Word: makeshifts
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While the war is ripping apart the intricately entwined ethnic mix of the old Yugoslavia, the makeshift arrangements of the dispossessed sometimes forge new bonds. Jelena Pekez, 27, a Croat from the Bosnian town of Jajce, is married to a Serb. Vesna Gacic, 29, a Serb from the Bosnian town of Mostar, is married to a man of Croatian and Muslim descent. Both women fled to Kosmaj, south of Belgrade: Pekez left just ahead of a total blockade of her hometown, Gacic after a frightening 20-day stay in an underground shelter. When the two women's paths crossed...
IMAGINE TRYING TO SEIZE AN ELEPHANT THAT IS spinning overhead by grabbing onto three makeshift handholds the size of soup cans. Then consider performing this feat swaddled in a 255-lb. rubber suit, suspended in midair, with no net. It , was a comparable challenge that confronted the Endeavour astronauts last week when they rescued Intelsat, a 4.5-ton 17-ft.-long telecommunications satellite, from its useless orbit 230 miles above the earth. In a record 8-hr. 29-min. space walk, with the world rolling by beneath them, Commander Pierre Thuot, Richard Hieb and Lieut. Colonel Thomas Akers wrestled...
...violent waves upon Stepanakert. From mid-morning until after nightfall, the city rattled to the thunderous explosions of 157 GRAD missiles, highly destructive artillery- launched shells. Karabakh leaders said more than 500 Azeri troops had moved down the mountain from Shusha to attack Stepanakert's outskirts. At a makeshift hospital on the first floor of the city's former Communist Party headquarters, doctors operated throughout the shelling as jeeps and ambulances arrived carrying the wounded. In the building's foyer, an old woman stared in grief at the body of her dead son, her rhythmic cries punctuated by the deep...
...streets are controlled by pickup trucks carrying antiaircraft guns and young men -- some barely in their teens -- with Kalashnikov rifles. Their eyes are bright with the drug called kat, their fingers quick on the trigger. Makeshift hospitals dot the city; the existing ones were looted long ago. The wounded must bring their own beds, so most end up lying on the floor, a weeping relative holding aloft their intravenous solution -- when it is available. Somali doctors and foreign volunteers move so quickly from patient to patient that trails of blood pattern the floors...
Across the rugged mountains and valleys of northern Iraq, the rubble is coming to life. Almost 2,000 Kurdish villages that Saddam Hussein's forces systematically dynamited and bulldozed are inhabited again. Tents and lean-tos dot the snowy slopes, shattered walls support makeshift plastic roofs, and open-air bazaars are conducting a brisk business in food, fuel and clothing. Many of the villages' new residents are doing their best to rebuild amid desperate hardship and the harshest winter in 40 years...