Julia is out of the country on a freelance reporting assignment. This column originally ran in the Marshall News Messenger.
When driving through Chimbote, Peru, I cried.
I was tired, having had a trying plane trip then an exhausting ride over desert roads so bad that we crawled rather than rode.
But Chimbote seemed the most forlorn, poorest, ugliest place on planet earth and I had already seen Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua as well as the place where the great South American cholera epidemic started a few years earlier.