Argentina logs a first: a homeless woman hosts a TV talk show

how totally cool... i haven't seen this and, in fact, didn't know it existed... i'll have to tune in when i get back next week...

A plaza in a residential neighbourhood of the Argentine capital has become "Stellita's Living Room" for the first TV programme in the world hosted by a homeless person.

Stella Cros, 70, has lived on the streets for nearly two decades. But now she is interviewing special guests, columnists and an astrologer, and presenting live music, as a talk show host.

The programme, "En el living de Stellita", is taped in a square in the fashionable Belgrano district of Buenos Aires. The set basically consists of park benches and two sofas brought in for the occasion, as well as a doorframe, through which the guests arrive.

"Welcome to my living room," says Stellita as the cameras begin to roll and her guests arrive. "I am here in this plaza which has already given me shelter before," she adds.

[...]

"A show like this gives Argentine television a level of truth and stripped-down reality that is like a balm in a parched wasteland of ideas," he [psychologist Tom Lupo, another guest on the show] commented.

[...]

Poverty rates skyrocketed in Argentina following the late 2001 economic, financial and political meltdown, plunging close to 60 percent of the country's 37 million inhabitants below the poverty line. In the last two years, under the government of left-leaning President Néstor Kirchner, this figure has dropped to around 40 percent.

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