Which town?

But there we were, well-meaning and realist persons became indignant and aggrieved = ‘come, we have all these lands laying unused (because they are too far, isolated, arid or ill-managed) and we have all these needs which cannot be answered due to lack of funds (more housing, better roads, more schools for our kids), why not sell them, then? So many lands are still missing for the consolidation of the territory of the city and its greenbelt, why not at least exchange those distant and useless lands for those we need most? This criterion of appreciation and evaluation, however common and reasonable, began to erode the inner and more profound relation between the parts.

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An ordinary mentality – an ordinary scale of merchant values, ordinary managing conduct and practices – soon reduced the representatives of the community in the eyes of the villagers, of the local authorities and of the developers, to company functionaries holding large estates and enjoying governmental backing. A certain quality of respect that had remained in the consciousness of the local inhabitants towards these adventurers who wanted to serve the Divine in life itself, was then compromised. A grey area, indefinite, ambiguous, just beneath the shared visible reality, settled in little by little, a manner of functioning closely woven into the daily fabric that, inexorably, began to secrete distrust, distance, judgments, comparisons, denunciations and duplicities.

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