Word: courtyards
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Flat strips of lush, submerged grass rise in terraces from the courtyard of Sidwell Friends' new middle school in Washington like rice paddies in a mountainous Chinese village. Part of a man-made wetland connected to the school's water system, the plants filter liquid waste, just as real wetlands do with rainwater. It's an engineering marvel, but Sidwell student Patricia Solleveld, 15, doesn't want you to get the wrong idea. "It doesn't smell at all," she says. Not only that, says Alejandro Alderman, 14, but the wastewater filtered through the wetland is clean enough to drink...
Paul Vallas, the man who took over the troubled school systems of Chicago and then Philadelphia and upended them, stood before a crowd of New Orleans parents in a French Quarter courtyard earlier this summer and offered a promise. "This will be the greatest opportunity for educational entrepreneurs, charter schools, competition and parental choice in America," he said. Call it the silver lining: Hurricane Katrina washed away what was one of the nation's worst school systems and opened the path for energetic reformers who want to make New Orleans a laboratory of new ideas for urban schools...
...Wednesday, hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary Calcuttans flocked around the Governor's convoy as it approached the recently refurbished house where Gandhi had starved and saved Calcutta in 1947. They filled its courtyard and crammed the gully lanes winding along its sides that had once been overrun by those angry mobs. Far from the dignified solemnity of the old Viceroy's Palace, dozens chattered and applauded when the Governor laid flower petals at an altar to Gandhi. Crowds of enthusiastic well-wishers turned his polite withdrawal into a prolonged retreat...
...name is Hawo Hussein Adan, more popularly known as "The Helicopter Woman." She resides in a squalid two-room house with bullet-riddled walls but she prefers to live in its tiny courtyard amidst the chicken that scurry about at her feet. She hasn't budged from this spot for 17 years. But despite a foot injury and her relatively run-down lifestyle, the helicopter woman is renowned here in Mogadishu as a symbol of defiance and resilience for many Somalis in the city. The Somalis who visit the helicopter woman today see her as a symbol of nationalism...
...Hawk helicopters fell on her house in October 1993, in the middle of a U.N. humanitarian intervention gone disastrously awry. Adan managed to retain a part of the helicopter's remains before everything else inside the aircraft was destroyed or looted. The piece sits in a corner of the courtyard as proof of what she has gone through and her small but emotional part in the country's history...