La Zamenhofa Tago

Today, December 15, was the Zamenhof Day ("La Zemenhofa Tago", or the Esperanto [literature] Day). Like many Esperantists around the world, we celebrated this day in a special gathering with (mostly) other members of IREA (Esperanto Association of Iran).

The celebration was a quite small gathering that took place in the house of one of the members. In this get-together, first of all we listened to Mr. Mamduhi's speech (in Esperanto) on the development of Esperanto and its help towards communications and tourism, as well as the language problem on the Internet. Mr. Mamduhi, who is the current president of IREA, provided some useful diagrams during his speech.

After that Mr. Habibpur read us a poem by Zamennhof himself in both Esperanto and Persian. He also provided us with a good background on the topic. I enjoyed this part of the program very much. Thank you Mr. Habibpur!

The third part, after a short break, was the beautiful performance of Niku Mamduhi based on a play about Esperanto.

After that Dr. Sayyadpur gave a useful speech on the works of William Auld, the famous Scottish author who has been dominated for the Nobel Literature Prize for several times. William Auld, who is one of the most well known figures of the Esperanto literature, died on September this year.

The last part of the program was Mr. Torabi's speech about the association, which was followed by a self-introduction of the members so that we would get to know each other better.

December 15 is the birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, the initiator of Esperanto. I should thank everyone who had a part in holding this get-together, and congratulate all the Esperantists of the world, "la gesamideanoj", for the "Zamenhoftago".