slums

It’s just like sometimes “from the slums of Shaolin, Wu-Tang Clan strikes again.”

In a small, crowded tenement in the slums of India's Pune city, Shailaja Paik grew up, surrounded by alleys strewn with garbage and battling the daily challenges of limited water and no private toilet.

Spending her childhood in a 20x20ft room in Pune’s Yerwada slums, Paik remembered standing in long queues every day to fetch water from the public tap for cooking and cleaning.

From 2007 to 2010, ongoing global warming caused the “worst three-year drought” in Syria’s recorded history — precipitating unrest marked by “massive agricultural failures” that drove 1.5 million people into city slums and, next, by a devastating civil war that, starting in 2011, forced five million refugees to flee that country.

The swarthy Sicilian striker, who never went to school and grew up in poverty on the streets of Palermo's slums, had started his career nine years previously earning £1.50 per goal for a local amateur side.