Green School in Uruguay

Francesco Fassina(Ecologist and Volunteer)

Michael Reynolds (Architect)

Alicia Alvarez (School Director)

Danila Mendez (Mother of a student)

Narrator : A sunny winter’s day is great news for these Uruguayan children. As pupils of South America’s first sustainable school, they study in a building heated only using solar panels. On top of the normal school programme, they learn about recycling, energy saving,and growing their own food

Francesco Fassina: The school is an autonomous building in the sense that it isn’t connected to any energy infrastructure for water or anything. It’s sustainable in the way it functions; totally autonomous and it works thanks to its connection with nature—the sun and the rain.

Narrator : The building was funded by a local NGO and a detergent company, and designed by US architect Michael Reynolds, a self-professed “garbage warrior” who's devoted his career to building self-sufficient structures out of recyclable material.

Michael Reynolds: People called me an idiot, uh, building with garbage, what a fool, you’re a disgrace to the architectural community, uh, you know. I was trying to contain sewage and treat it and do all of these things that architects didn’ t do

Narrator : The 39 students, so me just starting pre-school and others in their final year before university learn it’s possible to live in a building that produces no waste. NGO volunteers organise regular workshops on sustainability for pupils and teachers too.

Alicia Alvarez: Little by little, we`re becoming qualified. In fact were being trained by them. We`re being trained to learn how the school works. How to maintain it so that the systems don’t deteriorate.

Narrator : Some of the children have even started educating their parents

Danila Mendez: Every day, we walk here, and he finds glass in the sand or plastic or something and he picks it up. He says. “T`m keeping this to throw it away.” He doesn’t leave it there. He picks it up and he throws it away in the right place.

Narrator : For these little garbage warriors, saving the planet has become an integral part of their homework.

Food takeaway rider who finds respite from his daily work stress in writing poetry publishes his second collection in as many years, Chen Nan reports.

In 2019, Wang Jibing, a food delivery rider living and working in Kunshan, East China’s Jiangsu province, had an unpleasant experience due to the wrong address left by a customer. Wang searched three buildings and climbed 18 floors before he finally managed to deliver the food to the customer, who rudely scolded Wang for arriving late.

Wang was sad and frustrated. As a husband and father of three children, who shoulders the majority of the financial responsibility in his family, he had to swallow the insult.

“If I argued with him, he would give me negative feedback and the company would have imposed a fine on me. I had no choice but to apologize repeatedly,” recalls Wang, 54, who makes about 6,000 yuan ($823) a month by delivering food.

On his way home that day, Wang wrote a poem, Man in a Hurry, expressing his feelings.

“Wind is born from air in a hurry. A knife is forged from the wind in hurry… Man in a hurry has no four seasons. He only has one stop after another. His world is about the name of a place,” he wrote.

Since then, Wang has been writing poems inspired by his daily life, including a poem New Temple, which was conceived after he delivered food to construction workers repairing an old temple, and Forgive, based on his observation of a young couple fighting.

We need to get back to the natural, built-in mechanisms that we have for self- preservation and health. Laughter is one of them.

Laughter Yoga is a way for people to use laughter without telling jokes and being able to get the laughter to help them feel better. The interesting thing is that it helps ease pain, it can ease depression, it’s a way to move and get into your inner child and it’s a lot of fun. And adults don’t remember necessarily how to have fun

The bottom line of our research is that laughter not only makes us feel good but it has a direct effect on our blood vessels. And our blood vessels control the likelihood of us developing a heart attack or a stroke. So if we keep the blood vessels healthy, then we’re going to be healthy.You can burn up to 40 calories for 5-10 minutes of laughter. But equally important is that the blood vessel opening that we see is the same as going jogging or even taking one of our cholesterol medications. You get the same effect in terms of opening up your blood vessels as you do with a good, deep, belly laugh. Laughing on a regular basis is not only good for our soul, but also great for our heart.

Laughter is a way of communication and that’s why it’s contagious. Because when I’m laughing, you’re looking at me and you’re like “wow, this is a positive energy” and you’re more likely to join me in the laughter.

But laughter’s not present at birth. It appears about 3-4 months of age and it’s one of the most important early means of communication between babies and mothers. A mother will tickle the baby and the baby will smile and laugh. And the mother will do more of that. If the baby does not like it, the baby will fuss or cry and the mother stops. It’s a kind of instinctive language that exists before we learn to talk. Laughter, like speech, evolved to change the behavior of other individuals. Does it have to have other purposes? It probably does, but we’re just now starting to tease out what those differences are. Did the benefits of laughter come from the act of laughing or is it the social context, spending time with friends, family, and lovers? All of these are very difficult scientific issues that haven’t been teased out. But laughter clearly feels good when we do it. Isn’t that enough?

