Word: slumming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Because the rural economy is especially unpromising, jobless Peruvians have been migrating to the capital in frightening numbers. A pleasant colonial-style city of 1.5 million inhabitants 20 years ago, Lima has become a nightmarish sprawl of 6.5 million. The city has grown so fast that suburban slum districts housing 500,000 people are not even included on current maps. Almost 40% of the country's 18 million people are now crowded into the capital. Says Senator Manuel Ulloa Ellas, a close adviser to Belaúnde: "For many of these people, there are no jobs, no services...
...well after the noon hour in the sprawling urban slum where 22-year-old Mali lives. Clothes hang on a nearby line, and small children play in the dusty path. Squatting on a doorstep, Mali (a pseudonym) lifts her scarred right arm and feels for a usable vein. No one seems to notice as she grips one end of a yellow plastic cord in her teeth and winds the other end tightly around her arm, readying it for the needle. It could be the South Bronx, East Los Angeles, Amsterdam or London-the traditional dumping grounds for Asia...
...Some people told me to my face, 'We don't employ black or colored people.' " Angry and humiliated, he took a job as a bus conductor-inappropriate, he thought, for a college graduate. Working double shifts, 16 and sometimes 20 hours a day, living in a slum on tea and biscuits, he saved enough money to take a full-time accounting course and move to London. There he found the color barrier even harder to penetrate. He landed a factory job by pretending to speak pidgin English-"Me good worker, guv'nor. Give me job." When...
...carrying on a program worthy of Potemkin at his most imaginative. Confronted with the dilapidation and general ruin of the buildings he is assigned to preserve and develop, Gliedman has found an ingenious solution. He pastes vinyl decals over the broken windows of the city's abandoned slum tenements to convey an illusion of cheery life inside. Some of the decals look like curtains, some like Venetian blinds; some even contain illusory flowerpots, where illusory geraniums blossom in an illusory sunshine...
...that convinced people of the reality of George Gipp and Drake McHugh. And as Commissioner Gliedman's views demonstrate, the triumph of stagecraft lies in the change from perception affecting reality to perception being reality. The only question now is why the Potemkin plan should be limited to slum housing when it could just as well be applied to all kinds of problems that bedevil officialdom...