Word: townes
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Dusky Belaga, pop. 25,300, could be any quaint town in the American heartland. As the sun creeps down, joggers maunder the quiet streets. Old men in wifebeaters gossip and smoke over slow cups of coffee in a café right next door to a licensed ammunition dealer, across the street from a well-kept park with a picket fence. A few kids shoot hoops nearby at a shabby basketball court whose bent rims possibly never even had nets. Somewhere in the direction of the town's lone evangelical church, a weed-whacker hums...
...this is Sarawak, Malaysia - not Missouri. Belaga's Main Bazaar is a row of careworn early 20th century Chinese shophouses. Between the stores and the town's stone jetty stands a giant wooden hornbill, perched on a carved totem pole, missing a wing, paint peeling on its sun-bleached casque. From the kampung a couple of blocks away floats a muezzin's soulful maghrib, mingling in the twilight with the putter of Yamaha motors on the longboats crawling their way up the Batang Rajang, Malaysia's longest river. For hundreds of years, this was one of Sarawak's most vital...
...seat ekspress boats from Kuching spume up the Rajang (in 13 hours, spread over several legs and days), juddering past sawmills, plywood factories, rusty shipyards and timber barges heading downriver to the South China Sea. The alternative is a bumpy Land Rover ride from Bintulu, a coastal oil town three hours away, much of it on a rutted logging road past denuded ocher hills cleared to make way for palm-oil plantations. These have driven the area's economic boom, but also fuelled its cultural decline. (See pictures of Hong Kong...
...only doctor in Bayou La Batre, a town where about 80% of the population lives below the poverty line. As a consequence, she often treats patients for free or asks them to pay when they can. In 1994, Benjamin was named one of TIME's 50 most promising leaders aged 40 and under...
...charge them. When the clinic wasn't making money, she didn't take a salary for herself. When Hurricane George destroyed the clinic in 1998, she made house calls to all her patients while it was rebuilt. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed it again and left most of her town homeless, she mortgaged her house and maxed out her credit cards to rebuild that clinic for a second time." -President Obama describing Benjamin's dedication to her community (White House transcript, July...