Word: mercius
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...first light Mercius Pierre rises and leaves the stuffy interior of his mud hut. He opens the door and window that have been shut tight against strangers and the loups-garous, the werewolves that stalk the nights of the superstitious. Pierre's movement stirs up the rats nesting in the thatched roof, as well as his wife Annaise and three young daughters. Annaise lights a fire with a few scarce twigs, then boils coffee with the last drops of water from a gourd and sweetens it with a piece of sugarcane. Her daughter Melina, 6, places the gourd...
...begins another day in the "other republic," as rural Haiti is known. Governments come and go in Port-au-Prince, but daily life in the western hemisphere's poorest country remains a tedious grind, with little chance for Mercius and the hundreds of thousands of other landless peasants to improve their lot. Hope flared briefly in 1986, when Haitians rebelled and forced "President-for-Life" Jean-Claude Duvalier into exile. Since then, the government has changed hands three times, most recently last month, when a coup installed the regime of Lieut. General Prosper Avril. No matter how good Avril...
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