Poverty

If you're eating three meals today and have a roof over your head, you've probably never heard of the 211 service. It's like 411 or 911, except you use it when you're in such financial distress that you don't have enough money for food or perhaps even for a place to live. In this economic climate, those conditions can arise alarmingly quickly.

More than 80,000 people gathered for an anti-capitalism conference in Nairobi, marching from Kibera, its largest slum, to the downtown area in a protest of global policies they say hurt the poor. In Nairobi, Kenya's capital, at least 700,000 people live in Kibera, just one square mile, with little access to running water and other basic services. Organizers of the World Social Forum set up the march to contrast the slum with Nairobi's elegant homes and hotels.

IT'S often said that travelers visit Nepal because of the mountains but return because of the people. The generosity of the Nepalese goes straight to the heart and inspires reciprocation. I found that in November when I visited a library in Putalibazar, a town about 30 miles south of Pokhara. The staff draped three chains of marigolds around my neck and gave me a blessing, or \o7tika\f7, in the form of a puff of red powder on my face.

Anna Escobedo Cabral knows what it is like to be poor. The 47-year-old treasurer of the United States grew up in San Bernardino. The eldest of five children, Cabral said her dad moved from job to job -- picking up garbage, working in the laundry room at a mental institution, toiling as a fry cook and finally as a chef. When she was 16, money was so tight that Cabral decided to drop out of high school and apply for full-time jobs to help support her family.

There may be "One Game, One Dream," as Super Bowl XLI banners fluttering throughout the city proclaim. But advocates of the poor and homeless want the world to know there are two Miamis. As tens of thousands descend on this spruced-up city for the country's biggest sports party Sunday, the down and out are pointing beyond the sleek facade of high-rises, hip clubs and beachfront condos.

I had Exxon Mobil's $39.5-billion profit on my mind the other day when I stopped to buy cherries at a stand overlooking the San Fernando Valley. The obscenity of so much profit in a single year, the most ever for any American company, was filling me with an anger that wouldn't abate. Even by the shaky ethical standards of today's general merchandising, the amount was excessive.

A new opposition party mounted a stiff challenge in national elections, promising to end hunger and poverty in this tiny mountain kingdom in southern Africa, one of the world's poorest and most AIDS-ravaged countries. Former government minister Tom Thabane, who left the ruling party in October to form the rival All Basotho Convention party, had polled strongly among the country's disaffected young people in the weeks leading up to the election.

A third of Iraqis live in poverty, according to a study released under United Nations auspices Sunday, dire findings for a nation that enjoyed widespread prosperity less than three decades ago. The report, produced by a division of the Iraqi government and the United Nations Development Program, examined access to, and the quality of, a wide range of basic needs.

The words "guilty pleasure" surely were invented for circumstances such as these: taking a shower at the colonial-era Lagos Lawn Tennis Club after a sweaty afternoon in Ajegunle, aka the Jungle, Africa's biggest slum. An unhappy spit of land shared by as many as 5 million people, Ajegunle is a few miles, and a world away, from the club. There, children make their way home from school along rutted dirt roads lined with waist-high mounds of peanut shells, plastic bags and rotting food.

Like most of their neighbors in the sprawling, ramshackle Oasis Mobile Home Park, the Aguilars have no heat, no hot water. On cold nights, the family of eight stays warm by bundling up in layers of sweaters and sleeps packed together in two tiny rooms. Bathing is a luxury that requires using valuable propane to boil gallons of water. So the farmworker clan spends a lot of time dirty. Jose Aguilar, a wiry 9-year-old, has found a way around the bath problem. He just waits until dinner.