Word: river
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...Mediterranean countries. The combination of diminished supply and increased demand for water is already causing scraps over who gets what. Last week the environment ministers of Spain and Portugal agreed on how to mete out scarce supplies. Portugal said it would use 15% less water from the Douro River, which flows from central Spain into the Atlantic at Porto. But such comity was met with bafflement by some; Portuguese farmers complained that while their Spanish counterparts can profit from the recently completed Alqueva Dam in southern Portugal, close to the Spanish border, no irrigation system yet exists to get water...
...Tsuboi, his clothes burned off and his body covered with severe burns, ran until he collapsed near an emergency treatment center on the outskirts of town. There were badly injured people all around, he recalls, "in the river, on the ground, everywhere." Many of the people who weren't killed instantly staggered aimlessly through the fires that raged throughout the wreckage. Tsuboi recalls one man with a chest wound so deep, you could see his lungs expand and contract with every breath he took...
...Nowadays the once feared tribes of the upper Sepik live peacefully among their fruit and vegetable gardens, catching fish in gossamer-fine nets stretched across creek beds or floated out into the river. Their remoteness has protected them from many of civilization's problems, but it has also brought them few modern comforts. They have no electricity, purified water supply or hospitals; there are few working schools or telephones, and the only communication is via radios at the handful of mission stations dotted across the region...
...need for cash for school fees is so urgent," says p.n.g.-based anthropologist Nancy Sullivan, who has consulted on aid projects in the region. "There's no development. Boat fuel is so expensive. They are not poor the way people in Africa are. They have their gardens and the river, but they do not have cash." Exploiting this cash vacuum are some unscrupulous artifact dealers who travel up and down the river, taking advantage of its people's poverty to mine a rich vein of cultural treasure...
...other side of the river's broad reach, Kawa's mother sits in mourning under his house, while relatives deny the allegations that he sold skulls. But finally one admits that some of Kawa's kinfolk are nervous, fearing not illness but criminal prosecution and the stigma of being involved in a trade that has already led to two deaths. "Everybody who shared the money out of the skulls is losing their life, too,'' says one of the villagers...