The fortunes of one village, however, have brightened considerably over the last 30 years.
NPR's Philip Reeves visited one village close to the border and sent this report.
Regulars in one village pub grumble about immigrants (of whom, locally, there are almost none).
We stayed in Syria for the next year, moving from one house to another, from one village to another.
In one village, this initiative helped a group of farmers who were surviving by collecting firewood and producing charcoal.
"Now there's not much communication with the army, " observed one village woman.
Critics say that introducing the adat would create confusion by allowing some laws and punishments to vary widely from one village to the next.
It may involve a large number of participants from one village or tribe, guided by the poet who recites improvised and memorized poems in Arabic.
Lorenda Reddekop has more from one village particularly hard hit.
Under construction since 2007, one village, including shops, a school and village hall, has been completed and there are plans for 5, 000 new homes in the next decade.
The greatest damage occurred in the countryside outside Ya'an, with older houses in one village completely collapsing, Xinhua quoted Jin Zelin, an official with the provincial armed police, as saying.
The Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, which represented the Nigerian farmers, welcomed the compensation order for one village, but said it was "stunned" by its defeats in other villages.
"Thirty men went from Catwick to the Great War and thirty came back, though one left an arm behind, " he wrote of one village in a volume on the East Riding of Yorkshire.
And on some occasions the supposedly secret bidding looks rigged: in one village west of Paris, five of the six bids for a contract to supply water were within 0.1% of each other.
Nor was his music just a borrowing from Jamaica: it was rooted in Africa, especially in the ancient drums that were used to communicate hope, fear or joy between one village and another.
While pleased with the U.S. moves, the opposition appeared deeply disappointed, especially as it lost some ground in the latest clashes with Syrian troops backed by pro-government gunmen capturing at least one village in a strategic area near the Lebanese border.
It was a policeman, not the one from the village but one of the provincial traffic police.
In one Loliondo village, Maasai gathered from all over the district to discuss the issue.
"The only thing we can assume is that consumers of news and information will continue to want more as the world continues to become one global village, " he said.
It began in 1997 when a group of thirty-five women from one small village became the first to stand up and publicly declare an end to the practice of FGC in their community.
One of these, al-Destour, a weekly, reported a case where residents of one Delta village captured three hired NDP thugs, videotaped their confessions, then traded them for five Muslim Brothers held by the police.
The head of one remote village is reputed to be 109 years old and he says he has been trying to resign for 20 years, but that his only two surviving councillors are both senile.
From a man who had used it to create a "smart" cat feeder able to recognise each of his cats and give them the correct amount of food, to quadcopters used to transport things from one African village to another, access to a cheap microcontroller was creating a buzz in the maker community, he said.
There has not even been much progress in fairly simple cases where a family has taken over more than one property in a village (in one instance, simply to house a pet dog).
No one else in the village could resist the pleasure of getting at least one more look at her.
Yar Mohammed, one of the village elders, insisted it isn't a matter of discrimination.
One of the village's two dikes gave way on Monday night, killing at least five people.
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