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Another village curer, the bone ter, removes a handmade splint from a child's broken leg. The crippling that still often results from such treatment is not nearly as sever as what happens if there is no treatment.

The hands and health prescriptions, in Arabic, of spiritual healer. Some prescriptions are written out on a wooden prayer board, then washed into a cup of water, which the patient drinks.

Villagers gather to watch a medicine man, a malam, make medicine and treat patients.

Boy passes poster of Niger's president, Colonel Ibrahim Bare Mainassara, who led a coup d'etat in January, 1996.

As his mother looks on, a boy's virulent chicken pox is treated at eh clinic. The sores are treated with mercurochrome, which Westerners once used to treat cuts, which surely burns and stings.

A village clinic, with dull, unsterilized syringes, distributes some penicillin as a s prescriptive medicine, but has no other drugs. Thee is not even any aspirin.

There is no shame for a widowed and blind woman and her sickly mother to beg.

begging is some families' way of survival. An aging grandmother leads her blind daughter, 22, who in turn leads her four-year-old-son. Bratty little girls taunt the children to come play with them.

Children here are generally unaware of their own poverty and play as other children play. A soccer ball, made from bound rags, comes apart during an enthusiastic game.

As the water level drops and seepage from the fields that workers use as toilets increases, the wells become more contaminated.