Tag: Poverty

Another War Lost

This post is written for Friday Fictioneers. The challenge is to write a story using 100 words or less that has a beginning, middle and end using the picture prompt below.

PHOTO PROMPT © Miles Rost

We were in the heart of a long abandoned area of the park. The greenness of the area hid the desperation of the inhabitants below. Come nightfall the squatters would come back from their days journey in hell. Dirty backpacks, trash bags containing refundable containers, broken grocery carts filled with their worldly possessions. The daily migration never ended. Each day a few crazed zombies added to the population. The poorest of the poor lived right here, underneath the walking path. Some people who had lost their self-respect called this place home.

For some this was another war that they had lost.

The Darkness of Cambodia

RDP Darkness

Photo Credit === Danny James

“The Cambodian village of Kdep Tmar, deep in the northwest forests near the Thai border, lies within a minefield. Planted by numerous belligerent factions during Cambodia’s three decades of war, the mines are in the fields behind the houses, along the rutted track that is the only access to the village and in the forest where the villagers gather wood.

“Life is bad here,” says Pou Venh, father of three, a sad-faced man whose body is emaciated by malaria. “There is no land for growing rice, no food, mines everywhere. The school has no furniture.” He and his wife try to keep their children from wandering too far, but they don’t even know if the patch of ground around their small wooden shack is safe. Two months ago a pregnant woman was killed by a mine as she walked to the outdoor latrine 20 yds. behind her hut.”

By TERRY MCCARTHY

America’s Most Apocalyptic, Violent City

This is a sad story of the city where I was born.

Filmmaker Michael Moore is a Flint native and made the 1989 documentary “Roger and Me” about the city (which was recently inducted into the National Film Registry.) Moore said of his hometown, “The only difference between your town and Flint is that the Grim Reaper just likes to visit us first.”

http://www.policymic.com/articles/77225/this-is-america-s-most-apocalyptic-violent-city-and-you-ve-probably-never-heard-of-it