Once upon a time, I left New York City. I don’t remember why I left, what force I felt pulling me, why I knew that South America was the place to go. But I left—I walked out into Lonely Planet’s colorful world, and found that the people in the pictures are real.
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There is a girl in Buenos Aires who doesn’t have shoes. And she stands out in the street, with her dirty porceline face and her calloused toes on the shopping strip of Latin America’s most stylish city and pleads with English speaking tourists in Spanish. She doesn’t want food or water, but she’ll take moneras and begs for zapatos and rips your heart out with her little fingers. I gave her money, we offered her pan, she wanted shoes. Her eyes questioned our decency as humans, her hidden mother’s eyes bored into our back and made the hair stand on end.
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