Polio And Politics

Diego Ibarra Sanchez for TIME

A great scourge might soon be gone, but war, mistrust and even the death of Osama Bin Laden could get in the way the children in gadap town like to play tea party. There are no little tea sets here, not in this densely packed, grindingly poor Pakistani slum, the biggest in the megacity of Karachi. So children scavenge bottle caps from piles of trash near the foul-smelling stream that flows through the town. Using them as cups, they sip the filthy water, imagining perhaps what it would be like to sit down at a real tea party one day.

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