Word: thatch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...There is--though it remains limited. Two weeks ago, I joined an American delegation from the Atlanta-based Carter Center to observe a township election of government officials and People's Congress representatives in China's Sichuan province. When we arrived in Banqiao (pop. 1,987), a hamlet of thatch-roof houses and muddy roads, the villagers had gathered on the basketball court of a local school to elect three representatives to the township. People's Congress. There wasn't a lot of choice: four candidates, all picked by the party, for three seats...
...beds are hammocks tied to posts in a shed with a thatch-and-tarpaulin roof. "If you need to take a leak during the night, watch out for snakes," Mittermeier tells me. "I'll do that," I say, and drink nothing before bedtime...
...racing against time, as Western influences seeped into native villages. Thatch roofs were giving way to tin, while shorts and T shirts were replacing breechcloths and feathers. The shamanistic tradition was fading because missionaries brought in modern medicine's pills--many developed from rain-forest plants in the first place. Most ominously, the Amazon rain forest was dying around the edges, torched and slashed by farmers and loggers. Somewhere in the jungle might be a cure for AIDS or cancer that would be lost forever before it could even be discovered...
...know this sounds odd--is Bill Clinton. But if you could see this haunted house, you would note how sad and uncomfortable it makes you feel. The place is destroyed and not destroyed; it is both the ghost and the living thing. Its overgrown lawn is as thick as thatch. Its chimney tips like a cocked hat. At dusk its side wall, blasted by the dying autumn light, shows in a fierce and pathetic white--a burn victim in a sheet...
...that dot the Yucatan peninsula to the east. One reason: it supported only a few thousand people, rather than 100,000 or more. The major buildings and plazas were little more than earthen mounds covered with grass, lacking any sort of masonry facade and probably topped with pole-and-thatch houses...