Word: thatching
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Jigs & Japes. Buoyed up by his father's unwavering support, backed by the Kennedy wealth, Teddy also made the best of the Kennedy name, the Kennedy looks, the Kennedy manner. He had the familiar thatch of thick brown hair, the outthrust jaw, the meat-chopping gestures, the flat Boston accent. A voter could close his eyes, listen to the talk of "Cuber" and "Asier" and swear the President was on the platform. But these qualities alone were not enough to overwhelm Eddie McCormack, 39, another affable, handsome Irishman and the nephew of House Speaker John W. McCormack...
...Tristan islanders were hustled off their tiny island in the South Atlantic last October when a long-dormant volcano poured a river of molten rock toward their thatch-roofed houses. In traveling 6,500 miles to safety in England, they moved nearly a hundred years forward in time. At home, they had lived on a fish-and-potato diet, carded and spun wool by the light of oil lamps, ridden in bullock carts. In their new cottages near the British port of Southampton, they encountered for the first time the 20th century wonders of electric light, store clothes, supermarkets, frozen...
...into the jungle clearing of Ben Tuong to be greeted by a banner bearing the somewhat ironical message: "We will root out all the Viet Cong who destroy our villages." A concrete administration building and clinic is already standing at Ben Tuong, but the peasants must erect their own thatch-roofed houses, dig a protective ditch around the site, and crown it with a dirt wall and barbed wire. The 70 families that "volunteered" were given land already cleared by bulldozers; those who had been reluctant to leave were moved into barrack-like structures at the edge of the forest...
Tanga, like all Africa, exhibits the contrasts of a land alive with tension between the future and the present. A magnificent road peters out into two muddy ruts; bright new fire engines race over dirt tracks to put out a fire in a village of mud and palm-thatch houses; a group of white-shirted intellectuals talking on a street corner at night are badgered for a cigarette by a man dressed up for an evening stroll in a top hat, blue-striped pajama bottoms, and a pair of torn, cutaway tails that he has found somewhere...
Each morning at Trung Lap, Sergeant Guy Williams, a U.S. medic, gives free treatment to local peasants. They line up at his thatch-roofed "office," exposing their sores of yaws and jungle rot. Sometimes a hobbling peasant arrives with his foot pierced by a Communist shoe-mine-a viciously barbed spike planted in jungle trails. Two orphan sisters of 7 and 10 trudged in. Both had been wounded five days before by steel splinters from a Viet Cong grenade...