The Spirit of Emulation

Among the inhabitants of the apartment building on Paraguay Street, where I live, the spirit of emulation is quite intense.

It's true that for a long time they limited themselves to rivaling one another in dogs, cats, canaries or parrots. The most exotic among them never went beyond little squirrels or a turtle. I myself had a beautiful German shepherd named Joey that was just slightly smaller than our apartment. However, besides Joey - and this was something completely unknown -, there lived with my wife and me a lovely spider of the species Lycosa pampeana.

One morning, at nine o'clock, while I was feeding my pet, the neighbor from 7-C - whom I had never even seen before - came by to borrow my newspaper for a moment, for who knows what confused reason. Afterwards, without managing to leave, he just stood there for a long time with the newspaper in his hand. He was staring, fascinated, at Gertrude, and in his stare there was something that made me shudder. It was the spirit of emulation.

The next day he came by to show me the scorpion he had just bought. In the hallway, the maid of the people who live in 7-D overheard our dialogue on the life, habits and feeding of spiders, scorpions and ticks. That very afternoon her employers acquired a crab.

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Short story on puppets who save children’s lives

When she first heard about puppet shows raising children’s awareness of landmines, the vice-principal of a village school in Lopare, northeastern Bosnia was rather skeptical. How could such important topics be taught by funny looking foam toys?

Imagine their surprise then, when staff of the Genesis Project, a local organization sponsored by UNICEF which writes and performs these puppet plays, visited her office and found her breaking down in tears, thanking them for saving the lives of her own children, who attend the same school.

The woman related how a few months after the performance, her boy and girl had, without permission, visited the home the family had been driven from during the war. Exploring around the now destroyed house, the two youngsters, spotted a mine.

Freezing in her tracks, the daughter told her younger brother everything she had heard in the Genesis Project presentation. They then acted exactly as the characters in the puppet show had instructed them to do, and no one was hurt.

As the Lopare vice-principal discovered, those funny looking foam puppets actually save lives.

By Matthew Bolton for the UNICEF Bosnia and Herzegovina