Word: patriarch
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...village, with the unfortunate name of Nazi, was dusty and poor. Burmese villages, generally, are dusty and poor, but this place felt more downtrodden than most. The sour smell of anxiety pervaded the air. Eventually, O Lam Myit, the 75-year-old village patriarch, shuffled up, his eyes milky, his longyi (or sarong) frayed, a ragged prayer cap on his head. Like his father and grandfather, he was born in Arakan state. O Lam Myit laughed when I told him that many Burmese thought this village was populated only by recent economic migrants from Bangladesh. In 1978, he was returning...
...some 70 professions. Lebanon's fragile sectarian political system, balanced between Christians and Muslims, has been unable or unwilling to absorb so many Muslim refugees. So neither Sulhani, nor his children, nor his grandchildren, nor his great-grandchildren have Lebanese citizenship, despite the fact that all but the family patriarch were born on Lebanese soil. "My life in this country has been one heartbreak after another," says daughter Ahlam. "I have no good memories...
...ensure Blackett & Webb is passed off safely to an heir, Blackett does what any exasperated patriarch would do: he tries to fix his daughter's marriage. But the groom whom Blackett zeroes in on, Matthew Webb, the Oxford-educated son of his business partner, eventually proves to be not so suitable after all. Webb is the opposite of Blackett. A soft-hearted pacifist who once worked for the League of Nations, he arrives in Singapore and promptly begins to wander away from Walter's zealously charted course by getting involved with a beautiful Chinese refugee and exploring the teeming districts...
...conflict between ordinary Afghans and the foreign soldiers who don't know how to listen." Even if the message is heavy, his touch is light, a tactic to make the criticism easier to swallow. In one scene the soldiers fantasize about having multiple wives, while the refugee-clan patriarch, who has three, drowns his sorrows in opium smoke. Each wife has her own abandoned tank - call it a postapocalyptic, polygamous, Afghan trailer park - but the patriarch spends most of his nights banished outdoors. Every character is trapped in his or her own hell, says Barmak. "If only they could understand...
...patriarch says he herded his wife, mother and three young daughters, Amal, 2; Samar, 4; and Suwad to the door and gave the children a white flag to wave. "Two Israeli soldiers were beside their tank, eating chocolate and potato chips," he recounts, waving empty wrappers bearing Hebrew writing that he found later in the debris. "It was like a picnic for them...