It was a prospect that horrified Bono and Curtis who knew a bunch of white, middle-aged millionaires singing about a distant, poverty-stricken continent could provoke mirth.
There's also tremendous underlying class anxiety, about either being too-close or too-distant to poverty, and/or, if not to rich people, than to the assumed freedom and agency and cash-money everything.
In the morning, when we arrived in Abuja — the Brasília of Nigeria, an artificial capital city distant from the poverty of Lagos and the villages — Clinton was worn out and in a foul mood.
It's easy to be skeptical and distant from the poverty in other countries when our compassion at home has been lacking to a great extent, as long as we don't have to see the faces and know the people who suffer.
As a child, Mr. Lugo lived a turbulent life of poverty and distant or absent parents and guardians, according to news reports, and fell into the drug underworld in small-town Jiutepec, near Cuernavaca.
For men like Korir, that poverty is a distant memory.
They are now focusing exclusively on the bigger (and more distant) goal of ending child poverty altogether by 2020.
Homeowners remain frustrated and baffled that the distant abstractions of third-world poverty and federal immigration policy have hit home so literally.
But centered on lives badly balanced on the ragged edge of survival and uprooted by poverty, with a distant war rumbling in the background, inaudible to some people, deafening to others, this is a novel that could easily have been set in the present.
Lively traces the effect of these wartime refugees (popularly known as "the skinnies") on English country life, showing how the government's policy of billeting children and sometimes entire families in rural areas eroded the "profoundly deceptive truth" of pastoral changelessness by bringing distant things close, including urban poverty.
