Word: squalor
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...dead baby shoved in his face by an Indian beggar. "We were all horrified and, I think, more than a little envious," he writes. "All visitors to the developing world, if they are honest, will confess that they are actually quite keen on seeing a bit of squalor." And readers, if they are honest, will confess that they are more interested in this traveler's disintegration than in his resurrection...
...Ghadeer district is filthy; the rooms are damp and smell of rotting garbage. Her pets, a mangy brown pup and two molting cats, have shed clumps of fur on her bed, an old foam mattress on the living-room floor. There are pieces of stale bread everywhere. But the squalor doesn't seem to bother Nouman. She has lived in much worse places - a succession of prison cells, torture chambers and mental-hospital wards. Her living room may be fetid, but it is home, and she's free. "Nobody bothers me here. Nobody does bad things to me," she says...
...smartest movies of 2000, in any country; the hauntingly beautiful Behind the Sun (Brazil, 2001) and Argentina's bittersweet, Oscar-nominated Son of the Bride (2001). The leap, however, is most evident in City of God, whose driving samba-and-funk artistry provides a rare glimpse of the Dantean squalor bearing down on Brazil's tourist beaches. Hailed as one of the best Latin American films of the past half-century, it was snubbed by Oscar, many critics complain, because of its violence. Set in Rio's notorious Cidade de Deus favela and narrated by a teen who manages...
Zimbabwe’s current squalor is perplexing given its favorable history. With a flourishing economy under British rule and continuing prosperity early in its independence, Zimbabwe’s GDP growth exceeded 20 percent in 1980. Zimbabwe never endured Mozambique’s harsh Communist rule, decades of war or such devastating floods. Its circumstances, infrastructure and vast resources should seemingly facilitate continued growth...
...wretch like me" originated as a song of thanks for his deliverance from the sinfulness of slavetrading. Another former slave dealer, James Stanfield, composed an epic of several hundred lines entitled "The Guinea Voyage" (1789), in part of which he depicted the birth of a baby in the wretched squalor of the slave decks. (Art and life were not so distinct: the black poet Ignatius Sancho, who later became a figure in literary London, was born aboard a slave ship en route from Africa to the Spanish West Indies in 1729.) In 1805 the Irish immigrant and repentant slaver Thomas...