International Day of Working Women

By Berta Moya and Irene Monferrer

On March 8th we have celebrated the International Day of Working Women every year since 1911. This is a festivity recognized by the United Nations Organization. This day commemorates the fact that women participate in the same way as men in the world of work and in society.

The establishment of this date as the International Women's Day was the result of a long process. It supposedly relates to a fire that took place in a textile factory in New York in 1908, causing the death of a hundred striking workers. The reality, however, was more complex. There were three events, not just a single fire in New York: the textile workers’ strike in 1857, the fire in the Cotton Factory and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on March 25th 1911. In the latter, 142 workers (mostly young immigrants) died. They had been on strike the year before to demand better working conditions.

Medieval festival

By Thamesis Balceda

In Badalona, from 25th to 27th March, we celebrated the medieval festival along La Salut Avenue. The streets of the neighborhood of La Salut were crowded. They were full of lights and the floor was full of straw. There were a lot of of fools, knights and kings. The atmosphere was very medieval. People wore medieval clothes. There were all kind of medieval shops, donkeys… The objects were handmade. You could watch, for example, how a man made bread, and then he put it into the oven. You could also see how women sewed clothes. You could mount the donkeys and go for a ride. You could eat medieval meals and listen to medieval music.

International day of the bird

By Nicolas Ordax

In October, more specifically on the 3rd and the 4th, the International Day of the Bird is celebrated.

It is mainly a day on which activities related to ornithology are promoted in natural spaces. For example, there are guided bird-watching trips, guided photography tours and other activities...they are all, of course, free.

The Remolar-Filipines reserve, in the Llobregat Delta, is a place where these kinds of activities take place. It is located at the mouth of the River Llobregat and is a great place to observe birds. I've been there many times on short trips to do some bird-watching.

On the International Day of the Bird, the main activities in the Delta del Llobregat are the following:

-Guided trips: There are guided trips with local staff members to bird-watching hides on the lagoons and to the Pineda de Cal Francès, which is a little forest that is closed all year round apart from this day.

-Competitions: There are some competitions, involving, for example, drawing, identifying and photographing birds.

-Bird releasing: Injured birds that have been found and cured are released.

-Bird ringing: Bird ringing is a very big project, in which people at ringing stations put some nets in a specific area and then ring the captured birds. When birds migrate, they are sometimes captured by other ringing stations and this allows us to trace their migration route of the birds. On the Day of the Bird, visitors are shown how this process works.

The Year of Joan Maragall

By Marson John Mesa Bautista

In 2010 we celebrated the 150th anniversary of Maragall’s birth and to honour the occasion the Barcelona City Council placed a statue of Joan Maragall in Plaça Molina. The sculpture was created by his son Ernest Maragall i Noble.

He was born on October 10th 1860, in Barcelona. He was a Catalan poet, journalist and translator, and a very important member of the Modernista movement in literature.

When he was 14 years old, his father wanted him to work in the family textile business but in 1879 he enrolled in the University’s law faculty, where he graduated in 1884. He also learned several languages (English, German, French and Italian) and studied the piano.

In 1891 he married Clara Noble. He had 13 children with her and passed his interest in culture on to them. In 1891 he started to write for “L'Avenç”, where he published some poems. He wrote in a simple and spontaneous way and this led him to create the theory of the “living word”. Although he is well known for his poetic work, he also wrote more than 450 texts in prose. He contributed to various magazines and newspapers (L’Avenç, Catalonia i Luz, Diario de Barcelona and La Veu de Catalunya), in which he published articles in both Spanish and Catalan about literature, politics and social issues.

He won many competitions and awards during his life, as well as many honours, particularly his appointment as “Mestre en Gai Saber” and his election as president of the Barcelona Athenaeum in 1903. He was also a founding member of the philological section of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans.

He fell ill in November 1911 and he died on 20th December in Barcelona.

His most important works are Poesies (1895), Visions i CantsLes Disperses (1904), Enllà (1906), Seqüències (1900), (1911).

Nelson Mandela day

By Joel Suñé

This year Mandela Day was celebrated for the first time, on July 18th. It is an international day established by the United Nations. Individuals, communities and organizations were asked to devote 67 minutes to doing something for other people. Nelson Mandela served his community for more than 67 years.

Nelson Mandela was born on July 18th, 1918. In 1962 he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. He was imprisoned in Robben Island, where he spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison; after that he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison. He was released on February 11th 1990. He was the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the oldest elected President of South Africa (at the age of 75), as well as the first to be elected in a completely democratic election. Before becoming president, Mandela had been an anti-apartheid activist. In July 2001 Mandela was diagnosed with, and treated for, prostate cancer.

Mandela has been married three times. The first marriage was to Evelyn Ntoko Mase, the second to Winnie Mdikizela-Mandela, and the third to Graça Machel. He has six children, twenty grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren too.

Nelson Mandela has received over 250 honours, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Award.

The year of Miguel Hernández

By Xènia Nogué

2010 was the year of Miguel Hernández year as we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of his birth. To mark the occasion, on September 23rd Joan Manel Serrat launched a new CD with 13 songs, all of them based on the poems of Hernández. The CD is called “Hijo de la luz y de la sombra”, after one of his best poems.

Miguel Hernández was a poet born in 1910 in a little village called Orihuela. He studied in a Jesuit school. He published his first book of poetry at the age of 23 and by the time of his death he had written 500 pages of poems. After his death he became more and more famous. When he was young, he admired the Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora. On March 9th 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he married Josefina Manresa Marhuenda. They met when he was in Orihuela in 1933 and they had two children: Miguel Ramón and Manuel Miguel, although his first son died a year after his birth. Hernández was put in jail many times because he was an anti-fascist. While in prison he wrote a lot of poems, which were kept by the jailers. Before his death he wrote on the wall of the prison sickbay: "Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields". He died of tuberculosis in 1942.

The poet's works include: Perito en lunas (1934), El rayo que no cesa (1936), Vientos del pueblo me llevan (1937), El hombre acecha (1938-1939), Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias (incomplete, 1938-1942).

International Day of Peace

By Marson Mesa

Every year The World Peace Day takes place on September 21st. It's dedicated to peace and the absence of war. Many nations, political groups, military groups, and people celebrate it.

The United Nations General Assembly established the International Day of Peace in 1981 for “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace”.

On Tuesday, September 21, 1982, took place the first International Day of Peace.

In September 1998, the General Secretary of the United Nations asked to all the leaders of the nations in war to resist the temptation to conquer and recognize the capacity to govern peacefully.

If we want our future generations keep the fruits of this day, we must act now. We must:

●Promote education for peace, human rights and democracy, tolerance and the international understanding.

●Protect and respect all the human rights and fight all forms of discrimination.

●Promote democratic principles in all the society.

●Live tolerance and solidarity.

●Fight poverty and able to give each person a part of life on keeping with the notion of human dignity.

●Protect and respect our environment.