Languages are important for identity formation, communication, social integration, education and development, although due to globalization, they are increasingly under threat. At least 43% of the 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Only a few hundred languages are included in the education systems and less than a hundred used in the digital world. International Mother Language Day is celebrated since 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

Communication is nearly impossible without language, and communication is what makes change and development possible in human society. Body language can only get us so far. Different languages give us unique modes of thinking and expression. Some concepts are not familiar for everyone because they do not exist in their language. Mostly, facial expressions and emotions are universal among people, but it is hard to imagine a concept that does not have a word for it in your mother tongue. There are a lot of untranslatable words from different languages that English has now started using, since it lacks some of the concepts known to other languages (wanderlust or schadenfreude from German, for example). Or, I could recommend reading Milan Kundera talking about the differences in meaning and understanding of the equivalences for “compassion” in various languages – Mitgefühl in German and kaastunne in Estonian – in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

As someone who studied language and linguistics, the differences in our world view arising from speaking another language does not cease to amaze me. As an international individual, getting familiar with various languages has given me access to so many interesting concepts I could not know existed, and I have understood that not all people can make a difference between, or produce, certain sounds (for example, a lot of Spanish speakers do not differentiate between V and B sounds). Some languages do not have grammatical gender, which is surprising to most Indo-European language speakers; some languages have insane amount of inflections, which is different from languages that rather build their sentences with articles and prepositions, instead of changing the ending of the word to indicate movement, change, possession, etc. (both factors about the Estonian and Finnish language).

My mother tongue is Estonian, which is a Finno-Ugric language, sharing the same language tree with Finnish and Hungarian. It is separate from the big Indo-European language tree, even though throughout the history of our country, multiple occupations have influenced our vocabulary, since a lot of words and phrases are similar to Russian and German vocabulary. There are around 1 million Estonian speakers, which makes this language quite special (among other small languages), since barely anyone around the world has had any contact to it. This specialness is not always a positive thing when trying to remember new words in Indo-European languages that have absolutely no possible associations or connotations similar to my mother tongue.

It is, however, quite an interesting experience speaking such a small language, and this collective experience, like knowing something weird that others do not, leaves me often amazed. Because I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in a big country with a language that has a lot of speakers and a lot of people interested in learning it. Our films are not dubbed; we mostly use subtitles, which is also beneficial for our English skills. The market for Estonian books is not that profitable, since there are not enough clients. When I speak my language in front of foreigners, no one has heard anything like it (unless they have been around Finnish people). So, I will continue sharing facts about my small language and ask everyone else to sometimes give thought to these interesting peculiarities or various personalities that the experience of knowing different languages gives us.

By Jaanika Malla

Source: http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/en/statistics.html

It was a cold Thursday evening in Estonia. I stepped to the bus. People were looking at me and started to whisper to each other or at least I felt like that. But deep inside I knew, they were not looking at me or talking about me, instead they were looking at my two co-workers from Columbia and Afghanistan. It wasn’t the first time and it will not be the last one when something like this happens.

We look when someone is different. We judge when people don’t share the same thoughts as we do or don’t look like us. We ignore when we don’t want to understand other people’s points of view. Diversity is an action. It’s not just about governments, we can all do something if we choose to do. We all have a responsibility for making people around us feel comfortable. 

On the 13th of February UNESCO was celebrating 9th World Radio Day. This year’s focus turns to diversity. We as Praxis volunteers organized radio marathon and talked five hours about diversity. We covered the topics as diversity on movies and music, cultural diversity, diversity in media, gender and sexual diversity. We finished the day with a quiz about the radio and discussed the importance of radio. 
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Radio is one of the oldest medium, but it’s still a powerful communication tool. It provides an opportunity for those who can not access television and can not read to keep up-to-date on the news and trends. Radio is a low-cost medium and can reach to vulnerable people from remote communities while also offering a platform to intervene in the public debate. 

Achieving diversity isn’t easy, but for sure radio will help us to get closer to our goals. 

​Meriliis T

The concept of education has been changing over the years just as the different societies, ideologies and cultures. Theorists are still trying to find out the best system to obtain quality education that meets the needs of people and societies.

Education has great power for children who are the present and the future but throughout history, and around the world, the objectives regarding education have not been the same: from ancient Greece, where the first academies as a space for free reflection were created, to Sparta, where schools were spaces for military training with no place for weakness.

In the eighteenth century, with the enlightened despotism came the concept of educational institution as we understand it now: the goal was to create obedient people. In Prussia, education was elitist. Education was a tool to generate useful workers for the system, moldable for production. For this, they used military procedures such as punishments, ranks, schedules, hierarchies ... Does it sound familiar to you?

