Word: dirt-poor
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Chávez has also poured the country's oil windfall into a New Deal's worth of social programs in Venezuela, including the first medical clinics that many dirt-poor Caracas barrios have ever seen--usually staffed by doctors from Cuba whom Castro sends in exchange for cut-rate oil. "I don't care if our doctors are from Mars," says Manuel Tejera, who is helping build a clinic and lay potable-water pipes in the La Vega barrio. "We feel more like real citizens here for once...
...reason the international community pays particular attention to Sri Lanka, beyond a simple desire for peace, is the Tigers' world reach. To fund their war in the dirt-poor salt marshes of northern Sri Lanka, the Tigers built a multimillion-dollar fund-raising arm, cajoling and strong-arming the expatriate ethnic Tamil community which settled abroad, particularly in Britain, Australia and Canada. They assembled a fleet of boats, which Sri Lankan intelligence estimates at 22 ships, to smuggle weapons across the Indian Ocean and beyond. And they exported their know-how to the world...
Farmer is, above all, a gifted clinician, and he developed in Haiti something he calls "the P.I.H. model," a formula for administering first-class health care in dirt-poor settings. Every AIDS or TB patient is assigned a paid health worker, or accompagnateur--generally a friend, relative or neighbor--who will handle the drugs and make sure they are taken on schedule. The patient is also given what the doctors hope will be enough food for a family of five. "You can't take these meds on an empty stomach," Farmer explains, "and you can't treat a wasting disease...
...several weeks a year. And Villa del Sol, a plush beachfront resort in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, built a suite to Botero's specifications, and hosts the artist there one month each winter. This perpetual motion notches up considerable air miles. But the greatest distance Botero has traveled is from his dirt-poor beginnings. His father battled to keep his family afloat in Medellín - now Colombia's second-largest city (and a center of the country's cocaine business), but an isolated backwater during the 1930s and 1940s - by riding mules over rutted mountain tracks and peddling household items...
...ubiquity of personal technology distorted the early news of the disaster. Because the first indications of its scale came from Sri Lanka and Thailand, it was easy to forget that the real devastation was not in well-heeled tourist enclaves but in dirt-poor Indonesian fishing villages. In any event, the earthquake reminded us--had we been foolish enough to forget it--that there are primal forces of nature that no amount of our wizard technology is able to confine. Yet technology can help. For decades, a sophisticated early-warning system has helped limit catastrophic damage from tsunamis...