Stand up for love - LYRICS

Stand Up For Love by Destiny's Child

World Children's Day

A "Children's Day", as an event, is celebrated on various days in many places around the world. Major global variants include an International Children's Day on June 1 as adopted in the former Communist bloc, and a Universal Children's Day on November 20, by United Nations recommendation. Many nations declare days for children on other dates.

The World Conference for the Well-being of Children in Geneva, Switzerland proclaimed June 1 to be International Children's Day in 1925. It is not clear as to why June 1 was chosen as the International Children's Day: one theory has it that the Chinese consul-general in San Francisco (USA) gathered a number of Chinese orphans to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival in 1925, which happened to be on June 1 that year, and also coincided with the conference in Geneva.

The holiday is celebrated on 1 June each year. It is usually marked with speeches on children's rights and wellbeing, children TV programs, parties, various actions involving or dedicated to children, families going out ,etc...

It was adopted mostly by former and current Communist and Socialist countries.

Declaration of the Rights of the Child

...he may have a happy childhood and enjoy for his own good and for the good of society the rights and freedoms herein set forth, and calls upon parents, upon men and women as individuals, and upon voluntary organizations, local authorities and national Governments to recognize these rights and strive for their observance by legislative and other measures progressively taken in accordance with the following principles:

Principle 1 The child shall enjoy all the rights set forth in this Declaration. Every child, without any exception whatsoever, shall be entitled to these rights, without distinction or discrimination on account of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, whether of himself/herself or of his/her family.

Principle 2 The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him/her to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.

Principle 3 The child shall be entitled from his/her birth to a name and a nationality.

Principle 4 The child shall enjoy the benefits of social security. He shall be entitled to grow and develop in health; to this end, special care and protection shall be provided both to him and to his mother, including adequate pre-natal and post-natal care. The child shall have the right to adequate nutrition, housing, recreation and medical services.

Principle 5 The child who is physically, mentally or socially handicapped shall be given the special treatment, education and care required by his/her particular condition.

Principle 6 The child, for the full and harmonious development of his/her personality, needs love and understanding. He/she shall, wherever possible, grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his/her parents, and, in any case, in an atmosphere of affection and of moral and material security; a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his/her mother. Society and the public authorities shall have the duty to extend particular care to children without a family and to those without adequate means of support. Payment of State and other assistance towards the maintenance of children of large families is desirable.

Principle 7 The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages. He/she shall be given an education which will promote his/her general culture and enable him/her, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his/her abilities, his/her individual judgement, and his/her sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society.

The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for his education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with his parents.

The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education; society and the public authorities shall endeavor to promote the enjoyment of this right.

Principle 8 The child shall in all circumstances be among the first to receive protection and relief.

Principle 9 The child shall be protected against all forms of neglect, cruelty and exploitation. He/she shall not be the subject of traffic, in any form.

The child shall not be admitted to employment before an appropriate minimum age; he/she shall in no case be caused or permitted to engage in any occupation or employment which would prejudice his/her health or education, or interfere with his/her physical, mental or moral development.

Principle 10 The child shall be protected from practices which may foster racial, religious and any other form of discrimination. He/she shall be brought up in a spirit of understanding, tolerance, friendship among peoples, peace and universal brotherhood, and in full consciousness that his energy and talents should be devoted to the service of his/her fellow men/women.

UNO -841st plenary meeting, 20 November 1959

Homage to IRENE SENDLER who died on May 12, 2008

Irene Sendler was born in Poland on 15 February 1910  and died on 12 May 2008, aged 98.She was a Polish Catholic social worker who served in the Polish Underground and the Żegota resistance organization in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II. Assisted by some two dozen other Żegota members, Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out

During the German occupation of Poland Sendler lived in Warsaw .

 As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began aiding Jews. She and her helpers created over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, prior to joining the organized Żegota resistance and the children's division. Helping Jews was very risky, in German-occupied Poland, all household members risked death if they were found to be hiding Jews, a more severe punishment than in other occupied European countries.

Nazi German poster in German and Polish (Warsaw, 1942) threatening death to any Pole who aided Jews .
 In December 1942 the newly created Żegota (the Council to Aid Jews) nominated her (by her cover name Jolanta) to head its children's section. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the Ghetto.[
 During these visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself.
She cooperated with the Children's Section of the Municipal Administration, linked with the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys.
 Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak Sendler visited the Ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.
 She also used the old courthouse at the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto (still standing) as one of the main routes for smuggling out children.
The children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, or Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate at Turkowice and Chotomów.
Some children were smuggled to priests in parish rectories. She hid lists of their names in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.
In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs.
 She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed.

For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and attempted to find the children and return them to their parents. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had gone missing otherwise.

                                 Irene and her children

She  was awarded the Commander's Cross by the Israeli Institute. Only in that year did the Polish communist government allow her to travel abroad, to receive the award in Israel.

