Peasants

BARINAS, Venezuela - Richard Padron was born under democracy and into modern-day vassalage. "My dad worked on a cattle ranch," says the sinewy Padron, 25, wearing mud-coated, black rubber boots and with a butcher knife in a leather sheath at his side. "The owner let him use five acres to grow corn and a few other crops to eat. The wages were enough for food, but not much else. I left school and began working with him when I was 14." Padron still lives in poverty. He and his wife and two children survive largely off corn, and they sleep in hammocks with several other families in a dilapidated concrete-block farmhouse.

MAMINAS, Albania -- As Simona moos in her wooden hut, a group of village women recall the defining moment in the fall of communism here: the day they got their first cows.`It was such a happy day, a wonderful day,` says Syme Koni, 47, a thin, quiet woman who speaks with sudden ardor at the memory. `Everyone was surprised that we had something of our own, something that would belong to us forever. And I was happy because I would finally have more milk for myself, and to sell.`For almost half a century, Albanians suffered the harshest communist rule in Europe.

ALGIERS, Algeria -- They killed two of her three brothers and shot dead her mother, a pious 55-year-old who made her living packing eggs into cartons.Now the killers want Houria Zaidat, too.The death threat came in a penciled message explaining why the 23-year-old woman from Algiers' working-class suburb of Harraga, the country's female judo champion since 1992, was being targeted."Death to those women who do not wear the veil," it said. "Death to women who practice sports."In Algeria, once promising and prosperous, a dirty war has been waged for the past four years to create a pure Islamic state.

KAI COUNTY, China - Seven weeks before her death, 15-year-old Deng Xiaofang sat on a small stool by her hospital bed and carefully wrote down what had happened to her, the story that family members say police had warned her not to tell and newspapers would later be ordered not to report. Deng was a dropout from a middle school in a mountain village. Her grammar was flawed, her vocabulary limited and heavy with local slang. But in neat handwriting in blue ink on nine lined pages of letter-size paper, the adopted daughter of farmers scrawled an account of her rape and the police's efforts to cover it up. Her new employers at a restaurant had put her in the hands of a stranger, she wrote, who sexually assaulted her, tried to pay her $6 and then left.

MANILA, Philippines -- Pepsi's advertisements, splashed for weeks all over Philippine newspapers, radio and TV, were hardly subtle: "Today, you could be a millionaire!"From her tin-roofed shack in one of Manila's more squalid slums, Victoria Angelo couldn't resist. The unemployed mother of five and her husband, Juanito, who pedals people in a three-wheeled cab for about $4 a day, began drinking Pepsi with every meal and snack. Each morning, the family prayed for a specially marked bottle cap.And then, a miracle!

Editor's note: Three hungry soldiers come to a town where all the food has been hidden. But once their soup of water and stones is done, the town enjoys a feast.When the peasants heard that three soldiers were coming down the road, they talked among themselves."Here come three soldiers. Soldiers are always hungry. But we have little enough for ourselves." And they hurried to hide their food.They pushed sacks of barley under the hay in the lofts. They lowered buckets of milk down the wells.

After reading the story "Stone Soup," discuss how the soldiers were able to make soup from stones. Then have the child name some of the food that the peasants in the town were able to find:saltcabbagepotatoesciderpepperbeefbarleyroastcarrotsbreadmilkwaterThen ask the child these questions:Which are meats? (roast, beef)Which are vegetables? (potatoes, carrots, cabbage)Which one is a grain? (barley)Which are liquids? (milk, cider)You can extend this activity by making a vegetable or vegetablbeef soup with your child.

Our country's problems are complicated, but Newt Gingrich's Tiffany faux pas isn't. It's simple. It has to do with a leader having a sense of empathy, balance and propriety. The Gingriches and their million-dollar interest-free account at Tiffany's (they spent at least $750,000 on jewelry according to Slate) remind one of pre-revolutionary French nobility living frivolous, decadent lifestyles while their country faced financial crises and the peasants starved. It was amazing to hear Gingrich retort that he and his wife live "very frugal" lives.

Sen. Heberto Castillo,68, for decades a leftist opposition leader, died Saturday of complications from a heart attack in Mexico City.Mr. Castillo, who was once jailed for his activism, was best known as an opponent of Mexico's entrenched ruling party.Colleagues said his death may complicate efforts to reach a settlement to a smoldering rebellion by Indian peasants in the southern state of Chiapas.They said Mr. Castillo was the moral leader to mediators.August Heckscher,83, a former parks commissioner who helped bring the New York City Marathon andBarbra Streisand to Central Park, died Saturday in New York.

Russia's plunge into price reform begins a shock treatment without anesthesia. The unanswered question is: Will the patient walk again? But President Boris N. Yeltsin showed commendable decisiveness by not just talking about price reform and vacillating as Mikhail S. Gorbachev did for years.If handling finances was so easy, everyone would be a millionaire. Yet many individuals, and even countries, barely survive from paycheck to paycheck. Few universal panaceas exist to complicated monetary problems.