Instead, I've been struck by frightening poverty among older people whose living conditions are miserable.
Born to a teenage mother, abandoned by his father when he was a year old, plunged into the even more frightening poverty of the Savannah ghetto, Thomas, along with his brother, was eventually rescued by his grandparents.
On the one hand, it is a stunningly beautiful country but on the other it is frightening – the austerity, the poverty, the sadness of the people.
As for Yemen, even if the danger of a few hundred armed jihadists is real, locals may well care more about other national plagues: the frightening scale of corruption, poverty, malnutrition, water depletion, Yemen's plunging oil revenues, its ugly, four-year-old war in the north, simmering separatist sentiment in the south, constant tribal unrest and vicious power struggles among the ruling elite.
The city that was once thriving with middle-wage earning blue-collar workers is now home to frightening statistics on homeless, joblessness, and poverty.
Societies worldwide tend to stigmatize diseases associated with poverty, deviant or morally sanctioned behavior, contagion, frightening or unusual symptoms, and physical disfigurement or impairment.
With my grannies long gone, I am left with the frightening fact that too many older women end up living in poverty.
The frightening question in this drama, directed by Bernhard Wicki, is whether the desperation of poverty is stronger than basic morality.
To the Editor: Thanks to Nicholas D. Kristof for his frightening reminder that without attending to the population explosion, "international efforts to fight global poverty" will be ineffectual.
But the pattern of frightening spike and soothing abeyance will be familiar to anyone in the world who lives in an inner-city area with lots of poverty.