Kids perceive, imagine, fantasize, explore and absorb everything they are surrounded with; everything that surrounds them is a learning experience to create their personalities and understanding of the world. What is happening inside the schools, why are there high drop-out rates? Has the traditional education model become obsolete?

The current concept of most schools reduces children to a grade, instead of qualifying them to create differences and competencies. Initializing that from such a young age makes them enter into the competitive system and classes. Peaceful education cannot be achieved with competition and individualism. The school is similar to a factory, where a product is generated by specific processes. A factory of government-compliant, consumerist and effective citizens. Not taking into account that no two children are alike, each one has different motivations and abilities.

But there are schools that offer alternatives to this. For example, active schools, where you learn what can be done by letting children learn by doing, not in a competitive way. This system generates questions, desire to inquire, pleasure to learn from the process without the need of external forces to motivate them. Giving them maturity from an early age. This also helps them relate different concepts, which is very necessary in the world of constant movement and motion.

An education created from joy, curiosity and tenderness provides the tools not only to survive but to live on this planet with greater understanding of the world. It creates kids with the knowledge of the power of community and nature, with autonomy and authority over one's life, and internal discipline. We need empathetic human beings with sensitivity to different realities. People who regard the school as a window to discover the world and not as a consumer factory.

By Natalia Sepúlveda (Nana Ewig) 

4th of February is the World Cancer Day. It is a day that reminds us of the relevance of this disease, so widespread in our societies. Who does not know someone who has a friend, family or acquaintance who suffers from this burden?
 
The latest available data is from the year 2018, a count of 9.6 million deaths, making cancer the second leading cause of death in the world.[1] As Praxis organization, we went to the Panserraikos F.C. academy to talk with children about this issue, reminding them that the best way to prevent this type of disease is to adopt good and healthy habits, in addition to knowing the symptoms and having regular checkups. This article is not going to be informative, giving data about the number of deaths due to the different types of cancer, the risks that exist or how to prevent it. You can find this information on the official website for cancer day, on the page of the world health organization.[2] Rather, I would like to underline some social and emotional factors this time to think about.
 
Cancer cases continue to increase considerably, causing significant physical, emotional and economic burdens on patients, families, communities and health systems. Unfortunately, not all the countries share the same health systems so this provokes inequalities between them. On the one hand, in countries whose health systems are strong, survival rates of many types of cancer are improving thanks to accessible early detection and quality treatment. On the other hand, in countries with fewer resources, there are a lot of patients who do not have access to timely, quality diagnosis and treatment. Furthermore, in many health systems the accessibility to a private or public healthcare often depends on the social class, as well as the consumption habits that are related with risk factors. There is a lot of work to be done to overcome these differences with more economic inputs in the scientific research in order to improve treatments, making them cheaper, and universal health policies.
 
Regarding the emotional side, being brave is the most natural reaction, whereas being afraid is also natural; everyone has their own way to live through it. Being unbearable is a logical consequence of the stress of living through a treatment that needs to destroy you in part to heal you and that lasts for months, at best, or for decades.
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Let’s see the meaning of the word patient. It originates from the Latin word patiens-entis, and the  translation is twofold: suffer and endure. Therefore, if we ask the dictionary, it tells us that the patient is an adjective: “he has patience,” but also an action: “who suffers and who consents.” The act of consenting leads to the action of allowing oneself to heal, and that is why one becomes the patient of…
 
When you are diagnosed with cancer, there are not many treatment options. Unless you have specific training, what you have to do is put yourself in the hands of your oncologist, and assume that, if you want to live, you must endure a medical treatment that borders on the inhuman. That is why those who accompany the patients must think twice on which words they use, so that emotional exhaustion is not added to the anguish of looking at death closely.
 
By Fernando Iturria
 
1https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer 
2https://www.worldcancerday.org/ 
 

Wetlands are extremely diverse ecosystems flooded with water. They contain characteristic aquatic plants, like the mangrove tree. Many of the biggest wetlands in the world are mangrove forests like the Amazon Basin in Brazil or the Sundarbans in India and Bangladesh. The main types of wetlands are marsh, swamp, bog and fen.

Wetlands cover about 3% of the land mass in total but they degrade by 1% per year which is faster than deforestation. The degradation is both caused by climate change and human actions, such as burning or draining the ecosystems. Furthermore, they are threatened by rising sea levels, as a big amount of wetlands is located in coastal areas. In the last 45 years, wetlands shrank by a third. If you look further back into the past, you see that 87% of the wetlands have disappeared since after the preindustrial time. This degradation is accountable for a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions as wetlands store a crucial amount of land-based carbon. If peatlands catch fire, much more carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere than during casual forest fires because in peatlands the burning soil contains organic material of thousands of years.

