How the Bottom Billion Live

In the slums of the Third World, a daily battle against hunger, disease and the elements is waged, and it is much the same in Rio's favelas as in Calcutta's bustees. The hopes and aspirations of the poor are almost pitifully simple: a living wage, a decent dwelling and a school for their children. And yet for so many these basic amenities are out of reach. TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn visited a cotton-growing region in the Nile delta some 80 miles southeast of Cairo, while Bernard Diederich talked to the inhabitants of a slum in Mexico City. Their reports:

Egypt's Fellahin:

The Poorest Try Hardest

When you first arrive in the dusty Nile delta village of El Bahu, you get the feeling that the people there have made almost no progress since Pharaonic times in the struggle against poverty, ignorance and disease. Mudbrick, flat-topped houses sit in an island of dust in a sea of green fields. The village is bordered on two sides by a tiny canal that is shaded by weeping willows, but the water is gray with filth and refuse. Dressed in knee-length tunics and pantaloons, the women of the village squat at the canal's edge to do their laundry and wash their pots and pans in the turbid, disease-infested water.

In the carpet of dust of El Bahu's one street, a skinny crone pats into bricks a mass of inky black, slimy mud mixed with straw, the same kind of building material used in Moses' time. The old woman's husband, Hammouda Hamed, tills his two acres of land very much as his ancient Egyptian ancestors did. He lifts water from irrigation rivulets to his field by hand-turning an Archimedean screw invented in antiquity. He gets water up to the level of the field by the ages-old device of blindfolding his gamoosa (water buffalo) and driving the animal around in a circle to turn a water wheel. At night, Hammouda's buffalo and chickens sleep in the house with his wife and five children.

A new element has recently been injected into this depressing scene: hope that things can be better. For the first time in El Bahu's history, there is a water faucet in the village and the people have clean water to drink instead of the silt-heavy Nile. Only a few hundred yards away, the people can see power lines bringing electricity generated by the Aswan High Dam 500 miles to the south. Within a year they too will have light for their houses. As a result, there is a new kind of farmer in the Nile delta, who buys up land in anticipation of what progress the dam will bring.

There is also a new elementary school two miles from El Bahu, which means that the children of the village are the first in its history to be able to get an education. "At first we thought the school would ruin us," said one middle-aged fellah. "We need the children to go into the fields in the spring and pick the eggs of the cotton worms before they hatch. With all of them in school instead of in the fields we were in danger of disaster. But the government agreed to change the school term. Instead of ending in midsummer, the way they do in the cities, out here it ends in May, so the children can still work in the fields."

What worries some parents is that as those children learn to read and write, they will drift away to the towns and cities, looking for jobs as drivers, messengers, clerks, hotel servants. Some will manage to get through universities; once they earn a bachelor's degree, the government guarantees them jobs in the civil service or state-owned industries. "Even our young widows are going to school," says an old fellah. "In the old days, they would be looking for second husbands. Now they want to become schoolteachers." Adds a more affluent fellah: "It's the very poorest people here who are trying hardest to educate their children. They see education as a way to escape the misery and drudgery of farm life." No wonder. In the delta, a two-acre farmer like Hammouda is lucky to earn $400 a year; a landless farmworker makes only half that much. Even life in the slums of Cairo, to many of the young, sounds better than that.

Mexico's Paracaidistas:

The City Dehumanizes People

The stench of refuse, open sewers and pigs wallowing in mud hung heavily over the abandoned quarry. Six small children sat around an open wood fire eating their breakfast of bread and coffee. Two women scrubbed clothes in the open while a small boy struggled under the weight of two five-gallon cans of water slung from a pole across his shoulders.

This is "El Trotche," a ciudad perdida (lost city), or urban slum, less than half a mile from Mexico City's fashionable Paseo de la Reforma. It was early Saturday morning, but drunks were already weaving their way down the slope from a little clandestine tavern selling pulque, a cheap but potent drink that the Aztecs used during religious ceremonies. The people of El Trotche are at the bottom of Mexican society, which calls them paracaidistas (paratroopers) because they seem to parachute out of the sky onto any vacant piece of land. Then, like an army of ants, they hastily erect their little jacales--shacks literally made of rubbish.

In El Trotche, families of ten and twelve members crowd into the dingy, single-room, windowless jacales. Those lucky enough to have beds sleep three or four together. Otherwise, they lie on the dirt floor. TV antennas sprout from some of the huts, but electricity is the only city service they receive. Water must be carried from a single outlet in El Trotche. The nearby undergrowth serves as a toilet. Garbage is dumped out the front door for the pigs to eat.

Since 1940 Mexico City's population has grown from 1.5 million to more than 11 million, nearly a third of whom live without some city services. Many are campesinos fleeing rural poverty, who crowd into the capital on an average of a thousand a day. Warning posters emphasizing Mexico City's smog, traffic and unemployment are posted in marketplaces to discourage the peasant migration. But still they come.

Explains Refugio Lopez Ortega, 45, who earns $3.40 a day as a laborer: "It is tough living in the city but tougher living in the country. I left a little farm in the state of Michoacan in 1942, and I would not return there for anything. I never went to school. Here my children go to school." Ortega and his family of eight live in a single-room jacale at "La Cuchilla" (The Knife), a squatters' community on a ledge high above El Trotche. His food bill is $4 a day, and he must somehow find money for school uniforms and books for the children. To help out, his wife works as a laundress.

Worrying about food, lodging, schools and health leaves slumdwellers little time to think about the future. Surprisingly, many of the poor remain deeply conservative and have not yet been radicalized by leftist rhetoric. Fidel Guzman, who as a child supported himself on the streets by selling Chiclets, admits that if he were not so cynical he might have become a Communist. As it is, he has no faith in politicians of any persuasion. He feels that only the rich benefit from Mexico's social and economic progress. "Mexico City dehumanizes people," he says. "I don't want that to happen to my children. I have decided one day to go to the village of my wife in Oaxaca. There I want to be a farmer." But Guzman also confesses he has no idea of what farm life is like.

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