Word: delta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pretends that the Vietnamese turnout is an act of pure political enlightenment. Most villagers are under strong pressure to vote. Unquestionably, though, it takes brave men to run for office in Highland or Delta hamlets where every peasant knows that the Viet Cong are lurking just beyond the nearest paddy. The fact that the Vietnamese turn out so strongly in the face of terror-and sometimes end up marking their ballot with their own blood-shows that the candidates' courage does not go unappreciated...
...companions included not only New York's liberal Senators, Democrat Robert Kennedy and Republican Jacob Javits, but also California's conservative Republican George Murphy, the Governor's description bordered on the ludicrous. Murphy, for one, found nothing to laugh about during a daylong tour of the Delta's impoverished Negro communities. Said he, visibly moved by what he had seen: "I didn't know we'd be dealing with starving people." Such testimony-and such obvious need-will unquestionably save most poverty programs. Whether it will save the OEO itself is another question...
...Deal and postwar affluence changed the face of America, it was sometimes said that the churches' real mission was henceforth among the rich. Still, despite the wealth of the Great Society, the churches (along with everyone else) have rediscovered the poor, from the National Council's Delta Ministry organizing the Negro cotton pickers to the interdenominational California Migrant Ministry trying to better the lot of the grape pickers...
Typical is the pair of two-room buildings in Tan Thanh Dong, a tiny cluster of huts in the Mekong Delta, where the teachers' voices must compete with the rumble of armored convoys on the road outside. Communist slogans, painted on the classroom walls by Viet Cong by night and whitewashed away by day, are faintly visible. Bullet holes stand out more starkly. On their way to school along a pot-holed road, children step carefully, watch for Viet Cong mines. One enemy mine recently killed two South Vietnamese soldiers near the school, and both sides ambush each other...
Despite the dangers, the building of a school wins friends for the Saigon government. At Soc Don, another Delta hamlet, all but twelve families moved off into the jungle when government troops arrived to secure the community. But when classes were opened in a deserted hut, using ammo boxes as tiny desks, people drifted back. Now 120 families live in Soc Don, the school is crowded, and a new classroom building is going...