Category: History

Kigali – 8 October 2015: Rwanda joins the international community in celebrating World Post Day on 9th October, 2015.

The purpose of World Post Day is to create awareness of the role of the postal sector in people’s and businesses’ everyday lives and its contribution to the social and economic development of countries. The celebration encourages UPU member countries, including Rwanda, to undertake programme activities aimed at generating a broader awareness of their Post’s role and activities among the public and media on a national scale.

The World Post Day 2015 theme is “Importance of change for the postal sector to better meet the needs of governments and citizens”. This is to show the commitment of the postal operators to paradigm and status shift as posts are an integral part of the increasingly digital world. In fact, Postal services are not standing idly on the sidelines as they evolve and play their role in an era of new information and communication technologies, mobile telephones and the Internet.

In his 2015 message about the World Postal Day, Mr Bishar Abdirahman Hussein, Director General of Universal Postal Union emphasized on innovation, integration and inclusion that are the key drivers for the future of the Post, urging posts to take the challenges they face ‘’as opportunities to innovate and establish new market segments, understanding that a faster and more efficient communication medium is actually what the Post needs in order to build a new business value chain’’.

Reflecting on the importance of the World Postal Day, the Director General of the National Post Office, Mr. Célestin KAYITARE, said that ‘’this day gives us a moment to stop and ask ourselves if we are fulfilling our mandate as we should and look for innovative ways to meet the needs of our clients while ensuring continued growth of our operations’’ .

In Rwanda, the commemorative activities will be held on Friday October 9, 2015 at the National Post Office Head Office at Muhima -Kigali City, among which there is:

{{• Organisation of an ‘’Open – Post – Day’’ }}

This is an opportunity to show to our customers how the services offered to them are produced. We will offer them a guided tour of the back office services such as: letter sorting, treatment of registered mails, parcel handling, mail tracking and tracing, etc..
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• Guided Tour for young students }}

The guests for this event are the students from Kigali City Secondary Schools in the age group of 12 to 15 years. They will have an opportunity to ask questions related to the postal service in Rwanda and elsewhere.

{{• Press Conference
}}

The press conference will be hosted by the Director General of the National Post Office and will discuss the strategic orientations as well as the restructuring process of National Post Office.

{{• Conviviality –‘’Ubusabane’’ of the National Post Office workers
}}

This function will be held at MUHAZI Beach on Saturday 10th October 2015 and will be a great occasion to reflect critically on the services the staff of the Post Office provide to the public and renew their commitment to improved service delivery.
World Post Day is celebrated annually on 9 October.

It marks the creation of the Universal Postal Union on 9 October 1874, during the first Congress held in Berne, Switzerland, and invites UPU member countries and all postal stakeholders to celebrate postal services as a valuable public service that contributes to the social and economic development of countries. It was declared World Post Day by the UPU Congress held in Tokyo, Japan, in 1969.

TV and movies have taken over our lives these days. That’s not to say that watching certain TV shows or movies is a waste of our time—there are many well-made, thought-provoking things to be watched. And of course, thanks to Kindle, carrying even multiple books around at the same time has become infinitely easier and more practical.

Still, however, it is a bit sad how the the old-fashioned art of reading a regular paper book seems to be slowly fading away into the past. It sometimes seems as though children today do not even know the scent of an old book, a book that has touched the lives of so many, and how wonderful it can be to settle down on the couch with such a book on a rainy day and disappear into the world it creates.

Buy a Book Day was created for the purpose of reminding people how much joy simple black print on a white background can bring when it awakens your imagination and transports you far away.

{{The History of Buy a Book Day}}

Buy a Book Day was created in 2012 to educate people to the importance of books to our culture and civilisation as w whole. It is inarguable that books have been one of the greatest contributors to the advancement of the human race, by moving the hearts of many over the ages, stimulating their imaginations and helping them see the world in an entirely different light. Books have also served the simple but vital purpose of passing knowledge down from generation to generation.
The creators of Buy a Book Day want nothing more than for people take a moment to truly appreciate books and their numerous roles in the human experience.

