Word: maldivian
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...After roughing it out all day, you'll have earned a Maldivian curry dinner on the beach. Or you could check into the spa for a hot-stone-inspired cowrie-shell massage that is preceded by a foot treatment consisting of a grated-coconut scrub and a warm-coconut-milk bath. Then retire into one of the 142 luxurious villas. Pool villa No. 1, incidentally the cheapest category of accommodation, is perfectly sandwiched between the ocean and lagoon, and affords complete privacy. Rates from $860 a night...
...more pressing challenges at home. The Maldives boasts South Asia's highest GDP per capita, but the figure is inflated by the country's significant tourism revenues, which do not trickle down to everyone. Some 40% of the Maldives' population still earns less than $2 a day. And Maldivian youth are in the middle of a drug epidemic that, proportionate to the nation's population, may be one of the worst in the world. The legacy of Gayoom's rule lingers, and the process of unraveling it will last far longer than Nasheed's current five-year term. Entire political...
...Swelling Sea As if all that was not enough, the archipelago nation faces a more elemental challenge. It could find itself submerged, its fragile coastline and coral reefs facing extinction as sea levels swell. "We are sitting on a time bomb," says Abdul Azeez, a leading Maldivian environmentalist. For a nation of so small a size (the Maldives' population is less than 400,000), the new government's task is monumental. "It is as if, in the same country, both Saddam Hussein was toppled and the Berlin Wall fell," says Ahmed Naseer, a painter and dissident who lived in exile...
...hold on power like many classic dictatorships: what media that existed were run either by the state or the President's closest allies, and dissidents were locked and beaten up, often on the most spurious grounds. Nasheed - who eventually fled to exile in 2003 with other members of his Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) - was, in separate instances, accused of being a terrorist and then a Christian missionary, bent on converting the country's Muslim population...
...generation of underemployed youth has gone sour. With space a premium in Malé, most residents live with their extended families, some even sleeping in shifts; there's no privacy at home, but even less compunction to leave. In the vacuum, drugs have taken hold. An estimated 30,000 Maldivian youths are addicts, almost 10% of the country's population. "There is nothing to do here," says Ali Adib, one of the directors of Journey, a drug-rehabilitation NGO in Malé, and a recovering addict himself. "The whole social fabric is torn...