Poverty

[mikz]

The other day I wrote that it looked like there wasn't any poverty within miles of the suburb of Lima I was staying in. It looks like the correct distance is about 12km.

Exit 13 off the freeway to Pisco lead to what looked like newly

Comments

[trinker]

Bali Belly, eh? I know a lot of Southwestern USAns call that "Montezuma's Revenge".

Yeah, the "exporting all the good stuff" thing is hard to witness. It's not a conversation I dare have with my Japanese relatives, who are among the main beneficiaries of the "best of everything" economic scale. (Even in California, the best of the fruit goes off lovingly packed by air freight to Japan. Luckily, next-best here is still fantastic, and the rest of the country gets the usual "export grade".)

Flies...oh, I remember some horrendous fly action on a South Pacific atoll. Having grown up with a tremendously germ-phobic mother, it was a revelation. (And without that particular experience, I don't think I would have coped well with living aboard.)

It's good for me to have a reminder of how comparatively luxurious my own penury is. Looking forward to more reports from your experience, and hoping it brings you everything you yearn for, and little of the other.

[dangerpudding]

It's worth remembering that improving infrastructure *is* doing something towards improving poverty, long-term. If more people can consistently get to jobs on roads your crew is paving rather then struggling through mud pits and missing work when weather gets bad, their standard of living (and that of their families) is likely to go up. Not to what you're used to, not to what I'm used to, but up. Baby steps.

And, uh, cooked fruit is still fruit :)

[mikz]

This was a great comment to receive. Thank you.

We're actually more in the business of building housing and schools and stuff, but what I've been doing so far actually is kind of a roads project.

And when I went downtown last night, it was lovely. Families with kids hang out in the main square, and even the one or two squeaky-clean streets are full of locals, unlike many places I've been, where the locals hang out in the shitholes and the clean streets are for tourists. The nice café was mostly gringos, though. (And it was a really nice café!)