I’ll be there for you (When the rain starts to pour) I’ll be there for you (Like I’ve been there before) I’ll be there for you (‘Cause you’re there for me too)

Do you recognize it? It was the theme of the most famous sitcom in history, Friends. Maybe nothing like this TV show could explain with so much simplicity what friendship is supposed to be. Friends set up a proper standard of ideal friendship. Anyone who has lived in the myth of
Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer must have fantasized about which place of their city could be the heir of the
legendary Central Perk.
What David Crane and Marta Kauffman have done by creating Friends is not that far from the fantasies that we used to have as children. Basically, the sitcom is the answer to the question: how nice it would be to live with your friends?
Despite the unrealistic expectations settled by the show - it is impossible to have a group of friends together with whom you share every single moment of your life while spending most of your days drinking coffee with them - Friends has a basis of truth. Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross embody the passage between adolescence and adult life, where troubles and concerns become real, and having someone on your side who helps you is essential.

When you are sixteen, all you need to have good friendships are mutual hobbies and interests. Teenagers need friends to go to the cinema with, to talk about music, and to have fun. When you are young, friendship is the stratagem to escape one of the most terrible fears: being alone. Growing up things change, and so do the people of our lives. On the one hand, some of them disappear quietly and we barely realize that; while on the other hand, some people leave behind wounds that need time to heal. Over time, we realize that those people with whom we spend endless hours of school laughing and joking were not our friends. Rather, those people belong to those kinds of persons which I would call “people with whom you get along well”. With them, we share moments full of joy, but the relationship finishes in front of two beers in a pub. We never completely share the grief, sorrow, and traumas that
are part of everyone’s existence. In the time of need, they are not going to be there for us - rightly, I will add - for one simple reason: they are not friends.

If it is hard to find a proper definition for our non-friends, try to explain what a friend is, it is even harder. Unlike a love relationship, friendship does not have aims or norms. It is a set of values that pass from person to person. Ideas and personal interests are shared between friends in a unique way that not only develops our personality, but they shape and change it. Here, everyone is at the same time teacher and student; and in every conversation is hidden a new thought, that is meant to become part of our person.

However, never before it has been so difficult to find a group to learn and grow together. Nowadays, loneliness has reached an all-time high. Often regarded as the result of the absence of social interactions, only recently loneliness has begun to be treated as a collective and transversal phenomenon. Loneliness is a sense of exclusion that is felt as much towards those who should be close to us as towards political and economic institutions. We are lonely in response to our need to feel heard, understood, and treated with kindness and respect. A need that is rarely satisfied both in our relationship with society and in our relationship with other human beings.
We live in a moment in human history where we are called to deal we our free time. The society we live in teaches us to fill up our days with useless tasks, that make us feel accomplished only when we reach a status of burnout. People seem to be no more capable to deal with the time they have to take care of themselves and the others. This incapability has led some people to think that in order to love themselves, they have
to distance themselves from others to give space to their personal preferences. But isolating yourself is not the key to pursuing your well-being. Wellness can be reached by
creating mutual support relationships. Those kinds of bonds teach us to take care of each other, which unquestionably requires considerable effort. But through these relationships,
we become part of a bigger mechanism of change that allows us to create safe realities where we can discover the other and the self. We must overcome the fear of letting others into our spaces, strengthen our relationships, create new ones, and build social and cultural spaces based not on the fear of being alone, but on the mutual interest in being well.

Laura Savoini

Laura is an Italian volunteer involved in International Day of Friendship.

From 2014, the United Nations celebrate the World Youth Skills Day on the 15th of July. An important day to promote youth skills and how young people contribute to create a fairer and more equal word. As a lot a people say, youth is the future of our societies. But it’s too easy to say just that. It is essential to consider how can we educate and help this youth to be the future of these societies. Socialization, education, family, school, media, acquaintances… All of these items enable of a person to build himself or herself and to have a place into a society. And most of the time there is a pressure on young people, who are constantly told that they are the future of tomorrow and must take over from the older generation. But what the older generation do to guide and advise the new generation in the development of knowledge, skills and sharing of values to making the world a better place? 

​Indeed, the human is built and grow initially through mimicry. It's not uncommon to hear children saying things at school that are in fact just imitations of what their parents are saying. And it is from this very early age that the values of solidarity, living together, respect or hatred, rejection of others and intolerance are passed on. Of course, this can change with time and the person's environment, but it's very complicated.

Cultural, generational and gender diversity is the key to building peace and development for a better world. Young people don't build themselves. What's more, it's very easy to ask them to build the world of tomorrow, but are older people prepared to make way for young people and their new ideas? Fighting for a fairer world also means questioning the structures of our societies, our stereotypes, our preconceptions, questioning what we think we know and accepting that we live in a world that is changing too fast. But to give young people a glimpse of their skills and potential, we need to give them the room, the opportunity, and the space to blossom and prove what they are capable of. 

Olwen Delsart & Nina Lemarquand

Olwen and Nina are French volunteers involved in World Youth Skills Day.

It’s all about people! On the 11th of July, we celebrated World Population Day. This international day is observed on this date every year to raise awareness of global population issues. It was declared by the United Nations, concretely by the Government Council of the United Nations Development Programme, in 1989. It was inspired by the public interest in Five Billion Day on July 11, 1987, the approximate date the world's population reached five billion people. A stunning amount of people that nowadays looks almost ridiculous compared with the last milestone that we passed on the population’s growth. We reached 8 billion people on the 15th of November, 2022.

The theme for 2024 is “to leave no one behind, count everyone”. UN Secretary-General António Guterres gave his thoughts about it: “As the theme of this year’s World Population Day reminds us, investing in data collection is important to understanding problems, tailoring solutions, and driving progress. So is finance. I urge countries to make the most of the Summit of the Future this year to unleash affordable capital for sustainable development.”
*What is the Summit of the Future? The Summit is a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future (UN). It will take place in September 2024.
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From the UN Secretary-General word's we can understand that there should be a focus on the data as a tool to improve the world financial situation and, therefore, own the proper capital that allows us to continue the pursuit of sustainable development, to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, by 2030 (or someday). But it is also a claim about the fact that everybody deserves an opportunity, a place in our sustainable future. We need to count everyone because as a society, and as humans, we cannot tolerate leaving anyone behind. There’s one future and it has to be for the whole world or it will be for no one.

As we were saying, the United Nations remarks on the importance of data on the social and economic advancements over the last decades, assuming that data will be as important or even more than before. Some of the mentioned improvements “have significantly enhanced the delivery of health care globally, leading to substantial improvements in sexual and reproductive health and the ability to exercise rights and choices. Increasingly, new technologies are enabling more detailed and timely measurement of people's experiences than ever before.” All of this happened, according to the UN, because “societies around the world have made remarkable progress in improving population data gathering, analysis, and use. New population figures, disaggregated by age, ethnicity, gender, and other factors, now reflect the diversity of our societies more accurately.”

In conclusion, we have in our power an instrument to develop ourselves, our societies, just as we should. So celebrate people, count everyone. Gathering the data with a good purpose and the proper interpretation will help us on the way to the future through sustainable development.

 Mario Formisano Fernández

Rodrigo Duarte is a Portuguese volunteer and Mario Formisano is a Spanish volunteer, both involved in World Population Day.