In Samadhigama, a poor village 280km (175 miles) north-east of Colombo, a sobbing 87-year-old Ukkubandage Sumanawathie knows what he is talking about.
His son recalls there were hundreds of students lined up outside the school, which was in a dilapidated building in a dirt-poor village.
He teamed up with Carnegie Mellon economist George Loewenstein and others to test 87 residents of a poor village in India on a variety of tasks involving memory, fine motor skills and creativity.
By day, Mr Almodovar, who comes from a poor village in La Mancha, the dusty plain to the south of Madrid, held down a dreary job as a clerk in the state telephone company.
Having fallen on hard times, he was living down the hill in Kentish Town, then a low-lying, poor village between London and Hampstead which the rich preferred to gallop through as fast as possible.
If you look closely, there are still hints of the poor fishing village Positano once was.
Enjolo Primary School is located in a poor rural village about 30 minutes outside of Lilongwe.
The story is simple: a teen-age boy, Xu Yun, leaves his poor rural village in an obsessive quest to find his prodigal and newly prosperous father in the big city of Zigong.
And, although tourism has turned Zermatt from a poor and isolated Alpine village into one of the world's wealthiest resorts in under a century, even tourism officials think it is time the town slowed down.
If everyone in a village is undernourished, poor nutrition becomes the norm and everyone accepts it.
At a time when Dickens was documenting the shocking plight of the poor in contemporary Britain, the village had a unique egalitarian identity that attracted important figures to speak at the Hall, including Benjamin Disraeli, David Livingstone and John Ruskin.
Even by the standards of the village, it was a poor house - barely a room had even a proper door.
Telkom's introduction of pre-payment cards for home telephones, sold everywhere from petrol stations to village shops, eliminates the risk that poor customers will not be able to pay their bills, and improves the firm's cashflow into the bargain.
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Prone to look at borrowers geographically, Lilian points out that the poor are not the same everywhere, even in the same village.
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Meanwhile she makes riches out of everything to hand: from the life of the village, its craftsmen and labourers, to the poor weavers of nearby Carlisle, and so on out to the world of books and literary and philosophical societies, all set against the Cumbrian landscape with its Celtic and Roman remains and discoveries of an even stranger fossilised past.
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It is quicker and cheaper to sell a poor person a mobile telephone than to install a payphone in a remote village.
The rural poor are more at home with traditional forms of authority, such as village chiefs, than with the bureaucratic paraphernalia of a modern state.
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