Ms. Steefel, with her baby strapped in a pouch on her back, said she, too, was a regular patron.

A woman with a baby strapped to her back is shopping the racks of tapes.

Masked Zapatista women, with babies strapped in shawls across their chests, turned up studying the bikinis on the beach in Acapulco.

"I should have known that a woman who keeps a baby strapped to her chest while she drives a car would say something like that."

It was his mother, flying, a newborn baby strapped in front of her.

Hardship was visible then, too, in the endless lines of women with babies strapped to their backs, patiently waiting for corn or salt or sugar.

In one scene, the distraught Assita, her sick baby strapped to her back, waits under a bridge from which two men urinate on her.

Barechested boys, toothless old men and women with babies strapped to their backs ran alongside, laughing and chanting, "We want peace."

Women turned out in huge numbers here on election day, from young mothers with babies strapped to their backs to the well-heeled daughters of the tiny Liberian elite.

George stood behind the counter, wearing his white shirt with its Nehru collar, serving a young woman with a baby strapped to her breast.