"It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself"

Here's an excerpt of an email I just finished. As I was rereading it, I was struck by this piece that I wrote because it just sounded so unlike me. El Salvador is now classified a middle-income country after the census the government completed and made public about two weeks ago (amid many questions of their actual ability and trustworthiness to perform an unbiased and representative census). Even though the country is relatively better off than many countries in the region, it still has about 15% of it's population living in extreme poverty (maybe a bit less since the last IDB report), horrible income inequality, human development that's in past the century mark relative to the rest of the world. But anyway, the anger hasn't been as present as the hope for me, and that's the surprising thing about this email:

"I've honestly been more struck by the hopeful pictures of an extremely hardworking and street-wise population with a shit-load of problems to deal with. I visited this slums made out of cardboard and plastic... it's freakin horrific, but to be honest I was still more struck by the fact that their community organization had organized a volunteer work crew to dig a ditch in order to run pipe to a clean water source about half a kilometer away (pipes bought by collective contributions of the residents... in extreme poverty). Curse of the commons what? Did you say extreme poverty doesn't exist in urban slums, Inder? Ahem... wrong."

I don't know if you have had any moments where you've laughed at something you learned in Inder's class, but I was pretty satisfied that my first recollection of something I learned there was blatantly wrong. There's worse or equal poverty in the cities as there is in the countryside (i've been to both, but not EVERYWHERE).