At the frontier posts of Botswana's three neighbours – South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe – the teams reached both foreign and local children.
Only A Squadron of the 2/6th Cavalry Regiment was on hand, as the rest of the regiment was deployed in the defence of the frontier posts at Al-Jaghbub and Siwa Oasis.
Turkish schools in the region were closed for the day after intense overnight clashes in which the rebels attacked the Syrian frontier post at Tal Abyad, south of the Turkish town of Sanliurfa, according to the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency.
Relations between the two countries have been increasingly fraught after the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad last May, the incident involving Raymond Davis, the CIA agent who shot and killed two men in Lahore, and the accidental killing by US forces in Afghanistan of 24 Pakistani troops at a frontier post last November.
The sleazy frontier post, Chinese in all but name, is at the heart of the Golden Triangle, where the three South-East Asian countries of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos adjoin their giant northern neighbour.
This was the Iraqi frontier post of Trebil.
One of the wealthiest and most cultured residents of the famed Algonquin Avenue in Buffland (a city intended to be Cleveland), Captain Arthur Farnham is a Civil War veteran and widower his wife died of illness while accompanying him at a remote frontier post.
Young men from the inner parts of the empire, growing up in successive generations of continual peace, no longer looked on military service as a natural part of manhood, and the civilian economy appeared attractive compared to the rewards at some frontier posting.
Westbourne Terrace that Saturday morning gleamed as brightly as any of them, but the service road that led to Vladimir's part of it was blocked at one end by a heap of rotting mattresses, and by a smashed boom, like a frontier post, at the other.
Last Saturday morning I happened to be at Russia's only frontier post with Norway.
