I feel that this experience can cause us to have less patience for the poor in the developed world. Something like, "How poor can you be in the USA? In Mexico, just outside a major city, there is a town without electricity, where people eat corn and raise cows, and they send their children to the city at night to beg because they don't have any cash and no way to make it." How many people live in that level of poverty in the US?

But, still, perhaps the poverty in the US is worse, and more insidious, because it is often a poverty of spirit as well as money. It is hard to grow your own food here, as you don't have land, and you cannot buy it, because you don't have money.