Word: dirt-poor
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...clogging highways and emptying supermarket shelves. Houston, 50 miles inland, shuddered at the prospect of its glimmering skyscrapers swaying in the gale-force winds. About a quarter of the 60,000 residents of Galveston Island headed for higher ground, leaving boarded-up windows and fortified houses. In Brownsville, a dirt-poor border town of 110,000, those who could afford to fled inland. But since half the residents are below the poverty line, many had no place to go and no money to get there. Dozens of emergency shelters in the Rio Grande Valley were filled with locals...
...December the homeland of Kwandebele, a grubby, dirt-poor, black farming district to the north of Pretoria, will become the country's fifth "independent" homeland, thereby bringing Verwoerd's dream to the halfway mark. In the process, another 250,000 blacks will be written out of South Africa's official population figures and added to the more than 5 million already classified as citizens of the other four homelands. Kwandebele has just one paved road, no resident doctor, an acute water shortage, and employment opportunities for only about 2% of its people. The rest must find jobs...
...dirt-poor, despotically ruled homeland pursues lavish plans
...Sebe has seized upon the dubious gift with ebullience. Although unemployment in Ciskei has been running at 50%, its leader remains recklessly spendthrift. Just two weeks ago he announced a lavish scheme to furnish his dirt-poor homeland with an international airport, a harbor and an air force. Such tragicomic aspirations and the tyrannical rule that enforces them have made Sebe's fief something of an embarrassment even to its stepmother. Said the moderate Johannesburg Star: "Ciskei has become a byword for all the worst excesses of banana republics...
...words and actions rarely failed to bring political reactions. He roared "Silencio!" to unruly Sandinistas who disrupted a Mass he was celebrating in Nicaragua; he made a surprise visit to the grave of El Salvador's martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero; and he bluntly told the government of dirt-poor Haiti, "Something must change here." In Poland he met with General Wojciech Jaruzelski and called for the unshackling of Solidarity, the banned labor union. He also met privately with his native country's most celebrated nonperson, Nobel Peace Prizewinner Lech Walesa...