Word: makeshift
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Since June, Khmer Rouge fighters have forcibly relocated some 12,000 of the refugees to makeshift camps just across the border inside Kampuchea, to serve as porters for the guerrillas. These refugees are sitting ducks for Vietnamese artillery fire. In recent weeks hundreds have been killed by shelling and booby traps...
...muddy floodwater. In one area, all that protruded from the earth's watery surface were some straw roofs, treetops and a narrow stretch of broken dike-top roadway 20 miles long. At least 220,000 people had taken refuge on this chain of tiny islands, and were building makeshift shanties. Some had managed to bring along their cows and goats, which were being kept alive on a diet of water hyacinths. Elsewhere, survivors were obliged to fight off poisonous snakes that had sought refuge on the same bits of dry land. The bodies of many victims of drowning, disease...
...hitch: they are still expected to comply with the Group Areas Act, an apartheid law that compels them to live in segregated nonwhite homelands and townships. For many, the only recourse has been to leave the townships and rent housing from white owners in the cities or erect makeshift shacks on idle farmland, roadsides and in parks and / gardens. The result: as many as 7 million illegal squatters and the rise of "gray areas," whites-only districts where landlords have rented space to more than 100,000 blacks, coloreds and Asians...
While awaiting a new generation of textbooks, teachers of history glean material from glasnost-era news articles telling long-repressed tales, such as that of Nikolai Bukharin, whose free-market economics (presaging Gorbachev's) helped get him executed by Stalin. The impact of these makeshift texts is already apparent in the discussions in Yamburg's Moscow classroom, where 15- year-olds recently debated Stalin's role in Soviet history. "He had a lot to do with the industrialization and collectivization of our country," asserted one blond-haired boy. But a classmate countered, "Some consider him a criminal because he ruined...
Hard to change, in part, because the image of women's clubs is so tightly tied to the bone-china days of yore. Most clubs were born in the era following the Civil War as a makeshift laboratory for women's consciousness. The Industrial Revolution had freed women's time, reduced their chores, increased their mobility and introduced that cherished female institution, the free afternoon...