Spring flaunts its wild, dazzling passion across the fields,
Summer’s blazing hues vanish beyond the skyline,
Autumn arrives in gilded splendor,
leading a tribe of carefree immortals—
only to fade into winter’s bleak, snow-lit silence.
The Earth was never truly ours,
its soil long stained crimson with cold-blooded fury.
Thick snow blankets nature’s desolation, its indifference,
while melting patches expose the brutal history of beasts—
their savagery, their slaughter.
Only the wind understands humanity,
watching generations thrive and wither
amidst the drizzle’s murmur,
leaving behind untold secrets.
In the depth of blackened stillness,
a sound erupts—
a wolf-king’s simulated shriek, so piercing
it tears the night sky asunder,
scattering frozen stars upon the ground.
Who doesn’t yearn for the Earth to reclaim
its primordial grace?
June 12, 2025, Liang Garden, Shanghai
Liang Zhiwei is a famous antique collector and poet in Shanghai. Editor of the supplement of Shanghai Labor News. Member of the World Chinese Poets Association.
Women’s Education in Uzbekistan: Opportunities and the Path to Progress
Since gaining independence, Uzbekistan has undertaken major reforms in the field of education. In particular, significant opportunities have been created for women to gain knowledge and acquire professional skills. This is because one of the key factors in societal development is women’s literacy and their active participation in science, culture, and the economy.
Today, thousands of girls across Uzbekistan have the opportunity to study at higher educational institutions. Government-funded scholarships play a vital role in supporting them on this journey. These efforts are part of wide-ranging reforms aimed at strengthening the role of women in society and unlocking their full potential.
Scholarships and Quotas for Women
Special benefits and programs have been introduced for girls seeking education in Uzbekistan. Currently:
Separate quotas are allocated for female students admitted under state scholarships.
Through the “Women’s Register,” talented but financially disadvantaged girls receive assistance to pay their tuition fees.
Under the “Iron Register” and “Youth Register” programs, special privileges are provided to support girls’ education.
Presidential scholarships and other grants are awarded to encourage the academic achievements of outstanding young women.
International scholarships and global education programs are also making it possible for girls to study abroad.
Additionally, the number of vocational training centers for girls has increased in recent years, where they are trained in modern professions. The growing number of skilled women in fields such as IT, engineering, and business is a clear indication of this progress.
Progress in Girls’ Education
Currently, a significant proportion of students in higher education institutions are women. Across the country, many women are becoming leading specialists—not only in education but also in entrepreneurship, science, and social spheres.
In particular, recent years have seen:
A growing interest among girls in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields.
The establishment of business incubators and entrepreneurship development centers specifically for women.
Successful participation of Uzbek girls in various international grant programs.
Thanks to the reforms being implemented by our government, young women are now developing into competitive professionals not only within the country but also on a global scale.
Peace – The Foundation of Independent Learning
Today, young people in Uzbekistan have the opportunity to pursue knowledge freely in a peaceful and independent country. This serves as a solid foundation and a confident step toward a bright future.
In contrast, we see thousands of young people around the world being deprived of education due to wars, instability, and conflicts. In Uzbekistan, however, great attention is paid to education, and favorable conditions are created for the youth. As a result, our girls are realizing their potential in science, technology, culture, and various other fields.
Therefore, today’s youth—especially young women—must set high goals and make full use of the educational opportunities available to them. Because we, the youth of Uzbekistan, are learning with confidence in a peaceful nation and a promising tomorrow!
Nozima Ziyodilloyeva
Student of Uzbekistan State World Languages University
Md. Naeem Aziz is a Bangladeshi Author, Writer, Poet, Engineer and Photographer. He is best known for his poems & photography. He was born on 10th December 1998. He is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
For the Drug Addict in the Northern Areas of Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth)
We are living in a Renaissance, the African Renaissance. Attachment to the anticipation for the future arises from having high levels of a false construct that is held deeply within our core, where our personality resides, and rooted in our consciousness. Addiction arises from need, the need for freedom. The addict needs love. They get unconditional love, self–worth, a feeling of no regrets, self-love, love of self that is unselfish, all-encompassing kind of love and self-acceptance from the ‘fix’. The addict needs to feel accepted despite the mistakes they have made in the past. If and when the past does not exist for the addict they feel safe.
They begin to self-regulate their nervous and auto-immune system. The addict wants control. They want to control the high, the elation they receive from the substance they are consuming recklessly, without any thought to the injury they are doing to their brain. Does the addict live in the past, constantly bringing up painful memories from a conditioned childhood that they had no control over? It is a form of insanity to live in the past. This is a simple and profound statement that leads to understanding what Deepak Chopra said, that addiction has to do with karma. All humanity has a higher intelligence.
This exists in the animal world as well. You cannot escape now. The addict exists in the past. They relive past trauma, adverse childhood experience. There is an attempt to control the pain, the thoughts of the environment they found themselves in as a child where the trauma took place, the persons who hurt them as a child, adolescent or adult. Addiction arises from the mentality and mindset of having not received access to love from the same-sex parent or either parent and not having received adequate care, concern and unconditional love from parent, authority figures like a teacher, uncle, aunt, grandmother or grandfather, elder, church leader. Nobody asks what the addict needs. The addict requires a life of intention. They need to cultivate habits that will restore and renew good health, a sound mind and body. They understand on a subtle level that addiction will lead to their downfall in society, overdose and even death.
