Word: headman
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...these ordinary lives into one of India's most surreal dramas. The border between India and Bangladesh, drawn in haste just before India's independence in 1947, snakes through Panidhar. It runs right in front of the modest, thatched-roof home of Fazlur Rehman, 50, the village's unofficial headman. His younger brother lives next door - in another country. "His child, my child are the same," Rehman says. But in Panidhar, the children violate international law every time they run around the small patch of mango and betel-nut trees. A few hundred meters away, Indian and Bangladeshi border guards...
...Indonesians these days are definitely making themselves heard, even in the thatch-hut hamlets surrounding the Archipelago mine. Some in the community, like village headman Marten Katiandagho, believe that preserving the environment is all well and good, but that the area also badly needs the jobs and the tax dollars the mine will bring. "People need to eat," he says. But other villagers have battled Archipelago ferociously, even forming their own NGO, called the Alliance of People Against Mining Waste, to stage protests and lobby in Jakarta. Says Tajudin Hema, one of the leaders of the antimine group...
...most small villages, everyone knows everyone else here, and the conversation centers around marriages and births. But these usually mundane topics have taken on a tragic twist, involving couples failing to conceive, children being born with genetic disorders, people of all ages succumbing to cancer. Nadar Singh, the village headman, says there have been some 20 cancer-related deaths during the last five years in Jhajjal, a village of only 3,200. "A 23-year-old died of cancer in our village last year," he says, "But such news has stopped shocking us. Here even kids have cancer...
...village of Mafi Anfoe, I saw a microcosm of foreign aid failure. But I also saw what it takes to build success. While the visiting sailors made themselves into piñatas, the long-term development workers were meeting with the village headman. Over Guinness and Ghana’s local Star beer, they had a leisurely conversation about the village’s needs. They floated a few proposals, listened to his feedback. It was one of their many visits to the village...
...Afghans and foreigners alike. At first, local reaction was about the same as one would expect if some bowler-hatted Brit showed up at a Rio favela and proposed that he help residents spruce the place up. "I told him he would fail," says Palawan Aziz, the neighborhood's headman and now the project's strongest supporter. Stewart persevered, visiting residents and charming them with courtly Dari and Afghan social graces burnished by his earlier visits to the country (his 2002 trek across Afghanistan formed the basis of his best-selling travel memoir The Places In Between). His first project...