Sometimes I take my diary and read through its pages; its white leaves unfold as gently as soft bandages revealing a scar of memories. Some of my memories are painful and dark. Some bring back the screams, sirens, and the dead bodies of innocent people on the streets. Some fill my eyes with tears and wound my soul with great pain. It hurts to read; my heart wants to leap out of my body, unwilling to experience all the horrifying things again. My diary was always far more than a notebook. It was my means to survive-to remain human and sane.

Today, by reading it, I strive to preserve the life I was surviving for. I was twelve years old when the war began. I was a cheerful and carefree girl when the bloody hands of war took my childhood away. Before the war, I lived happily with my dearest parents and brother. We were an upper-middle-class family, as were many others in Sarajevo. My mother was a business manager at the National Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina. My father was a manager at a major book company. We had a beautiful fourteenth-floor apartment, a house in a village where we spent our weekends, a cottage and some land on the island of Brach on the Adriatic Sea, and two cars.

Friends Of Peace Notebook Download Free

DOWNLOAD 🔥 https://bytlly.com/2yGcq2 🔥

It saddens me to realize that most people know little about Bosnia. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a beautiful country located between Italy and Greece. The capital of my homeland is the beautiful city of Sarajevo. From the television news footage most people may picture my city with no electricity, water, gas, or food. Though we lived without these essentials during the war, before the war Sarajevo was as modern as any city in America. Surrounded by a gorgeous ring of mountains, Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. It was truly an international place where people embraced every visitor, placing a Bosnian pie, a "Cevepi" meat roll, and a glass of pure mountain springwater in front of him.

The war came quickly and suddenly. I remember the morning when I woke up and started getting ready for school. I entered our living room to find my parents' faces troubled and sad. They said I could not go to school. Groups of armed men with sock masks had placed barricades throughout the city and blocked the streets.

Through the first few weeks of chaos and confusion, I believed that the craziness would soon be over and that everything would be just as it was before. I believed that the armed men would simply disappear. None of my hopes and wishes came true.

On May 31, 1992, I was frightened as never before. That day my trembling fingers opened the covers of an old notebook and I began writing my diary. I finally let my tears, frozen for so long, fall freely onto my face. I released emotions so long clutched inside. I realized that a prisoner of a city cannot remain a prisoner of his own mind and soul. The body can hurt and starve, but the mind and soul must be nourished.

Soon, we got used to living with the war. I know now that a human being can survive unimaginable conditions, because deep in the human soul lies an eternal desire to live, to be, and to become. I got accustomed to dragging water up the stairs to the fourteenth floor. I became used to not having the food we normally ate. I even found it normal to have grenades wake me up in the morning instead of the warm voice of my dearest mother. My family strove to make our lives easier, to make the sudden change a little softer. We planted vegetables on our balcony and were happy to decorate a dish of plain rice with a piece of lettuce or a slice of tomato.

My mother went to work even though she never got paid and had to walk twelve miles every day; with every step she was in danger of being killed by bombs or snipers. Countless mornings, I watched her brush her hair and put makeup on her pretty face, horrified by the thought of her getting killed. When, through my tears, I begged her not to go, she told me she couldn't stay home because the endless days would kill her.

My father was let go from his job because of our religion, so he volunteered for the Red Cross during the war. For a long time I could not comprehend the reason he was let go, as I never judged people by their religion. My family and I are believers of Islam. We believe in God solemnly, but we always embrace our friends and neighbors who are Christian, Jews, or Orthodox. I grew up with my father's saying: "One who doesn't respect the religion of others cannot respect one's own."

Being a child of peace, I never took a moment to think about everyday things that made my life so cheerful. I never thought what it would be like to wake up one morning and find them gone. The first things I was deprived of were school and my friends. Sometimes my friends from the building and I gathered in the basement with our teacher for a lesson. In the winter, each one of us would bring a piece of wood and try to warm up the little room with an old stove. Some mornings, when I got up only because I was so anxious to go to school and see my friends, the shelling would start and school would be canceled. My desire to learn in spite of everything never faded, so I often took out my books and studied on my own. I made a daily schedule and studied Bosnian, English, French, and math. I also practiced guitar and sang.

The war mercilessly stole four years of my life. Like every child would do, I acclimated to the new conditions of my life, forgetting what I had before. Every tear that stained my pillow at night, when all I could hear were sirens and grenades, was also a tear that mourned all the innocent citizens who lost their lives. I often felt sad because the war opened my eyes at such an early age. Even though I learned a great lesson, sometimes it hurt so bad that I wish I had never learned it. Only my dreams, so beautiful that they could resist all the ugliness of war, so invulnerable that no grenades ever harmed them, kept my head and my hopes bright and high. I realized that the soft and colorful paths of my dreams often intersected with the roads of cruel reality. That was when my dreams, my determination, and my faith were tested.

War taught me that every human being has a dark and bright side. It is our choice to fight the darker side and show our warm and beautiful feelings or to let ourselves be weak and hopeless, bitter and mean. I hope that the warm and brilliant colors of the morning dawn, the radiant light of midnight's stars on the sky of my dreams will always light up my soul with goodness and faith. I hope they will light the path of my existence with peace and righteousness.

The views expressed on this site are the author's. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics does not advocate particular positions but seeks to encourage dialogue on the ethical dimensions of current issues. The Center welcomes comments and alternative points of view.

The International Day of Friendship was proclaimed in 2011 by the UN General Assembly with the idea that friendship between peoples, countries, cultures and individuals can inspire peace efforts and build bridges between communities.

To mark the International Day of Friendship the UN encourages governments, international organizations and civil society groups to hold events, activities and initiatives that contribute to the efforts of the international community towards promoting a dialogue among civilizations, solidarity, mutual understanding and reconciliation.

The International Day of Friendship is an initiative that follows on the proposal made by UNESCO defining the Culture of Peace as a set of values, attitudes and behaviours that reject violence and endeavour to prevent conflicts by addressing their root causes with a view to solving problems. It was then adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1997.

International days and weeks are occasions to educate the public on issues of concern, to mobilize political will and resources to address global problems, and to celebrate and reinforce achievements of humanity. The existence of international days predates the establishment of the United Nations, but the UN has embraced them as a powerful advocacy tool. We also mark other UN observances.

The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration.1 This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically--at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. By approaching the Declaration in this way, we can shed light both on its literary qualities and on its rhetorical power as a work designed to convince a "candid world" that the American colonies were justified in seeking to establish themselves as an independent nation.2

The text of the Declaration can be divided into five sections--the introduction, the preamble, the indictment of George III, the denunciation of the British people, and the conclusion. Because space does not permit us to explicate each section in full detail, we shall select features from each that illustrate the stylistic artistry of the Declaration as a whole.3

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.4

Taken out of context, this sentence is so general it could be used as the introduction to a declaration by any "oppressed" people. Seen within its original context, however, it is a model of subtlety, nuance, and implication that works on several levels of meaning and allusion to orient readers toward a favorable view of America and to prepare them for the rest of the Declaration. From its magisterial opening phrase, which sets the American Revolution within the whole "course of human events," to its assertion that "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" entitle America to a "separate and equal station among the powers of the earth," to its quest for sanction from "the opinions of mankind," the introduction elevates the quarrel with England from a petty political dispute to a major event in the grand sweep of history. It dignifies the Revolution as a contest of principle and implies that the American cause has a special claim to moral legitimacy--all without mentioning England or America by name. 152ee80cbc

revision notes for the mrcog part 1 pdf free download

kitchen counter 3d model free download

sonarr pending download client is unavailable