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Start Smiling Now
The United Nations was founded to bring peace, human rights and solidarity to people of the world. Now the organisation includes 185 Member States and its aim is to prevent discrimination, armed conflicts and terrorism. To achieve it, the UN is publishing books that encourage people to resolve racial, religious or territorial conflicts without using arms. One of these books is called Peace Museums Worldwide. Most of the peace museums that exist in the world appeared after World War II.
According to the authors of the book, peace museums can be of two kinds. Some of them concentrate on the past. They demonstrate historical events, such as wars, violence and terrorism. For example, if you visit the museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (founded in 1955), you will see pictures of the nuclear bombing in Japan in 1945. The aim of these museums is to prevent a tragedy like this in the future.
There are also museums that aim to educate people about peace. They organise different art exhibitions, as art helps people of different nations and nationalities understand each other. One of the most famous museums of this kind is the International Museum of Peace and Solidarity in Samarkand. Its collection includes over 20,000 examples from more than 100 countries of the world, including drawings, paintings, flags, books, stamps and records. The museum is proud of its wonderful collection of photographs, letters and articles, many signed by peacemakers from all the continents of the world.
In recent years, the Museum of Peace and Solidarity has organised exhibitions of children's artwork from many countries both within the museum and in other museums internationally. Many of these children suffered disease, violence and crime in wartime conditions.
Every year the museum holds a special Children's Peace Festival. The slogan of the festival is: "War is not a game. Why play with military toys? Peace starts with me." At the festival, children are invited to exchange their military toys for peaceful, non-violent and educational toys. Children who have no military toys can bring along a poem or a drawing and exchange it for a creative game, a pencil, a ball and so on.
The museum has got another wonderful collection: a worldwide collection of smiles. The smiles have come and are still coming in all different forms, including photographs, paintings, drawings, computer graphics, poems and jokes. The museum is planning to open a special Hall of Smiles. So start smiling now! Come on, today... right now.