Word: ruralism
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...keep more newborns alive in the poorest corners of eastern India: Get their mothers talking. A report published in The Lancet medical journal last month suggests that gathering women together for monthly chats on sound pregnancy practices and reproductive health may drastically cut neonatal mortality rates in rural communities. "Too many people in the health community think that health is about delivering little magic bullets to passive poor people," says Anthony Costello of University College London's Institute of Child Health, which spearheaded the project. "What that doesn't do is tap into the solidarity, the collective memory, the sharing...
...similar project in the mountainous Makwanpur region of Nepal, where health facilities can easily be a six-hour walk away, required the Institute to organize local women into groups. In east India, it rallied an existing structure of "self-help groups," a national network of rural microfinance intermediaries typically composed of 10 to 15 women who contribute small savings to a common fund until they have enough to begin lending. As part of the trial, the groups were asked to replace talk of business with babies, and open meetings to the general public...
...When the red shirts announced plans to stage a massive rally in Bangkok in mid-March, taking supporters in by bus, tractor, boat and pickup truck, the Bangkok-based press warned of the havoc the rural hordes might wreak. City governor Sukhumbhand Paribatra advised residents to "please stay home," lest the demos degenerate into rioting as did a red protest last year. The overall mood was one of fortress Bangkok being surrounded by alien beings. Then the unexpected happened. As tens of thousands of red-shirt vehicles wound through Bangkok streets on March 20 in a miles-long caravan, members...
According to the Pastoral da Terra, the Roman Catholic Church group that monitors land conflicts, more than 1,400 rural workers have been killed in land conflicts since the commission began keeping records in 1985. The 13 people killed in Para in 2008 over land issues is almost half the national total and more than in any other state. The Ohio-born Stang, who was 63, was one of the highest profile victims of the conflicts. Two hit men were jailed for her murder and a powerful rancher who believed her activism was instrumental in his losing a parcel...
Experts on Brazil's rural violence said land ownership, along with the related issues of deforestation, logging, land grabbing and the slave labor sometimes used by powerful landowners, are the key factors in making Brazil's remote hinterlands such bloody places. "Economic interests are linked to land ownership and anyone opposed to them is in danger," says Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, the author of "Brazil Violence Map," a government-sponsored study of the country's most violent areas...