Church Crowd Loja, Ecuador

I´m sitting at the Plaza San Francisco, in the provincial capital of Loja, Ecuador. It´s a fairly nice Plaza, complete with a church, also called San Francisco.

As I sit, I´m thinking about what a Cuencan city guide said about mendigos, or beggars. I posted the quote, but it basically blames the beggars for their woes, and explains that they taint Cuenca with their country ways.

Outside the church, in the evening, I hear some sort of Mass going on inside. Outside have gathered the following three types of people:

1) vendors (of candles, milagros, paintings, jewelry, crucifixes, etc...)
2) mendigos (legless, old, crawling, filthy, sad, destroyed, etc...)
3) artists (I´m drawing the church with a bottle of wine in my bag)

Anyway, it kills me to think that anyone, much less an entire city, would have such a terrible attitude seemingly devoid of empathy such as that which was displayed in the brochure. For crying out loud, the fucking lady has no legs, she´s crawling around on the floor with shoes on her hands. Crippled or not, a buck is a totally different thing for me than for her.

PS. I forgot. There´s a fourth group present here this evening:

4) the PDAers (making out, groping, entangled, in love, in lust, both, nice).