Word: lau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lau would like to contribute to changing that. So while he was accepted to nine U.S. medical schools last year after graduating from Miami's Florida International University, he decided to stay at FIU and join the first class of its new Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine - largely because the school focuses on training primary-care physicians who hook up with the kind of communities Lau hails from. In fact, under the innovative FIU curriculum that started in August, those neighborhoods are laboratories for students like Lau, who, starting in their second year, will go into disadvantaged pockets like Miami...
When Patricio Lau came to the U.S. from Nicaragua eight years ago as a teenager, it didn't take him long to notice one of his new home's more glaring paradoxes. Despite the country's vast wealth and medical resources, the working-class Miami neighborhood where his family settled had scant access to family physicians - and most people saw a doctor only when a costly emergency hit. To Lau, it didn't seem much different from the situation back in his impoverished Nicaraguan hometown of Chinandega. "Miami has a lot of problems, but the biggest is that too many...
...poor, others are mentally ill, elderly, children and the occasional drug addict. Beyond the dwellings' crushingly small size, residents must battle poor hygiene, exposure to electrical wires and heat during the extremely humid summer months. It's difficult to pinpoint an accurate number of people living in conditions like Lau's because many live in private tenements, but social workers estimate at least 100,000 people live in inadequate housing, a category that includes cubicle, cage, rooftop and partitioned dwellings...
...least there's air-conditioning, turned on at 9 p.m. every summer night. For most people in Hong Kong, the lives of Lau and his roommates are a world apart, hidden behind gated doors and dark stairways. But this is home to thousands of Hong Kong's urban slum dwellers, who are barely making ends meet and - in this year's downturn - putting off dreams of a better life. Across Victoria Harbour from Hong Kong's central business district, in a neighborhood of bright neon signs and bustling vendors, 33-year-old Lai Man-law has been looking...
...surprisingly, this hasn't trickled down to those most in need. "We didn't get anything," Lau cries, who has been on a waiting list for a public-housing unit for the past three years. Instead, since the beginning of 2009, Lau and his roommates have seen their monthly rent increase from $142 to $167. In the absence of rent control, bed-space dwellers will pay the same rental rates per square foot as those for luxury flats. "I just want better housing and a better job, and I don't want to get fired," says Lau. But even with...