4 . HEFEI, Oct. 13 (Xinhua) - A poetry festival kicked off Wednesday to commemorate Li Bai, a famous Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), in Ma’anshan City of east China’s Anhui Province.

More than 500 representatives attended the opening ceremony of the 33rd Li Bai poetry festival, including poetry experts, scholars and poetry lovers from across the country. A poem recital activity will also be held online this year between Chinese and Japanese poem enthusiasts to promote bilateral cultural exchange.

Li Bai is a household name in China as Shakespeare to the UK or Tagore to India. He lived between 701 and 762, also a golden age of Chinese poetry, and his poems are brimful of patriotism and romanticism. He spent his last days in Ma’anshan and wrote about 50 poems about the city throughout his life. It is said he was buried at the foot of Daqing Mountain in the city after he passed away.

A total of 871 poems have been submitted to the organizing committee to participate in this year’s festival. More than 100 statues of Li Bai and figures that appeared in his poems have been collected from all over China for exhibition at the festival.

Participants will pay homage to places in and around Ma’anshan City which Li Bai once visited. They will also pay a visit to Li Bai’s tomb on Thursday.

The first Li Bai poetry festival was held in 1989 in Ma’anshan, and it has become a shining cultural activity of the city ever since. Ma’anshan was named as Chinese City of Poetry by the Poetry Institute of China in 2014.

Japan started releasing nuclear-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean on August 24th and will continue to do so for at least 30 years. In the face of strong questioning and opposition from the international community, Japan plays word games by referring to the discharged “nuclear-contaminated water” as “treated nuclear wastewater”.

However, the two are fundamentally different. Nuclear wastewater refers to the wastewater produced during the normal, daily operation of a nuclear power plant, such as large quantities of water used to cool down the reactor of the plant. Because the water doesn’t touch radioactive substances (放射性物质) in the nuclear reactor, it can be flushed out after strict processing.

Nuclear-contaminated water refers to cooling water that comes into direct contact with radioactive materials inside the reactor when the reactor is breached after a nuclear accident. The cooling water becomes contaminated with highly radioactive substances, thus becoming nuclear-contaminated water.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant experienced a major incident in 2011, bringing water into contact with radioactive substances. The Japanese side’s conflation (混淆) of this with wastewater from normal operations is a deceptive attempt to hide the truth. The Japanese side claims that the multi-nuclide treatment system ALPS is used to treat nuclear contaminated water, and that the treated water is safe and even meets drinking water standards. However, such statements fail to alleviate public concerns. Japan has yet to address major international concerns, such as the long-term reliability of the purification facility, the authenticity and accuracy of the nuclear-contaminated water data, and the effectiveness if the monitoring arrangement. This is extremely selfish and irresponsible, as the discharge will spread the risks of nuclear contamination to the rest of the world.

6 . Upgrade your problems

In 2017, I spent all my money buying my first flat — which meant I had no money to fix my first homeowner’s problem. I was sleeping on an air mattress because I couldn’t afford furniture. Then I noticed a leaky pipe under the bath, which created a wet puddle (水坑). I couldn’t afford a plumber (水管工) but I didn’t want to introduce myself to the neighbour by crashing through their wet ceiling.

The only option left for me was that I had to solve the problem on my own. I took the bus to a nearby store and talked with the nice guy behind the counter. He explained how to fix it and sold me a pipe cutter and a bit of pipework. I went back home, pushed my head under the bath, and got the job done.

It taught me a lesson that has since become a bit of motto for me: Upgrade your problems.

Having a wet bathroom floor is a problem — and the day before I bought the place, I would have had a landlord to call. But once the place was mine, this became my problem. I saw this as progress: You must own your own property to take care of this sort of situation.

Years later, when I founded my professional services company with my business partner, Adam, this motto became core to how we approach the business. There have been many problems, and there will continue to be new ones. However, we remember the reason we have these problems — it’s because we run our own business! A late-paying customer is a problem, but it’s one we encounter only if we have paying customers.

That is why I still keep the pipe cutter on my desk today. It reminds me that, no matter my level of frustration (挫败), I am fortunate to face the problems I do. The more I solve them, the more I upgrade to even better ones.