Word: homelessness
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Aung Than Htay is walking along the road to Laputta, a cylone-shattered delta town teeming with tens of thousands of refugees. Before Cyclone Nargis hit, the population of this sleepy riverside town was 30,000. With the hungry, homeless and bereaved pouring in from the delta - 80,000 have perished in this district alone, according to local aid workers - that refugee population has now reached six figures...
...Temples, schools and other buildings still standing in Burma's low-lying delta region are filling up with the sick and the homeless. State media claims that Nargis killed nearly 23,000 people, with more than 40,000 missing; the United Nations estimates some 1.5 million people will be severely affected. But traveling the road to Bogalay-a delta town which lay in the cyclone's path and took its full fury-there is little sign of a major relief operation...
There are four main story lines. One concerns a $20-million-a-movie married superstar who is secretly gay. Another involves a teenage couple who run away from home in small-town Ohio to work service-level jobs in L.A. There's also a mildly demented homeless man who finds purpose when he meets a meth-addicted runaway. And there's Esperanza, a maid who makes a love connection with her psychotically mean boss's nice, nerdy...
...they take place in L.A. Two, they are all clichés. Frey has less fear of cliché, or of sentimentality, or of stating the obvious, than almost any other writer I have ever read. He literally writes as if he personally discovered that show-biz people are fake, homeless people can have hearts of gold, love can bridge any divide, and people go to L.A. to watch their dreams...
...Burma take omens seriously. For centuries, the vagaries of weather have been scrutinized by astrologers who divine a relationship between celestial irregularities and earthly mayhem. So when a tropical cyclone tore across the country on May 2 and 3, killing tens of thousands and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless in the Irrawaddy River delta and the city of Rangoon, Burmese couldn't help noting the curious timing: exactly a week later, on May 10, the thuggish ruling junta was set to hold a constitutional referendum, a step toward what the military has called a discipline-flourishing democracy. Then the heavens...