I've lived in a Third World country all my life, though I was fortunate enough to have been born into a middle-class family. The success stories in this article are inspiring, although I have witnessed too many horror stories to feel good about this news. For every creative, hardworking, frugal poor person, there is another person out there who is simply crushed by the burden of living on so little.
I like browsing local and international PF sites precisely to avoid failling into the same poverty trap, but sometimes I wonder if Mustachians in the First World (pretty much everyone in the First World) realize just how good they have it.
I remember a conversation I had a couple of years back with a French taxi driver who took me from Charles de Gaulle airport to central Paris. He drove a BMW, was stylishly dressed, used GPS to find my hotel, and complained to me about how incredibly hard it was to make a living driving a taxi in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. He charged me 65 euros (about 85 USD) for a trip that was about 30 kilometers long.
Compare that to taxi drivers in the Philippines, where the most upscale taxis are Japanese or Korean cars, and where you only have to pay 350 pesos (about 8 USD) for the same 30 kilometer distance. (Yes, I looked up the distance on Google Maps. No, Filipino taxi drivers don't get any kind of fuel subsidies). I have never seen a local taxi with GPS, either.
So yeah, vastly different worlds here. Vastly different lifestyles.