An update of our impression of poverty in Santa Cruz de la Sierra....

So... on our second day here I was very disturbed by the site of women with children that appeared to be living on the streets. It was especially overwhelming to me that this occurred 3 times within about 2 blocks.... since then, however, we haven´t really seen that level of obviously visible poverty. I haven´t been approached for spare change any more often than is normal in Calgary and haven´t seen an alarming number of people living in the streets overall. Part of the reason that we haven´t seen as many people on the streets since that day is that we haven´t been wandering around the central plaza much since then. So, the initial experience described earlier in this blog was shocking, but has not been repeated to the same extent.