{{How to Celebrate Buy a Book Day}}

The best way to celebrate this day is to do what its creators meant for us to do, buy a book. Buy a Book Day does not require for you to spend excessive amounts of money. All you have to do to enjoy it thoroughly is invest even a small amount of money in a book, either first- or second-hand and then soak up all of the knowledge and wisdom in it.

Especially if you haven’t read an actual book in a long time, you are sure to be pleasantly surprised at just how quickly a well-written books draws you in, making you as much a part of the story as the characters in it. And do not be fooled into thinking that the only books worth reading are ones written hundreds of years ago—there are many contemporary authors alive and active today that pen masterpieces each and every year.

Daniel Woodrell, for example, wrote the critically acclaimed and tremendously powerful novel “Winter’s Bone” that was later adapted into an equally acclaimed film starring Jennifer Lawrence. J.K. Rowling, author of the world-famous Harry Potter series, has been named one of the most influential women in Britain for her the amount of children and teenagers she got to fall in love with reading.

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether whether you like the classics or contemporary literature or whether you can afford to buy a brand new hardcover book or just a dog-eared softcover book from the local thrift shop—you can celebrate Buy a Book Day anyway.

BERLIN (AP) — Scientists say they have found rare evidence of a prehistoric massacre in Europe after discovering a 7,000-year-old mass grave with skeletal remains from some of the continent’s first farmers bearing terrible wounds.

Archaeologists who painstakingly examined the bones of some 26 men, women and children buried in the Stone Age grave site at Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten, near Frankfurt, say they found blunt force marks to the head, arrow wounds and deliberate efforts to smash at least half of the victims’ shins — either to stop them from running away or as a grim message to survivors.

“It was either torture or mutilation. We can’t say for sure whether the victims were still alive,” said Christian Meyer, one of the authors of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Meyer said the findings from Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten bolster theories put forward after the earlier discovery of two other grave sites in Germany and Austria. At all three sites, the victims and the perpetrators appeared to have been from the Linearbandkeramik — or LBK — culture, a farming people who arrived in central Europe about 5,500 B.C. Their name derives from the German phrase for “linear band ceramics,” a reference to the style of their pottery.

Intriguingly, the sites have all been dated toward the end of the LBK’s 600-year presence, suggesting that members of this culture — which is thought to have developed in what is now Hungary and spread along the Danube River — may have turned on each other.

“It’s about finding patterns. One mass grave was spectacular, but it was just a single grave. But when several such sites are found from the same period, then a pattern emerges,” said Meyer.

In their article, the authors suggested that “the new evidence … in conjunction with previous results, indicates that massacres of entire communities were not isolated occurrences but rather were frequent features of the last phases of the LBK.”

Chris Scarre, an archaeologist at the University of Durham, England, who wasn’t involved in the study, said its conclusions seemed well supported by the evidence.

“What is particularly interesting is the level of violence. Not just the suppression of a rival community — if that is what it was — but the egregious and systematic breaking of the lower legs,” said Scarre. “It suggests the use of terror tactics as part of this inter-community violence.”

Meyer, an anthropologist at the University of Mainz, Germany, said nobody can say for sure what prompted the killings so long after the fact. But it’s possible to put forward theories, based on what’s known about the LBK culture and the conditions they faced. For example, the end of LBK culture coincided with a period of climate change.

“The LBK population had expanded considerably, and this increases the potential for conflict,” said Meyer. “Also, the LBK were farmers, they settled. So unlike hunter gatherers, who could move away to avoid conflict, these people couldn’t just escape. Add to this the fact that there may have been a period of drought that constrained resources, causing conflicts to erupt.”

Meyer said the theory of conflict between different groups within the LBK is supported by the existence of an apparent ancient border near the Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten site. Archaeologists have found that flint was traded on either side of the divide but not necessarily across it — suggesting the two groups did not see each other as kin, he said.

The attackers, however, spared some members of the group, with victims skewed toward young children, adult men and older women.

“It’s likely that the young women, who are missing in the grave, were kidnapped by the attackers,” said Meyer.