stark differences

Moving back and forth from Santa Cruz to the States provides, of course, great joy in reuniting with family and friends. Visiting in Saginaw, MIchigan, our familiar home town was not only as special as licking a Mooney's chocloate almond ice cream cone, but during this last visit I became aware of sutil differences between the two cities that for some reason stood out like massive boulders hovering over the diverging roads that Robert Frost wrote about in "The Road Not Taken" balancing ever so delicately between crashing down to destroy the road or remaining fixed as part of the breath-taking scenery.
Saginaw is a modern city by world standards, but certainly a depressed city with its problems of joblessness that is played out with crime, lack of hope, and diminishing population. Santa Cruz is also a modern city, but instead of dimishing, it is growning faster than it can seem to cope. Construction everywhere, cars hopelessly crammed into streets not adequate for the two-car families that is common today. Disorder at every corner, but progress humming to the tune of bulldozers and cement mixers.
One difference that stood out to me was simply -the people. Everywhere you look you see people in Santa Cruz and they are mostly young people. This is a culture of the young. In Saginaw it seemed that no matter where we went, the majority of people were older. The recent statistics from the city of Santa Cruz cite 110,000 university students studying in 16 different universities. 60,000 of them in the state-run Gabriel Rene Moreno U which is free. There are 400,000 school age children. The city cannot keep up with the demand for school buildings. Students in many schools are sitting on the floor as desks are scarse. Saginaw is closing and consolidating schools.
You can drive around the Saginaw area and see so much open space, closed busineness boarded up or cowering shyly behind For Sale signs that have been up for more than 2 years in some cases without an interested buyer.
Yet Saginaw has wonderful public services such as the police, hospitals and my favorite, the libraries. Santa Cruz operates on a meager financial diet and does not have an adequate organizational structure to make these necesities a reality for many, especially the poor. Most home-owners hire their own private guards. (See the picture with the small brown guard house on the corner - a very common site)
And the traffic? You MUST tailgate here in order to move forward in the congestion. You cannot hope to find adequate parking spaces.
We left Santa Cruz in 1984 when the city was just emerging from being a 'pueblo' to becomming one of the fastest growing cities in South America. The city is slowing evolving, but each time we step away and then come back, it seems that the changes and differences stand out more to me.
Years back, Daniel and I once had the chance to move to the Dallas,Texas area to work for SER National. We decided not to go because we didn't think we'd like living in a big city. So here we are now in Santa Cruz with a population of about 2 million.
"Two roads diverged, and I took the one less traveled"