Word: towns
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...Mohammed School was built by Canadians in 2005, in Senjaray, a town just outside the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. It is said that 3,000 students attended, including some girls - although that seems a bit of a stretch, given the size and rudimentary nature of the campus. There are two buildings, a row and a horseshoe of classrooms, separated by a playground in a walled compound. No doubt, the exaggerations about the school's size reflect a deeper truth: most everyone in Senjaray loved the idea that their children were learning to read and write - except the local...
...past, Katyn signified mass murder committed in 1940 in a forest just west of the Russian town of Smolensk by troops of the Soviet Union, who killed defenseless Polish prisoners of war. The victims of the atrocity accounted for much of Poland's military as well as intellectual elite. The second Katyn tragedy - the April 10 crash on the approach to Smolensk airport of a plane carrying dignitaries to a ceremony commemorating that very 1940 massacre - led to the death of nearly 100 of the top political personalities of a newly independent, and once again democratic, Poland. Those who died...
...perfect metaphor. The Taliban closed schools; the Americans opened them. That this particular school was located deep in the enemy heartland, in a district - Zhari - that was 80% controlled by the Taliban, an area the Russians called the Heart of Darkness and eventually refused to travel through, in a town that will be strategically crucial when the most important battle of the war in Afghanistan - the battle for Kandahar - is contested this summer, made it all the more perfect. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
...incompetence and corruption of the local Afghan leadership. Indeed, as the struggle to open the school - or get anything of value at all done in Senjaray - progressed, the metaphor was transformed into a much bigger question: If the U.S. Army couldn't open a small school in a crucial town, how could it expect to succeed in Afghanistan? (See pictures of President George W. Bush in the Middle East...
...empire, and to this day its predominant population is not Han, the ethnic group that rules the new China, but Tibetan. Indeed, the name Yushu, or "Jade Tree," is not what the locals use, beautiful as it is. Yushu is Mandarin, the language of the bureaucrats of Beijing. The town uses Jyekundo, which is Tibetan - the language of the exiled Dalai Lama, a bête noire of the Chinese government. Dominating a large square in Yushu was a spectacular statue not of some cultural hero from the broad river plains, crowded cities or farmlands further east...