Progress Among The Poor.

"I stooped to go inside and noticed immediately that the sooty cobwebs were missing from the rafters. They had raked the garbage off the floor and the children were hauling crushed seashells from the beach and covering the kitchen floor with this granilla, making it fresh and white and clean. They had repaired the walls and were beginning to paper over the cracks in the bamboo with old cement bags supplied by the “Manta Peace Corps.” Raul came out of the bedroom with a machete in his hand. He grinned his eternal smile and, with a wave of his hand, invited me to see what he had been doing. The dirt floor was covered with freshly split and flattened bamboo. He looked at me proudly and I clapped him on his bare shoulder. “It’s beautiful, Raul!” I told him, and I meant it. His work did look beautiful to me and to his appreciative family. But I thought of how it would appear to an outsider coming from another culture. The lopsided walls, the roughly chopped flooring, the crude furniture, the sooty kitchen, the filth left by animals sharing the same living quarters, were anything but beautiful." (Barrios Of Manta. Rhoda & Earle Brooks)