Therapy can lead to a happier existence for the addict, talk therapy, joining a support group, receiving support from a loving and attentive partner who is an effective listener, and believing in a religion. They need the company of a good friend or friends that they can participate in meaningful activities with who is also an effective listener and who offers them support. There are tools that are instrumental for our survival and communication. For example, our thoughts, emotions and feelings are part and parcel of that survival.
The now is what we experience in the present tense, the fleeting moment that is gone in a second and that can never be replaced. Change and transformation can take place in the drug addict’s life but only with the loyal support of their family. Isolating the drug addict will never work because they too need a community (see promiscuity, sexual misbehavior, rape, gangs, gangsterism and gun violence). Religion also has its role to play in the foundation and education of the psychological framework of the individual. Healing and recovery can take place. It is the addiction that is the residual effect of abnormal thinking, incorrect habits cultivated over time and brain damage. The addict’s brain is indeed damaged and not just by the abuse of substances but by not adopting society’s norms and not living by and accepting religious values and views, and ideas.
The notion of time is ever-present at the back of our minds as we, the human race, humanity, chart our course in this world. The world a drug addict lives in is a world that is unpredictable. The addict feels unsafe, deeply unloved, misunderstood, misrepresented, rejected, isolated and alienated from his peer group, his contemporaries. They face self-doubt and insecurity on a daily basis. For the most part they are unemployed, although there are individuals who suffer from and crave illegal substances who try to go out into the world and seek gainful employment. There is a stigma that exists in modern society against a drug addict in recovery. People feel they cannot trust a drug addict and that they haven’t really changed. They are just going to steal to support their drug addiction.
With aging comes grace and acceptance. Acceptance is a key equivalent to love, and so are accepting our past, accepting our shared history with family members, siblings, parents, aunts and uncles and cousins. I believe there is a genetic code within all of us that pre-empts what is going to happen in our lives but nevertheless human choice, individual choice, and the choice of the collective, the choices we make, whether good or bad, choices that give us, our brain, our physical bodies cellular networks, our psychological framework and network negative or positive feedback can also inspire the lives we lead at the end of the day.
What the drug addict wishes to do by taking, imbibing, consuming, injecting, abusing the illegal substance or buying over the counter prescription medication is to mask, veil, cover the trauma they were exposed to, experienced or witnessed, whether it was verbal, emotional, physical or sexual assault. I state this explicitly. The community can help. It starts with the family unit. Listening, accepting, talking, not rejecting, and not isolating the drug addict, because isolation can result in suicide ideation, relapse and hospitalization (a long period away from home). The drug addict comes from a dysfunctional family unit/background, a weak family unit. The drug addict possesses intelligence. They know and sometimes acknowledge that they are harming themselves. Addiction affects the entire family.
Bemoaned
The dripping drizzle of first summer dawn
The leftover pansies bloomed to its core
I sang my morning symphonies
Under the Greenberg oak
The saddle of lost promised land
The beaded sanctuary
Waiting to be engulfed
A waning stormy moon
To questions and narrated agonies
A sea storm rained over
Purging silhouettes under it's dark cavern
It bemoaned a devilish streak
As if hanging under the churches of revelation
The green oaked smile
Spoke to me
Its hands are gripping wet a cement of laugh
A lull under the southern choir.
From the soul, from the heart, not from any face that perceives itself with courage
but one that does so with cowardice.
White on black, black on white, it does not matter, we are all failures,
floating, falling, feeling the fresh hell that we inflict unto ourselves.
I am not a cynic, I am a sinner, and sin is simply the consequence of a complex mind not yet whitewashed by the weight of their words has been freed by the burden
of pure reason.
Dear Diary, I am beginning to find that in fact I was made to be broken
For somehow I cannot look in an unfractured mirror without seeing a fractured face staring back at me, and why fractured if not with reason, why fractured if not so I may one day stitch my wounds again?
So, holy conqueror, I invite you.
I invite you to rise from the perch which they tell me you hold in the heavens
And show unto me your true face,
And once you have done so you may tear me apart, limb from limb,
For I myself am divine and seem to threaten the power you hold.
Wide is your reach, Heavenly Father,
Yet shallow is the depth of your teachings, soulless is the nature of your sermons, and what they tell me is clean and holy I have found to be cursed and reeking of filth.
Let these words be my last if their nature incites your rage
And merely my most meaningless if the deity unto which I speak them has no ears to hear, as I believe He does not.
He has turned a blind eye to the wasted earth from which he has left his children to feed,
And furthermore so ancient and archaic is he
That he has gone deaf,
Deaf to the cries and to the pleas so oft spoken from dry and dirt-coated lungs
To fix this charred and barren wasteland
And restore it to the glory which it once held but no longer mirrors.
So this is my promise,
My solemn oath unto those whom Thou hath so wrongly forsaken,
Delivered in Thy place but not in Thy name.
I shall take up arms and conquer.
I shall build an army of the most unorthodox ideals yours knows for mine knows
no bounds, no bonds, no inhibitions and no prohibitions.
No longer will I look upon my own face with cowardice –
I will look upon my face with courage and yours with disgust and disdain
For it now falls to me and those whose love truly is unconditional
And those who do as they preach
And those who preach as they do
And those whose behaviors do not sorely contradict their beliefs
To take up our arms
And bring this world the holy water
Or perhaps the unholy water
Which it so desperately needs to rebuild.
No longer will I look upon my own face with cowardice –
I will look upon my face with courage and yours with disgust and disdain
