Panorama | All stories

Writers often call just about any country a “land of striking contrasts”. In the Eastern Congo the main, inescapable contrast is that of joy and grief. As we arrived in the town of Bunyakiri a noisy procession was celebrating the birth of a child, while not far off, in a makeshift classroom on the other side of town, 26 health workers are being trained under the auspices of the Czech charity People in Need to deal with the gravest of tasks.

Czechs are working in crisis spots around the globe, predominantly through the charity foundation People in Need. Some of the people most truly in need of that aid are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose eastern conflict was largely unknown in the Czech Republic until a few people who thought they could help came in and started doing so.

‘English is attacking Czech from all sides’ one newspaper columnist recently despaired, while others talk of Czech’s ‘battle for survival’ in a world in which ever more English is spoken. From terms like ‘setobox’, ‘vygooglovat’ and ‘mobil’ on the one hand to words like ‘sorry’, ‘byzy’ and ‘lůzr’ on the other, English does seem to be making an impact on today’s Czech. But are these English borrowings really a threat to the Czech language, or do they enrich it instead? I asked some Czechs for their opinion:

For Panorama this week we go back to school, visiting a class of 12- and 13-year-olds at the grammar school in the old town of Havlíčkův Brod, about a hundred kilometres south-east of Prague. We are here to find out more about a pioneering teaching project that has been made possible thanks to the enlightened attitude of the local town hall, which gave financial support.

The Jonathan Crossley Band is what you get when you ask two Czechs and three South Africans to make a mixture of rock and jazz. The outcome is being warmly received by crowds from Prague to Pretoria. Since they formed a year and a half ago, the group has toured Europe, Africa and beyond and, on a recent trip to Johannesburg - part funded by the Czech Foreign Ministry - the band recorded its first album, called ‘Got Funk, Will Travel’.

At Prague’s Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Vladimír Bosák went through thousands of photographic negatives from the files of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s communist-era secret police, selecting the 200 plus images that now form a fascinating coffee-table photography book, Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police.

Milos Gavrilovic is the owner of Bric a Brac, a Prague antique shop known for its thousands of items crammed into two small stores right off of Old Town Square. Serbian born Gavrilovic and his Croatian wife Sonja moved to the Czech Republic in 1991 from Yugoslavia, when their country was on the brink of a civil war. After selling antique plates on Charles Bridge, he opened his first store, which has now been in business for 16 years.

In this week’s edition of Panorama, we report from the latest edition of Anifest. Now in its eighth year, this international showcase of animated film has become a major cultural event in the Czech Republic. It screens several hundred films and attracts tens of thousands of festivalgoers and scores of international guests. In fact, Anifest has now got so big that part of the event this year will be held in the spa city of Teplice in addition to the charming town of Třeboň in south Bohemia, which is its traditional base but which no longer has the

In the Czech Republic an incredibly high number of children – over 20,000 – are living in institutional care. Very often they are from poor families, with an extremely high percentage coming from the country’s Roma minority. This serious and disturbing social issue is the focus of a new art exhibition in Prague.

The Czech expatriate organization Beseda Volnost was founded in the Brussels pub of a Mr Antonín Trojan in 1904. Its membership has grown some from the original 29 Czechs who signed up to pay their half-a-franc yearly fee back then, but the club’s mission remains more or less the same. Over the past century, Beseda has provided Czechs living in Belgium with a means of keeping their culture alive, and has raised funds for a number of good causes such as the Prague floods in 2002.