Dos mundos

"That's something you'll see everywhere in Latin America", said my first Couchsurfing host in Cusco. "An upper-class neighbourhood can turn into a slum just from one street to another."

Often, however, the change is even more drastic: you see it from one house to another.

Coming from such a different culture with such different problems, it's difficult to understand the issues here. I can't tell if people are starving or how severe of a problem child labour is. I can't say whether poverty always means a dangerous neighbourhood, or whether a dangerous neighbourhood always means poverty. There are teenage street vendor girls with their sulky teenage faces glued to their smartphone screens, and middle-aged street vendor mothers with their three little children playing in the dirt next to their stands.

What I noticed already in Lima, however, is that it's as if there were two completely different economies existing side by side within the same city or the same country. That's possibly the case in Europe, too, but the differences are not quite that extreme.

Here, there's the first economy, where a person can buy a bagful of groceries from a supermarket for about 12 euros, take a city bus for some 40 cents and a taxi for perhaps 4 euros, go to a yoga class for 6 euros and buy a fresh fruit smoothie for 2 euros.

And then there's the other economy. For those people, taking a bus would be too expensive, so they walk. They buy their groceries from a market where they can choose the cheapest vegetables and haggle the prices down. They might have a fresh fruit smoothie when it's mango season and they walk past a tree that belongs to no-one. For those people, the other economy doesn't exist. The cable cars might float above their homes night and day, but they belong to another world beyond their reach.

Still, those people are not unemployed, or alcoholic, or homeless. They have jobs and they work long hours, and their children presumably go to school just like everybody else's. A bit of public education just isn't enough. The system we have in place works the same way here as it does everywhere: those who have some wealth tend to have it easier to gain more.

Those who have none have it much harder ever to gain any.