GRANOLLERS: FIRST CERTIFICATE 5.50 EUROS HORAS


miércoles, 9 de mayo de 2012

IETLS - LISTENING 2 - PREPARATIONS GRANOLLERS




So, close to 200,000 people a day migrate from the rural to the urban areas. That's, and I'm going to be fair to the statisticians who talked this morning, not almost 1.5 million people a week, but almost 1.4 million people a week but I'm a journalist, and we exaggerate, so almost 1.5 million people a week, close to 70 million people a year. And if you do the math, that's 130 people every minute. So, that'll be -- in the 18 minutes that I'm given to talk here, between two and three thousand people will have journeyed to the cities. And here are the statistics. Today -- a billion squatters, one in six people on the planet. 2030 -- two billion squatters, one in four people on the planet. And the estimate is that in 2050, there'll be three billion squatters, better than one in three people on earth.So, these are the cities of the future, and we have to engage them.
"Armstrong explained the brutal reality of their situation: they paid 1,500 shillings in rent, about 20 bucks a month, a relatively high price for a Kenyan shantytown, and they could not afford to be late with the money. 'In case you owe one month, the landlord will come with his henchmen and bundle you out. He will confiscate your things,' Armstrong said.'Not one month, one day,' his roommate Hilary Kibagendi Onsomu, who was cooking ugali, the spongy white cornmeal concoction that is the staple food in the country, cut into the conversation. They called their landlord a Wabenzi, meaning that he is a person who has enough money to drive a Mercedes-Benz. Hilary served the ugali with a fry of meat and tomatoes; the sun slammed down on the thin steel roof; and we perspired as we ate.
"After we finished, Armstrong straightened his tie, put on a wool sports jacket, and we headed out into the glare. Outside a mound of garbage formed the border between Southland and the adjacent legal neighborhood of Langata. It was perhaps eight feet tall, 40 feet long, and 10 feet wide. And it was set in a wider watery ooze. As we passed, two boys were climbing the mount Kenya of trash. They couldn't have been more than five or six years old. They were barefoot, and with each step their toes sank into the mucksending hundreds of flies scattering from the rancid pile. I thought they might be playing King of the Hill, but I was wrong. Once atop the pile, one of the boys lowered his shorts,squatted, and defecated. The flies buzzed hungrily around his legs. When 20 families -- 100 people or so -- share a single latrine, a boy pooping on a garbage pile is perhaps no big thing. But it stood in jarring contrast to something Armstrong had said as we were eating -- that he treasured the quality of life in his neighborhood.
So, the question is how do you go from the mud-hut village, to the more developed city, to the even highly developed Sultanbelyi? I say there are two things. One is people need a guarantee they won't be evicted. That does not necessarily mean property rights, and I would disagree with Hernando de Soto on that question, because property rights create a lot of complications. They're most often sold to people, and people then wind up in debtand have to pay back the debt, and sometimes have to sell their property in order to pay back the debt. There's a whole variety of other reasons why property rights sometimes don't work in these cases, but they do need security of tenure. And they need access to politics, and that can mean two things. That can mean community organizing from below,but it can also mean possibilities from above. And I say that because the system in Turkey is notable.

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