Because of these dangers that wetlands and the whole world faces, a group of environmental activists gathered in Ramsar, Iran in 1971 to collaborate in conserving these valuable ecosystems. At this convention they signed a contract on February 2, the day to celebrate the World Wetlands Day (WWD). Every three years, the contracting parties come together for a conference. In 2015, it took place in Uruguay and the last time they met in Dubai in 2018.

The Ramsar Convention compiled a list of wetlands with international importance that covers an area of over 2.1 million km² in total. The UK has the highest number of wetlands (175) and Bolivia has the biggest area with about 150.000km². The convention works closely together with six different organizations like Birdlife International, Wetlands International and WWF International. The first WWD was celebrated in 1997, exactly 26 years after the Ramsar Convention.

There are a lot of reasons for the Ramsar Convention and for everyone to protect wetlands. They are important for the climate, as they store about 30% of all land-based carbon, but also important for the local people. Wetlands purify water, they prevent floods and they protect people from tsunamis in coastal areas. These days, over 1 billion people make their living from wetlands, with fishing or collecting honey among others. Last but not least, 40% of all of the world’s species live or breed in wetlands which is the reason for the topic of the WWD in 2020: “Wetlands and Biodiversity.”

By Paul Paessler
 
 

2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the World War II. On the 27th of January 2020 we celebrated the liberation of the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau for the 75th time. The 27th is the International Day of the Commemoration of the Holocaust.

Only in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1.1 million people lost their lives in gas chambers or due to malnutrition and diseases. WWII was one of the biggest crimes ever committed in the history of humankind. It was a time of terror and oppression. In which innocent people suffered and lost their life because of a racist ideology.

For the German people it is the darkest chapter in the history of their nation. Almost everyone has a connection to WWII in their family background. Some might be civilians, some might be victims, some might even be villains. But regardless of the personal history one might have we all have the same duty to remember. Commemoration and education are the only ways to prevent history from repeating itself. The way to commemorate differs heavily. All over the world, memorials and monuments are places to remember the victims and terror of the Nazi regime.

PRAXIS is a non-governmental organisation supporting the human rights and equality. With our campaign for the 75th anniversary of the commemoration of the victims of the holocaust we wanted to remember those who suffered and honour those who fought for human rights. For this reason, I chose to create an exhibition which shows memorials and monuments all over the world. In the following I am going to present the 3 most remarkable of the exhibits presented on the 31st.

Yad Vashem is the World’s Holocaust Remembrance Center located in Jerusalem. The museum offers many monuments to visit and one of the most important is the Hall of Names. It commemorates every Jew murdered in the Holocaust. No cemetery, no headstones were built for those who lost their lives to the terror of the Nazis. The Hall of Names restores the identity of the victims by presenting images, short biographies and documents. Family members and relatives donated personal belongings to the museum to personalize the memorial. At the moment, it contains 2.7 million images and faces of victims.

Another outstanding monument is the Janusz Korczak memorial. It is also located in Yad Vashem and dedicated to its name carrier, the author Janusz Korczak. In his country of origin, Poland, Korczak became famous as a writer and pedagogue. Before WWII he lead an orphanage which offered a shelter to every child in need. He was a great supporter of democracy and the rights of children. Korczak believed in the majority of minors and gave them a voice. In the orphanage, rules passed by democratic committee consisting of minor members had to be obeyed. He offered himself the same privileges and duties as he offered his children. Not only did he support his children but he also opposed the Nazis heavily. By 1939, every Jew was demanded to wear the Star of David which Janusz Korczak refused to do. He also refused to abandon his children by the time they were sent to the ghetto. He committed his whole life and energy to the improvement of the circumstances of his children. In 1942, Korczak and more than 200 of the orphans he protected were sent to the concentration camp of Treblinka where they later lost their lives. Nowadays, Janusz Korczak is not only remembered by several memorials or monuments. Many schools or other educational institutions are named after him to honour the effort he put in the protection of helpless children.

Due to strong historical connection many monuments that commemorate the World War II are located in Germany. One of the most important can be found in the centre of Berlin. The memorial to all the murdered Jews of Europe is an arrangement of grey stone square made by Peter Eisenman. It is a 19.000m² large field where visitors are able to walk through. The memorial is rather abstract because its purpose is to reconstruct feelings and not facts. By walking through the field observers are able to feel the supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with every kind of humanity.

These 3 monuments are just a few examples of a variety of places and ways to commemorate. Education and awareness are the only ways to prevent similar catastrophes from happening. We have a duty to fight for human rights and prohibit extremism and fascism from gaining power.
 
​Elisa Henke