Word: boyness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...find magic in the Kathputli slum, if you know where to look. In one of the unlit concrete huts lining this cramped and chaotic warren of alleys, open sewage and dazed beggars, a boy swallows a sword. In another, a string puppeteer makes his wooden princess do pirouettes that send her dress - hand-stitched by his wife - sailing through the air. In a third home, a ten-year-old girl waves her hands over three flowers and - poof! - a bouquet...
...back on the other side, leaving his customers to their fate. They followed him, bewildered, only gradually realizing that we were journalists, not federal agents. In this way, we had a chance to see how a group of ordinary Mexicans--one a grandmotherly woman, another a 10-year-old boy--cope with the U.S. government's new $1 million-per-mile border-security fence...
...easy transit. One young woman froze in fear, a leg on either side of the fence, her face a mask of panic as she looked at the long fall into one country or the other. Her companions quickly and efficiently coaxed her over. Then the little boy--who wore a knockoff New York Yankees cap--went over, dangling by his hands from the top and dropping bravely into waiting arms. The old woman glared at us as a companion pushed her back up the fence she had just come down. Within three or four minutes--minutes freighted with visions...
Poverty makes people desperate. We got a glimpse of that when we watched a family boost their 10-year-old boy over a 12-ft fence, where a slip could easily mean a broken leg, miles from the nearest doctor. Or when we stood at the rusty steel barrier between the U.S. town of Calexico and the Mexican city of Mexicali in California's Imperial Valley. Through a gap in this wall flows the New River, perhaps the most polluted waterway in North America--a foamy, green mix of industrial waste, farm runoff and untreated human sewage. This river...
...deluge that swamped Iowa and much of the Upper Midwest was supposed to be a 500-year flood. Fifteen years later, Iowans are rethinking that judgment. In a spring of calamitous weather, the state's can-do stoicism was tested by two tornadoes; one tore through a Boy Scout camp and killed four teenagers. Rains then swelled the rivers and strained the levees, which burst indiscriminately. Iowa's second largest city, Cedar Rapids (pop. 124,000), and one of its smallest towns, Chelsea (pop. 276), were inundated. On Friday the 13th, downtown Des Moines was under voluntary evacuation. The surge...