Who knew?

Fun facts I learned at work today (off the speech section of the site, thank god). I'm assuming these are accurate facts since it's a government website, but on the other hand, they still have a listing for 'Serbia and Montenegro' so you never know.

• About a fifth of the population of Estonia has no citizenship of any kind - descendants of Russian immigrants who can't pass the compulsory Estonian-language citizenship test and aren't Russian citizens either
• All secondary schooling in Nigeria, Eritrea and Ethiopia takes place in English
• Fewer than 60% of Columbians go to secondary school
• About 45% of Ethiopians are Muslim and 40% Christian - but most Ethiopians of either religion don't eat pork
• A Hungarian invented the ballpoint pen and the Rubik's cube (not, as far as I know, the same Hungarian)
• Even kindergartens in Iran are single-sex: co-ed schools are banned
• The poor state of schools in Liberia meant that families were often asked to provide materials including schooldesks for their kids (past tense?)
• They have Old Believers in Lithuania too! (It's a Russian thing...)
• Russian troops are still in Moldova despite it becoming independent from the USSR in 1991
• Moldova is the poorest country in Europe (hampered by its widespread reputation as a made-up country methinks ha ha)
• Nepal is the only officially Hindu state in the world
• Urdu is the official language of Pakistan, despite being the native tongue of only 8% of its population
• There are about 45,000 Roma in Portugal - not just an Eastern Europe thing huh. On the other hand, there are between 1.8 and 2.5 million Roma in Romania, the largest Roma population in Europe. (Unsurprisingly, I suppose - Romania - Roma...)
• At the end of lower secondary education, Romanian pupils get a 'certificate of capacity' - are we sure that's translated correctly? "There's room for 12 litres of learning in this one, sir"
• The female literacy rate in Sierra Leone is just 18%, ouch!
• Slovenians apparently speak 'Slovene' (not, as I would have guessed, Slovenian)
• Turkish has letters like Old English 'eth' ð and 'thorn' þ cool
• There used to be a sizeable community of Indians and Pakistanis in Uganda until they were expelled in 1972 (actually this I did already know)

And if you're thinking I'm not spending my time at work very productively, yeah you're right. On the upside though I edited about 135 pages of the site today, compared to about 60 yesterday (those speeches were hard!)