its amazing how squeezed everyone is in a country as large, and as relatively empty, as brasil. i read somewhere that something like 75% of the population lives along the immense coastline. that leaves the rest of this continent-sized country relatively empty. but it does seem perverse how people choose to live in suffocating squalor (not in these houses, but for example, in the burgeoning favelas - shantitowns-) in order to scrape a meager living in a country with such abundant resources and possibilities.