Standard Of Living

Ali Bassem plans to start saving for a new car now that the extra money is rolling in. The Baghdad University architecture professor regards his 75% salary increase as a fitting reward for having stayed in Iraq while so many other people of means fled. The extra dinars in his paycheck, Bassem said, are proof of a tentative step forward from the darkness and violence. They mean that years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, "the government is beginning to take root and establish itself," he said.

Mona Mond had a plan -- and it didn't include Wall Street going haywire and giving up a three-bedroom house with a half-acre yard for a small apartment. She'd married a man with a career on Wall Street, and at the very least she was going to live in a house, preferably brand new, with a Jacuzzi in her bedroom and a pool in that yard. There'd be a maid -- and no skimping, no worrying that any day Amar, her husband, would lose his job.

NOEL Jones, 8, and his 12-year-old buddy Wendell "Papa" Williams, were strolling recently through their post-Katrina trailer park -- a self-contained universe of gravel streets, rows of white box homes and dogs on short chains. It was hot and humid, and seven hours before the start of hurricane season. There is no playground here, no basketball court. The boys were a little bored. They showed off the metal fence they jump to get to the swamp, with its alligators and snapping turtles.

As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on. Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.

In the new documentary "The Price of Sugar," Haitian immigrants are featured living in medieval squalor and their barefoot children work next to elderly men, cutting sugar cane on Dominican plantations that supply U.S. households. Their remote shantytowns are enforced by barbed wire fences and patrolled by shotgun-wielding guards. There's little medical care and barely enough food to survive. "There is no death worse than this," a worker named Jhonny Belizaire says in the film.

A single mother of five who supports her family by breaking boulders into rocks with a metal spike stands in the baking sun and rattles off a familiar list of problems: a government that does nothing for the poor, harassment by security forces, ethnic discrimination.

We are puttering along in an ancient pickup with no brakes to speak of, dodging the potholes. Every bolt seems to groan with effort, but Max Mkandla says the car is doing well. He speaks rather like a proud father discussing his brightest child. "I'm trying to protect these tires," Max says. There's a pause. "Because I haven't got a spare." I'm taking a turn at the wheel.

Life in Zimbabwe is shorter than anywhere else in the world, with neither men nor women expected to live to 40, World Health Organization statistics show. The WHO's World Health Report for 2006 says the average life expectancy in the AIDS- and poverty-stricken country is 36 years, less than half the 82 years for Japan, which tops the list along with San Marino and Monaco. The study used the latest data from 2004.

On a June day in 2003, Paige Bilbrey was on the phone frantically trying to reach her boss, former Los Angeles Dodger great Steve Garvey, at Le Parc Hotel in Paris, where he was attending the French Open tennis tournament. The matter couldn't wait: Standing in the lobby of Garvey's hilltop mansion outside Park City, Utah, was an employee of the local power company. Pay the overdue bill, the man said, or he'd turn off the lights. The incident wasn't the result of an embarrassing oversight.

Behind the humming highway, with its foreign chain supermarkets, take-away franchises and cellphone stores, lies sprawling Misisi township, one of the poorest districts of the Zambian capital. Here, Foster Katoni, a 52-year-old widow, sits in the dust all day selling bags of crushed salt, a cold wind cutting through her ragged cotton shift and light sweater. Like nearly three-quarters of this nation's 11 million inhabitants, she survives on less than a dollar a day.