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WORLD DAY OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY | The necessity of passing on cultural philosophies for young people today

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rom our cultural philosophies, at least shared across the people of African origin, both those within the continent and those in diaspora, the sense of community is deep and strong; as the Ubuntu philosophy for example says “I am because we are.”

When young people are taught that this is our way of life they grow with a reflection to own this new sense of being as a backdrop and a springboard from which they bounce as well as make sense of their life.

Do we proudly cherish our African Heritage and make it seen?

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What happened to the African values which have set grounds for what we regard as our social morals? Do they still stand as ideals to measure ourselves by? If yes, do we still communicate that to our generations? There are wars today in many African countries, and most of these countries have deep knowledge of conflict resolution in their cultural wisdom, and have riddles, jokes and adages communicating a whole wide range of interesting ideas about peace. If culture does not inform our deeper convictions about human values the discontinuity is a dangerous black hole.

Past and present of our maternal and newborn survival in Tanzania

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Globally there has been progress in reduction of maternal deaths from 339/100000 deaths to 227/100000 deaths from 2000 to 2015 respectively.  Despite the marked decline, progress has been minimal from 2015 to 2020, where the maternal mortality rate is 227/100000 live births. What can be done?

Your kidney could be next in the seemingly clean criminal organ markets

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Organ donation is a charitable thing, but should be done within the precincts and demands of acceptable laws and medico-social ethics. It should not be a trade with blindfolds and middlemen handling cash transactions.

This area can mostly be controlled through serious monitoring by the government and its intelligence system, especially in hospitals owned by foreigners or where most patients are foreigners. Trends of this illegal trade show that priority is given to foreign patients because they pay more.

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF STREET CHILDREN | Is the vulnerable child of today the offender of tomorrow?

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When the system has poor incentives to guide young people to be productive and engaged in the society, even after they have been integrally formed well in their homes they can lose it all as they switch into the survival mode of the streets.

Countries with lowest crime rates have the best job security as well. In Tanzania, many individuals currently in correctional facilities (prisons) might not be there if meaningful employment opportunities had been available. It is a big problem to accept our kind of frustrating joblessness as a social dynamic, even among those who are educated.

How emojis influence emotional communication today

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With the widespread use of computer mediated communication devices and these emojis, it is worth exploring how much, or rather in what ways, our emotional communication is influenced by emojis. Most emotion related emojis and emoticons (emotional icons) communicate these emotions only in a general sense and cannot really touch the unexplored territories of dynamic human emotions and feelings.

Will Kiswahili poetry survive the whims of spoken language pollution?

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Poetry is beyond rhymes and play of words, it is an art that enables poets to express carefully deeper thoughts and meaningful mental constructions which simple conversational words cannot present sufficiently. It is an art because we enjoy its richness especially as it informs both the society about itself and the outside world, and the world about itself and in relation to that particular society, respectively, in an inward and outward dynamic.

With language as the vehicle and safeguard for the treasures in poetry, it follows that when a language is polluted, there will be repercussions in the poetry of that language, and in the understanding of the corpus of poetry that has lived generations before such pollutions. Dynamics of languages are diverse and are often irreversible if appropriate action is not taken.

INTERVIEW | “A Child is a Free Mind”: Author Corona Kimaro Cermak on Storytelling, Identity, and Tanzanian Children’s Literature

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My African heritage plays a crucial role in my storytelling. My Swahili culture and language largely constitutes my identity as a storyteller. ven though my children are half Czech, and half Tanzanian, they are blended in both cultures in a beautiful way. I believed by them having Swahili language and cultural awareness they will appreciate more the half of who they are, and be happy and free, when they visit Tanzania.

Building trust in family helps children disclose harms done to them

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A family environment that has friendly conversation, care, company and love will go a long way to make a child comfortable to peacefully express his or her ideas and worries.

It is different from a home that entertains anger, fights, foul exchange of words, physical violence, absent parenting, and others. Children are distressed by these negative emotions and are affected by them, sometimes in ways that even years of therapy can hardly heal.

Lessons after a century past the racist zoo caging of Congolese ‘Ota Benga’ in America

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he case of Mbye Otabenga (c. 1883-1916), now popular as “Ota Benga,” a Congolese young man from the Mbuti indigenous forest people, who was put in the zoo in America, is not isolated from the deep-rooted and widespread oppression and suppression of people of different races by the Caucasians of Europe and America, who at the time dominated science, trade, media, and publications.

The degrading oppression of people of African origin who have been referred to by colour ‘black,’ a hugely controversial and widely unacceptable taxonomy, has for centuries been given both reason and justification meaning by manipulating science in favour of the pervading oppressive idea.