Guinea, world's largest bauxite resource, works with France, Canada and America to refine it; Alcoa alone donated a billion dollars. But proof of how corrupt, incompetent and inadequate the infrastructure of President Conteh's government is, are its extensive slums and the existence of cholera. Annual epidemics plague the capital, but hit hardest among the garbage dwellers living in the toxic squalor of these fetid mountains of waste at a seaside dump. The regime's execrable and Sisyphean solution is bulldozing the community into the sea, only for the squalid heaps and tin hovels to return with the tide.   

--Candace Scharsu