Word: burma
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...Although nobody starves in Burma, poverty and malnutrition exist and are by some accounts increasing. Outside Mandalay, I visited the families of migrant workers who live in squalid lean-tos on the wide, refuse-strewn banks of the Irrawaddy River. They labor for subsistence wages, shoveling sand from dredging boats or hauling illegal timber. Often there's not enough work to go around, and sometimes?for example, when the dredgers run out of fuel?there's none at all. Sickness is everywhere. "I have a husband and three children," said a woman dressed in rags...
...centuries, travelers have depicted Burma as an agrarian paradise so fertile that, as one saying goes, a farmer tickles the earth with his hoe and it laughs a harvest...
...favored refuge of Wa and Chinese drug traffickers, who cruise the city's free-for-all intersections in dark-windowed late-model Land Cruisers and Pajeros. Like native Mandalayans, I negotiated the streets by bicycle or trishaw, or else flagged down a 40-year-old Mazda B600 taxi, Burma's answer to the Trabant. Exploring the pot-holed backstreets, I came across extravagant faux-classical mansions towering over otherwise destitute neighborhoods where poor sanitation feeds regular outbreaks of cholera and pariah dogs nose through uncollected rubbish. In Burma, it seems, there are only two kinds of new buildings: museums constructed...
...Mandalay might be Burma's second-largest city, but its community of democrats is small and easily terrorized. A local NLD leader was jailed for five years for seeing a foreign reporter. I arrived in Mandalay to news that Win Mya Mya, a prominent NLD member who had had both arms broken in the Black Friday attack, had been shifted from a military hospital to a prison cell at nearby Shwebo. Her relatives were still forbidden...
...Since Black Friday, more state-sponsored violence had erupted. The evening before my arrival, a hundreds-strong posse of government thugs had razed a Muslim neighborhood in Kyaukse, a town not far from Mandalay. Ten people had burned to death, including a pregnant woman. Burma is home to anywhere from 2 million to 8 million Muslims?it's impossible to be more accurate because most are denied Burmese citizenship and therefore don't appear in official records. They are often the target of state-orchestrated violence incited (the theory goes) to distract everyone else from their own meager...