Word: peasant
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...weak religion. In reality it offers one of the few elements of cohesion in the ethnographic jigsaw that is Southeast Asia. On the plains, the Buddha's concepts of the "flood" (travail in the material world) and "further shore" (the search for nirvana) are apt metaphors for peasant lives constantly subjected to natural disasters. In mountain societies, which are often driven by a lust for Lebensraum, Buddhism's "middle way" tempers excesses...
...remain at the Vinh Nghiem pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City are reminded by the bust of Uncle Ho and numerous red banners that the religion is tolerated only as an appendage of the state. In Laos, over the past five years, one-fourth of the peasant population of 3 million have swum or rafted across the Mekong River to Thailand. One of the most famous of these waterborne refugees is Laos' 88-year-old Supreme Patriarch, Pra Yodkaw Vachirorods, who sighs, "Buddhism is alienated and separate from the people. Religion is dying in Laos...
...backdrop containing the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the skyline of lower Manhattan. Scarlet-clad Korean girls sang God Bless America; an Irish war-pipe band in kilts played martial music from the homeland of Reagan's ancestors; and Polish dancers stepped out gracefully in their peasant regalia. Reagan's main coup was to present Stanislaw Walesa, 64, the father of the leader of the workers' protest in Poland, to the cheering crowd. Walesa, who lives in Jersey City, is not a U.S. citizen and has no political preferences. No matter. He helped Reagan by joining...
Square, squat and dour-faced, Kania is the only top Polish official of solely peasant stock. Raised in a village in southeastern Poland, he trained as a blacksmith, but in 1945 went to work for the Communist Party. In 1968, although he had little formal education, Kania was appointed head of the Central Committee's administrative department, where he ran the party machinery according to the wishes of the Politburo and the party secretaries. To satisfy so many constituencies, as he evidently did, Kania needed considerable bureaucratic skill-and the political finesse of a big-city mayor. As security...
...According to Maritza Flores Vega, a spokesman for the National Ministry of Health, less than 10 per cent of Nicaraguan women use birth control. Why? "Partly because people want children born in 'Free Nicaragua,' and partly because many uneducated women associate contraception with Somoza's forcibly sterilizing thousands of peasant women...