Slums

The saint of Calcutta's gutters provided, with her own hands, the poorest of the poor a clean, loving place to die, a simple, but fundamental, act of compassion that won for her - over many a statesman - the Nobel Peace Prize. "I feel unworthy," Mother Teresa said in 1979 when told of the accolade. But the diminutive Catholic nun, 69 years old at the time, accepted the prize "in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society.

RIO DE JANEIRO - The police blitzes in this Olympic city's biggest slums are meant to show the world that Rio is winning the fight against violent drug gangs that have ruled the shantytowns for decades. With this weekend's occupation of the Rocinha slum, home to 100,000 people, authorities secured key areas near athletic events planned for the 2016 Games. They've also cleared shantytowns around Maracana stadium, where the final soccer matches of the 2014 World Cup will take place. Since the security program began three years ago, 19 permanent "police pacification units," or UPPs, have been created, serving slums housing 280,000 people - roughly 14 percent of those living in Rio's slums.

All in a row, the frail bodies of several dozen young children lay nearly lifeless last week on stretchers in a crowded ward of the Tegh Bahadur Singh Hospital. Many of the children stared glassy-eyed at the doctors coming by to examine them; some were already in a state of physical shock. All of them, doctors said, were severely dehydrated. "We give them intravenous glucose and most of them pick up," explained M. A. Faridi, head of pediatrics at the hospital. "But of course, some will be too far gone when they reach us. " Just a short distance from India's seat of power and some of its wealthiest neighborhoods, these children of New Delhi's slums are suffering and dying from an epidemic of cholera - a fast-killing disease that flourishes only amid the most foul and unsanitary living conditions.

From the top of Corcovado Mountain, beneath the 10-story statue of Christ the Redeemer, you can see the endless stretch of Rio's fabulous bays and beaches. But let your eye stray to a sharply pointed hill just past the far end of fabled Ipanema beach, and you see a squatter slum sprawling down from the top toward Rio's poshest houses. That is Rocinha, Rio's biggest favela, home to 150,000 poor, and the largest of 600 or so favelas around the city. This is the paradox of Brazil, the world's fifth largest state in area and population (170 million)

For years, they have held the unofficial distinction of being perhaps the two worst places to live in here, and they earned their titles easily. Broken windows, shattered doors, recently kicked holes in graffiti-covered walls. Inside, tenants are crowded five or six or more in a two-bedroom apartment. Many stay inside after dark - away from the drug abusers who put needles into their arms in the hallways, away from the people who put bullets in each other on the parking lot outside.

Delaware County officials paid their banquet and bar bills with federal funds earmarked to improve slums and to benefit low- and moderate-income residents, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia charged yesterday. The same funds were illegally used to reward political allies, to make a video for one elected official's political campaign, to fund a politician's pet county-history project and to provide unauthorized loans to favored parties, the prosecutors alleged. In all, about $327,313 in federal community block grant funds were allegedly squandered by officials, including William J. Tancredi, 36, executive director of the county's Partnership for Economic Development, a government agency, between 1985 and 1990.

They keep their heads bowed to avoid eye contact with strangers. They stop sharing the latest news with their neighbors because they don't know whom to trust. They run away when they see the television cameras that they used to seek out. And they no longer want to talk about "him. " If pressed, they'll lie. Throughout this city's most gruesome slums, where tattered children beg all day and hungry babies wail all night, a curious political transformation has taken place. In Cite Soliel and La Saline, where the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide used to enjoy near sainthood status, his name has become a bad word - not because Aristide is no longer revered, but because those who have admitted their admiration of the exiled president have paid with their lives.

Now it is "we the people. " Where are "we the people" when Mr. Reagan squanders millions on his Central American policy, billions on his "Star Wars," his disoriented foreign policy, his domestic programs that run counter to the people's wishes? Where are "we the people" when children are going hungry, the homeless living in streets and dying in the cold? Mr. Reagan, stop reading speeches and waving the flag while you take your weekly sojourns to Camp David at the expense of "us the people.

The borough Planning Board has booked the 300-capacity Riverton School auditorium for its meeting Tuesday. It doesn't think its usual meeting place at the municipal building will suffice. The board, said Chairman Richard D. Gaughan, is scheduled to take up "probably the biggest thing that's happened in democratic government in Riverton in years" - something that has people "quite wound up. " What has them wound up is a tough 14-page property maintenance ordinance that the Planning Board proposed three months ago. The purpose, the ordinance states, is to prevent "the growth of slums and blight" in the tiny borough.

One of the nicest places in the city to grow up in was Germantown. I know, it was my home for 27 years. At one time, most of my family lived on one street, aunts, uncles, cousins and even my grandparents; since then I've grown and married and gone on to raise my own family. The others also have moved on. Every few years, when I get a little homesick or melancholy, I make a pilgrimage back to the old neighborhood; and each time, I get a little more depressed, seeing how it looks today.

Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity By Katherine Boo Random House. 288 pp. $27 Reviewed by Rita Giordano On the road to the international airport of Mumbai, India's richest city, near a crop of luxury hotels, the length of a concrete wall of yellow advertisements boasted a slogan for upscale floor tiles: BEAUTIFUL FOREVER, BEAUTIFUL FOREVER. BEAUTIFUL FOREVER. Behind that wall lay Annawadi, a slum of makeshift housing, trash scavengers and thieves, the minimally employed, fathers, mothers, children, orphans, living among rats and woeful livestock beside a sewage lake.

RIO DE JANEIRO - The police blitzes in this Olympic city's biggest slums are meant to show the world that Rio is winning the fight against violent drug gangs that have ruled the shantytowns for decades. With this weekend's occupation of the Rocinha slum, home to 100,000 people, authorities secured key areas near athletic events planned for the 2016 Games. They've also cleared shantytowns around Maracana stadium, where the final soccer matches of the 2014 World Cup will take place. Since the security program began three years ago, 19 permanent "police pacification units," or UPPs, have been created, serving slums housing 280,000 people - roughly 14 percent of those living in Rio's slums.

RIO DE JANEIRO - More than 3,000 police and soldiers backed by armored personnel carriers raced into Brazil's biggest slum before dawn yesterday, quickly gaining control of a shantytown ruled for decades by a heavily armed drug gang. It was the most ambitious operation yet in an effort to increase security before Rio hosts the final matches of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Officials are counting on those events to signal Brazil's arrival as a global economic, political and cultural power.

By Roger Smith Henry Holt. 304 pp. $26 Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky American movies of the 1940s and '50s retroactively dubbed films noirs were called melodramas at the time of their initial release. Read Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead , and it's easy to see why. The thriller, the second novel from its South African author, is chock-full of types from those movies. An adventurer who comes home looking for what's his. A woman in trouble and living by her wits.

When Luc Bouquet arrived at the clinic yesterday morning after a cold bucket shower, a hard-boiled egg, and a splash of thin coffee, 75 people were already gathered on benches in the speckled shade of a billowing tarp. One woman with a badly bruised pelvis was pushed in a wheelbarrow to this simple medical facility, Haiti Clinic, in Port-au-Prince's worst slum, Cite Soleil. While Bouquet would see most of the patients in the clinic's dirt courtyard, he asked three men to help carry the woman into the clinic's small, bare waiting room to protect her privacy.

Home for Iqbal Hussein, for all of his 29 years, has been a space tinier than a one-car garage. It serves as living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom and washroom for the itinerant laborer, his wife, their 1-year-old son and extended family - eight in all. At night the men must sleep outdoors, although the monsoon - under way now - can make that a challenge. Toilets are communal and require waiting in line. That's the way it has been for three generations of the family, ever since Hussein's father came from rural Jaunpur in 1964 and found work and a home here in Dharavi, a squatter settlement in the heart of Mumbai, India's financial capital.

Slum tour. It's not what most travelers consider a top destination. But after traveling to more than 20 countries on four continents in the last year, I've been convinced otherwise. My husband and I visited Rio de Janeiro, where slums, or favelas, clutter the hillsides above the posh beach communities of Copacabana and Ipanema. The bright-yellow flyer at our hostel jumped out at us among the brochures for samba lessons and paragliding. It said, "Don't be a gringo. Be a local. " A part of me had some hesitation.

TEN YEARS ago, Princess Diana's life was taken tragically in a tunnel in Paris. Hundreds of millions would watch the memorial. But then, as the world wept over Diana, the news arrived that Mother Teresa had died of cardiac arrest. The irony was that while the world mourned the princess they conferred sainthood upon, they overlooked the real saint. Now, 10 years later, concerts and articles are honoring the princess' life, but less is remembered about the nun. The death of Diana has been intensely scrutinized, when instead we would have been better served examining the life of another.

JOHN KALICKI (letters, Oct. 23) perpetuates the myth that there weren't any rules for European immigrants - they "simply had to get here. " European immigrants needed sponsors and jobs. They were quarantined and deported if diseased. Plus, crossing the Atlantic is considerably harder than fording the ditch that is the Rio Grande. Most either left permanently or chose America as their home, rejecting old loyalties (and criminals couldn't run back across the border). Since they spoke many languages and weren't patronized with bilingualism, they learned English.

Every weekend, in the hills above the beach-side streets of this city's poshest neighborhoods, the residents of the Cantagalo slum throw a raucous party that would make the girl from Ipanema run for cover. Teenage boys armed with automatic weapons and pistols stand outside the concrete bunker where hundreds of revelers gather. Cocaine and marijuana, provided by one of the city's drug gangs, fuel the party well into the morning. The soundtrack for all the debauchery is a driving, beat-heavy music that booms at deafening volume from two 10-foot-high walls of speakers.