Word: slum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...This slum doesn't have a name. The 5,000 residents call it Ban Chua Gan, which translates roughly as Do It Yourself Happy Homes. The expanse of jerry-rigged wood-frame huts with corrugated steel roofs sprawls in a murky bog in Bangkok's Sukhumvit district, in the shadow of 40-story office buildings and glass-plated corporate towers. The inhabitants migrated here about a decade ago from villages all around Thailand. Jacky came from Nakon Nayok, a province near Bangkok's Don Muang airport, seeking financial redemption in the Asian economic miracle. And for a while...
...theory, Junior Parents' Weekend is a chance for our kin to catch a glimpse of our Harvard years--to slum it a bit with us college folk, to make sure we've been eating and sleeping properly and, of course, to find out where, exactly, all their tuition money has been funneled for the past three years. Harvard invites our parents to the Square for the weekend, the weekend being the most, shall we say, intriguing aspect of any college student's week. We have, however, been thrown something in the form of a bone: an events schedule packed full...
...India, power is power. Whoever can provide precious kilowatts to householders or industrialists scores huge political points. Politicians allow slum dwellers to tap into the grid for free in return for votes, and policemen do the same for bribes. The government even subsidizes electricity bills for farmers, the majority of the population. The country simply doesn't have enough juice. And its underdeveloped and antiquated power grid is making life miserable for virtually everyone...
...Finding one wasn't difficult. She met Babita through a friend who had employed the child's mother. Babita's father, Parikshit, was happy to let her leave the family of eight's slum home for a few dollars and the offer of free clothes, food and board. The 10-year-old's mother, Janaki, was glad she would be going to school. "Batra said she would love my daughter like her own," says Janaki...
...position, insisting she is innocent and that she was framed by jealous neighbors. "My life is over," she sobs. "People will always know I have been to jail. Now my husband will definitely ask for a divorce. Who could have thought these poor people, living in a slum, would have dared to file charges against us?" The accusations against her, of violent fits of fury directed against Babita, have ignited a controversy over the use of child servants. "This is modern slavery," says Kailash Satyarthi of the Save Childhood Movement, "It's a fallout of the expanding middle class where...