Brazil
When I was 17 my family moved from the UK to Rio de Janeiro. After I finished my a-levels I spent almost a year straight in Rio and worked at a school in Botofogo, helping kids learn English etc. Some highlights of what I saw:

1. Walking to the bus one day after work - seeing a huge fan shaped puddle of blood on the ground and part of a brain from where someone had been shot.

2. Walking to deliver some letters for the school and having to go through a tunnel. Realising that I was stepping over a dead body (flies on eyes and that kind of stuff).

3. Going home from my portuguese class - there were a number of kiosks that sold hamburgers etc. They had plastic garden style furniture etc outside. At one of these tables was sat 3 incredibly hot, incredibly white, Brazilian girls. Laced around one of the chairs lying on the floor was a dead black guy of about 50. No recognition from the brazilian elite that someone was dead beneath them.

4. Being in a football stadium, going to the toilet and being offered cocaine and a pistol for a cheap price, then going back out on to the stands and having to scramble out of the way of a knife fight just in front of me.

5. Brazilian favelas.

6. The guy who used to live under the bridge near our apartment. This is a bridge over a stinking, chemical and shit ridden canal. He slept on one of the supports and spent all day begging on the bridge.

7. The family of 6 who were living in the doorway of a cobblers shop.

8. The small children trying to sell anything to make some money.

9. The frankly horrifying number of young men with legs or arms missing.

10. The juxtaposition of a large shopping mall, populated mostly by white people, next to a slum, populated mostly by black people.

11. Police brutality against a peaceful demonstration against police brutality. The police picked up chairs from a nearby bar and beat people with them.
(Zapiola zip-zap-zop, Fri 22 Jun 2007, 16:32, Reply)