In 2003 Pope John Paul II sent Sendler a personal letter praising her wartime efforts. On 10 October 2003 she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration, and the Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart," given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, D.C.                                            

On 14 March 2007 Sendler was honored by Poland's Senate. At age 97, she was unable to leave her nursing home to receive the honor, but she sent a statement through Elżbieta Ficowska, whom Sendler had saved as an infant. Polish President Lech Kaczyński stated she "can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" (though nominations are supposed to be kept secret). On 11 April 2007, she received the Order of the Smile as the oldest recipient of the award.

In May 2009, Irena Sendler was posthumously granted the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award .

The award, named in honor of the late actress and UNICEF ambassador, is presented to persons and organizations recognised for helping children. In its citation, the Audrey Hepburn Foundation recalled Irena Sendler’s heroic efforts that saved two and a half thousand Jewish children during the German occupation of Poland in World War Two.

Sendler was the last survivor of the Children's Section of the Żegota Council to Assist Jews, which she had headed from January 1943 until the end of the war.

Nobel nominee...

In 2007 considerable publicity accompanied Sendler's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. While failed nominations for the award have not been officially announced by the Nobel organization for 50 years, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, reported in 2007 that Irena Sendler's nominator had made the nomination public. Regardless of its legitimacy, talk of the nomination focused a spotlight on Sendler and her wartime achievements.

" As you sow, so shall you reap " - words from the BIBLE

An excerpt from  "The Strangest Secret"

by Earl Nightingale

George Bernard Shaw said, "People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, they make them."

Well, it's pretty apparent, isn't it? And every person who discovered this believed (for a while) that he was the first one to work it out. We become what we think about.
Conversely, the person who has no goal, who doesn't know where he's going, and whose thoughts must therefore be thoughts of confusion, anxiety and worry - his life becomes one of frustration, fear, anxiety and worry. And if he thinks about nothing... he becomes nothing.
How does it work? Why do we become what we think about? Well, I'll tell you how it works, as far as we know. To do this, I want to tell you about a situation that parallels the human mind.

Suppose a farmer has some land, and it's good, fertile land. The land gives the farmer a choice; he may plant in that land whatever he chooses. The land doesn't care. It's up to the farmer to make the decision.
We're comparing the human mind with the land because the mind, like the land, doesn't care what you plant in it. It will return what you plant, but it doesn't care what you plant.
Now, let's say that the farmer has two seeds in his hand- one is a seed of corn, the other is nightshade, a deadly poison. He digs two little holes in the earth and he plants both seeds-one corn, the other nightshade. He covers up the holes, waters and takes care of the land...and what will happen? Invariably, the land will return what was planted.
As it's written in the Bible, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
Remember the land doesn't care. It will return poison in just as wonderful abundance as it will corn. So up come the two plants - one corn, one poison.


The human mind is far more fertile, far more incredible and mysterious than the land, but it works the same way. It doesn't care what we plant...success...or failure. A concrete, worthwhile goal...or confusion, misunderstanding, fear, anxiety and so on. But what we plant must return to us.
You see, the human mind is the last great unexplored continent on earth. It contains riches beyond our wildest dreams. It will return anything we want to plant.

Ave Maria de Schubert (Latin, "Hail Mary")

The Hail Mary-Ave Maria (Latin)

Pope Benedict XVI visits Fátima on May 13th, 2010

PORTUGAL 11-14 May 2010 Pope Benedict XVI visits Fatima shrine

Pope Benedict XVI holds open air masses for capacity crowds in Lisbon and Porto, and visits the Marian shrine of Fatima to celebrate the anniversary of the day in 1917 when the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three shepherd children there. While in Portugal he could announce plans to canonize Sister Lucia dos Santos, one of the three children, who died in 2005 at the age of 97.

On the 13th of each month from May to Oct 1917, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to Lúcia,10, and to her cousins Jacinta, 7, and Francisco Marto, 9, in the fields outside the village of Aljustrel near Fatima. Jacinta and Francisco died in 1919, victims of the Spanish flu. All three have been beatified, the first step to sainthood.

The last visit to Fatima by the head of the Roman Catholic Church was by John Paul nine years ago

HEART BEAT...

English's fun...English's fun...English's fun...English's fun...

Feel it... love it...

it's your heart beat !

READING is the key to SUCCESS

"Reading is the best way" says Charlie from China:

"In my fourteen years of learning English, I have tried out many ways of learning English, but the most effective so far has proved to be learning through reading.

Reading, I mean effective reading, should involve on the reader's part a thorough concentration on the material he is reading, and an alertness and sensitivity to the wording as well as the general layout of the passages.

First of all, attentive reading can help one build up one's vocabulary. As we read more, we will inevitably encounter words and expressions that we have never learned before; and by making sense of them through the context or by later referring to some sort of dictionary, we will notably increase our vocabulary in a very short span of time.

A second benefit of reading extensively is that one can cultivate in oneself a sense of the language and of the particular language flow peculiar to that target language.

Reading also helps writing. As you expand your vocabulary, you have more idiomatic words or expressions at your command for you to use when you write articles of one kind or another

In all, reading extensively and attentatively will do one a bagful of good."

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