Residents and officials are dedicated to remembering their losses but are also committed to what is certain to be a long, slow recovery from a tornado that killed 161 people and injured hundreds of others. The storm last May wiped away entire neighborhoods in the city of 50,000, destroyed Joplin’s only public high school and left behind a ghastly moonscape of block after city block of foundations wiped clean of their structures.
Photo: Parishioners gather around the cross at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Joplin, Mo. The cross is all that remains of the church which was destroyed by a deadly tornado one year ago. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
This is one of my favorite books. I read it nearly two years ago and I still think of its concepts every day.
Photojournalist Diana Markosian spent the last year and half covering Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region. This year she started a personal project entitled “Goodbye My Chechnya” documenting the lives of young Chechen women as they come of age in the aftermath of war. She writes, “For young women in Chechnya the most innocent acts could mean breaking the law. A Chechen girl caught smoking is cause for arrest; while rumors of a couple engaging in pre-martial relations can result in her killing. The few girls who dare to rebel become targets in the eyes of Chechen authorities. After nearly two decades of vicious war and 70 years of Soviet rule, during which religious participation was banned, modern-day Chechnya is going through Islamic revival. The Chechen government is building mosques in every village, prayer rooms in public schools, and enforcing a stricter Islamic dress code for both men and women. This photo essay chronicles the lives of young Muslim girls who witnessed the horrors of two wars and are now coming of age in a republic that is rapidly redefining itself as a Muslim state.”
For more about the treatment of women by the current Chechen authorities, go here. For something about the perils of working toward change, read this.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS
Scenes from a wedding in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. By Diana Markosian.
A pair of deformed front legs left Roosevelt, a border collie in Maine, unable to do what border collies love most: run. But his new owners fitted him with a $900 pair of all-terrain wheels, and now Roosevelt’s rolling right along.
Teachers who do not understand that their students have different learning lenses (Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences) react this way when their students learning styles are different from their own, instead of celebrating their strengths and supporting their weaker areas to strengthen them. My son had a math teacher, who told him he would be working for the kid next to him because he wasn’t strong in math. That teacher didn’t stay around long enough to see my son graduate from Columbia University and working for AOL/Huffington Post as the Editor of a Patch online newspaper. That kind of teacher does more damage than good. If teachers like him “know it all” they won’t be looking for better ways of teaching.
Rosa Salgado-Vargas bought her dream home after her husband was killed in combat, but living in it alone was too much to bear.
“It kind of hit a few months later that I would be living here by myself,” she said. “It was just the reality sinking in.”
From 20 Years Since The Bosnian War, one of 46 photos. Here, during the Bosnian War, cellist Vedran Smailovic plays Strauss inside the bombed-out National Library in Sarajevo, on September 12, 1992. (Michael Evstafiev/AFP/Getty Images)
This is a space for humanitarians who are building schools in devastated areas, parents and those teachers-at-heart to understand that less is more and doing a few things well will reach all the young people they care about. There are five basic principles to focus in on:
