Misreading from Spanish

From just the three weeks full of mere impressions, the poverty witnessed means almost nothing to me. What´s meant by that is that there is no accessible empathetic laden perception of what the poor go through--more precisely is that what has been witnessed of the people is barely different than back home. People live in houses, put their kids in school, go to work, shop, eat, attend social functions and drive cars. The differences do not seem to lie in abundance vs. scarcity. People here have a lot of (mostly useless) crap here just like in the US.

One big difference is how little the cosmetics of the public and private outdoor spaces seem to matter. Yards do not exist much. No big loss for me. The cemetary to your right speaks for itself. Appearently the public sanitation service is not comprehensive because people burn their garbage or leave it on the ground.

When it is said, that the poverty means almost nothing to me, what is also meant is that an aethestic reverence exists for all of these surroundings. It is an aesthetic pleasure to walk around in hills obviously intended for cow grazing, skipping over cow and dog shit, a pile of ripped plastic, paper and dry grass to get to the top of the final hill, say hola to the cows, homeless dogs and humans only to walk a block full of dirt pits exposing water lines underneath wooden make shift roughly 1 meter long pedestrian bridges and make single-foot-filed steps across the narrow sidewalks to get to school.

And the cemetary speaks for itself.

It must be talked about next: The appearently radically different retail economics of Guatemala. Where 150 page books are expensive and liquor is cheap. Where people sell all kinds of things from there houses.