1 For the first time in 50 years, school children in the former Soviet republic of Estonia can now study geography in their native language.
2 Thanks to the Scandinavian Lions Clubs, which printed and paid for 20,000 new Estonian-language atlases, students can also finally see their homeland marked as an independent country.
3 'This will make independence more real for the children. It will help them know who they are,' Tiia Raudma, an education official at Estonia's Ministry of Culture, told the Associated Press in a recent interview.
4 Raudma said cash-strapped Estonia couldn't have paid the dlrs 100,000 the atlases cost. Lions Clubs from Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark and Iceland paid all the production costs.
5 The atlases, which will be distributed to most schools in mid-February, replaced old Soviet ones which were written in Russian, a language most Estonians learn as a second language in their teens.
6 The new blue-colored atlases won rave reviews among children at School No. 34, a yellow brick building in central Tallinn.
7 'It will now be easier for us to understand what we are learning,' said 16-year-old Juli Jarnut.
8 Independent between 1920 and 1940, Estonia was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II.
9 Communist authorities destroyed thousands of independence-era school books and replaced them with textbooks peppered with Soviet propaganda.
10 Emphasis was also put on the Russian language, which was viewed by Estonians as an attempt to Russify their non-Slavic nation.
11 Estonians also never accepted they were legally a part of the Soviet Union, a conviction which made the Soviet atlases doubly annoying.
12 'It was very frustrating,' recalled Mart Laar, who was a teacher before serving as Estonia's prime minister from 1992-1994. 'I had to spend a lot of time tracing my finger around the right border, the one showing Estonia outside the Soviet Union.'

For the first time in 50 years , school children in the former Soviet republic of Estonia can now study geography in their native language .
native language
Why did Estonia's children not speak their native language in school for 50 years?