Reforms in 1786 the crown established a series of intendancies in the area. The new intendancies were San Salvador (El Salvador), Ciudad Real (Chiapas), Comayagua (Honduras), and León (Nicaragua). The governor-captain general-president of Guatemala became the superintendente general

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

Kyrgyz family in a region of Kyrgyzstan. *Photo from Wikipedia August 31 is Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Kyrgyzstan from the Soviet Union in 1991. Although geographically isolated by its mountainous location, it had an important role as part of the historical Silk Road trade route. In between periods of self-government it was ruled by Göktürks (突厥, a nomadic confederation of Turkic peoples in medieval Inner Asia), the Uyghur Empire, and the Khitan (契丹) people, before being conquered by the Mongols in the 13th century; subsequently it regained independence but was invaded by Kalmyks (the Oirats in Russia), Manchus