It's not the position you stand in, but the direction in which you look

Or is it? The people in Rocinha have probably the best view of the ocean, so do the people from Babilonia. But at the same time they still live in brick houses, sometimes without plumming or running water, having to go down to the city every time they need to buy something and then carry it back up the narrow stairs that form the link between them and the rest of the world. They look at the ocean every day, just as the people from Ipanema or from Copacabana, they have better views than most of the luxurious hotels on the ocean front, yet their monthly salary (if they have one) equals to the price you would pay for one night in those luxurious hotels.

So for them, it's not the direction in which you look, but actually the position you stand in. They look down on the rest of the world because they're atop a hill, but they are looked down upon by everybody.

Today I visited Rocinha, the biggest favela in South America, a favela that is slightly bigger than my home town in Romania. I was impressed by everything I saw there. Beyond the drug trafficers and beyond the poverty, I saw a community of people that were living together and helping one another, I saw compassion and love in a place where guns and drugs set the rules. I saw kids playing and dogs chasing them, I saw people having lunch and enjoying themselves. It was not the war zone that's always portrayed in the media, it was a community. There were no 3-meter high fences (as you see in the rest of the city), no locks on the doors, these people had nothing, but what they had they shared.