Word: dirt-poor
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Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma was born in April 1942 in the dirt-poor town of Nkandla among the deep gorges and steep ridges of the Zulu heartland in the southeastern province of what is now called KwaZulu-Natal. Unemployment in South Africa hovers at around 40% but in Nkandla it is 90%. Tarred roads, electricity and running water are a novelty if they exist at all, a quarter of the population is infected with HIV and only 3% graduate from high school. Though he grew up before AIDS, bad health was rife - his father, a policeman, died when...
Manny Pacquiao is going through his throwing motion at Yankee Stadium. With easy deliberation, he shows off the form he says he perfected playing elementary school baseball in the dirt-poor southern Philippines before boxing took him over completely. His shoulder slips back, his torso pitches smoothly forward, left hand and arm torquing an imaginary ball into the depths of the air-conditioned players' cafeteria, where he is waiting to take the field for an announcement. The diamond stud in his ear catches the light...
...They still crew and act for Hollywood, but the country now churns out a steady roll of its own excellent small films. The year before Tsotsi won its Oscar, South Africa missed out on one for Yesterday, the story of an HIV-infected mother bringing up her daughter in dirt-poor KwaZulu Natal. In 2007 came Bunny Chow, a hip black-and-white comedy about three comedians traveling to a festival that recalled early Spike Lee. Last year featured Jerusalema, a sophisticated thriller about the rise and fall of a Johannesburg slumlord - a kind of South African American Gangster - which...
...blacks were free to do what they wanted in the homelands - but had proved unwilling or incapable of developing. It wasn't an argument that washed with their opponents. The Eastern Cape's poverty lit the flame of rebellion in Mandela and Mbeki, both born and raised near the dirt-poor Transkei city of Mthatha, and Steve Biko, who grew up in nearby King William's Town. Even today, both the ANC and COPE claim the Eastern Cape as their heartland...
...ndia, though, and you don't sense the relentless doom and gloom gripping other cities in the world. Take Efigênia Francisca da Silva, who exudes middle-class expectations and remains positive despite the tsunami of bad news. Thanks to a government scheme to encourage entrepreneurs, the once dirt-poor housewife has received some $8,000 in low-interest bank credits in recent years and now owns three shops that sell everything from shampoo to public-transit tickets. "I didn't have a bank account before," says Da Silva, 37, standing beneath graffiti-covered walls and pirated power lines...