Peru is a society with such a strong class system. A caste system, even. After almost six months, it still has the capacity to shock me. My (middle-class) friends will make reference to ¨lower- class people.¨ It´s discussed as a matter of fact that there are classes, ¨A¨ people, ¨B¨ people, C people. I don´t know how many classes there are. The first person I heard talk about ¨A¨ people was this girl studying advertising, and how that class of people was who she was targeting for this ad project she was working on. I was pretty shocked but hoped it was just advertising lingo. But since then I´ve heard other people talk about the A and B classes.
People take it for granted to such a degree, both upper and lower classes. I know there are rich and poor in the US, and maybe people here are just more honest. But it´s such a different mindset. To the rich and middle-class, and even to the lower classes, their economic status is their identity. They aren´t just people who are poor right now. Their parents were poor, they are poor, they will probably always be poor. I don´t know how they would get out of their poverty. The kind of jobs they get are service jobs, providing services like cooking, cleaning, watching children and for the men, things like landscape work with the worst equipment. Like cutting a lawn with small rusty shears and then hauling away the debris on a bicycle.
Poor people here often work 10 or 12 hours days, six days a week of insanely tedious and-or backbreaking labor for a shockingly low salary. Maids often live with the family they work for. I don´t know how they could afford housing otherwise. It has to make middle-class people feel better to think of the "lower classes" as different kind of people. It´s routine to see children begging or selling candy on buses, on the side of the road. The government either doesn´t have the resources to take them off the street, or else chooses to spend it on things like planting flower beds in middle-class neighborhoods.
Despite the growing size of the middle class, Peru is still a poor country. I don´t think they should be judged by first-world standards. But it´s frustrating to see a class system so blindly accepted, further perpetrating the poverty of the lower classes. I don´t know how it can ever change.