Word: squalor
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Singing to Live. Hollow-cheeked and not quite five feet tall, Edith Piaf looked the part. She was born in wretchedness and squalor in a Paris working-class district, was abandoned by her mother, and lived in a brothel run by her grandmother. A childhood disease blinded her for four years, and at 16 she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, who died in infancy. Heartbroken, she began singing outside sidewalk cafés, lived on the coins tossed at her feet...
...system is the 4,500-acre estate (wine, vegetables, citrus fruit) formerly owned by Henri Borgeaud, once the richest man in Algeria. After he fled to France last year, his 1,800 peasants and their families burned down the bidonville (shantytown) where they had huddled in squalor for generations, and moved into their former master's dwellings. The wine presses and bottling machinery are in good order and ready to process the bumper grape harvest expected this month, although ex-Owner Borgeaud took the formula for his red wine with him to France and no one is quite sure...
...necessarily even kids: the average age of Peace Corps men is 25, of women 28, and there are plenty who are in their 50s, 60s and even 70s. Most volunteers feel they have had few glimpses of glory. Many have been racked with illness and bedded down in squalor. They have slogged through colorless tasks, from building chicken houses to digging sewers. They have wrestled with tongue-twisting languages. They have gagged on incredible foods containing everything from cat meat to sheep intestines to fish heads. They have cursed the mistakes of their superiors and muttered in fury...
Tailored for Primitives. Despite such squalor, Schweitzer's institution has a good medical record, and the city's Europeans generally choose it over the new government hospital. Few hospitals anywhere can offer such a dedicated staff, or one that lives as austerely. Each of the doctors and nurses occupies a single room equipped with iron bed, enamel wash basin and kerosene lamp; meals usually consist of fried bananas and other fruit. The old man stubbornly refuses to go modern. Says he: "Circumstances command that the hospital be primitive in keeping with the primitive state of the people...
...nearly 700 years of British domination, which had left more than 8,000,000 Irish living like pigs-and sometimes with them under the same sod roof. A visiting Frenchman found in Ireland "the extreme of human misery, worse than the Negro in his chains." Why this savage squalor in a fertile land? "All this wretchedness and misery.'' says Woodham-Smith. can be "traced to a single source-the system under which land had come to be occupied and owned in Ireland, a system produced by centuries of successive conquests, rebellions, confiscations and punitive legislation...