Your understanding of the world is warped by the safety and availability of goods. It's incredible when you get in places where the state doesn't function at let's say 50% of what we get in the first world. It's one hell of a learning experience.
> Fly to Brazil, take a cab around Central Sao Paulo.
source: Am Brazilian, would not recommend it.
To be fair, Central São Paulo isn't even what I would consider third world yet, if you really wanna see how good some of us have it go to the northeast of Brazil, or Venezuela (if you manage to get in somehow).
And no, you will only find similar stuff at Rio de Janeiro. Fortaleza and Recife have small areas that come close, but the real bad of urban violence is on the southeast.
What are you referring to, specifically?
The only thing that comes to mind are the homeless population, but then again you could say the same problem (and at arguably larger scale) afflicts San Francisco or New York.
Sao Paulo is not even particularly violent, too
Made me realize there are still big chunks of the world where you can't take basic literacy for granted in 2023, even of people in their 30s.
To me it reads like you didn't know the local language but they're the illiterate ones for not knowing your language? Or did I completely misunderstood your story?
I assume you didn't mean to imply that "basic literacy" == "knowing English", but your post does somewhat come across that way.