World

Saturday 14th October 2023. Peace – and maintaining peace – requires active seeds. Those who oppress a people for decades, taking away the soil to live on, stealing the resources necessary for survival, even cutting off its water supply, mustn’t be surprised if and when the moment arrives where things come to a head. Investing in hate and violence turns into a twisted spiral. At some point a threshold is crossed where patience or hope for better times cease to exist. Active seeds growing hate are when one human being takes away the chance of development from another person, and …

Saturday 30th September 2023. In the year 2020, every Portuguese citizen produced on average some 40 kg of plastic packaging waste. Across the EU, this places Portugal at the top of this particular ranking. If you look at an infographics published by Statista, only Ireland produces more waste per inhabitant (62 kg), followed by Hungary (47 kg), Germany (40 kg) and Estonia (40 kg), at a par with Portugal. According to the Eurostat data, Greece, Cyprus and Croatia produce the least plastic waste. On a global scale, dealing with waste is one of the most important environmental issues – and …

The setting is Nepal. Looking out the window of his childhood home, M gazes across a green valley, with some mixed and conifer forest a little further down. M is from Merangdi, a village with a handful of houses in the Solukhumbu district. In fine weather, stepping out of his parents’ house and looking up towards the north, he can see the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, 8,848 metres high, in the sky. The tall summit towering above the valley and Province no. 1 is an imposing sight. M and his three siblings, two older brothers and a …

The Salt March of 1930… was a campaign by Mahatma Gandhi that was intended to break the British monopoly on salt and, in the end, led to India’s independence from Britain. The Salt March was the most spectacular campaign launched by Gandhi during his fight for independence. The campaign aimed to inspire civil disobedience and to stand up against the dependence on too high taxes imposed by Great Britain. On 12th March 1930, Gandhi set off from his home town with 78 of his supporters, on a march that continued for 385 kilometres to Dandi on the Arabian Sea. He …

If the entire population of Lisbon was wiped out within nine years, how would we react? We are all aware of the war in Syria, which has been tearing the country apart since 2010, causing the death of an estimated 500,000 people and forcing millions of others to flee their homes and become refugees. In this age of mass social media, we can sometimes become desensitised to the suffering of nameless citizens who live in faraway countries, but at Aljezur International School the students, teachers and parents have a special interest in the news from Syria.  Since 2015, they have …