Joe McWilliams
Up too early on a Sunday, head aching, magpies squawking, coffee not helping – what else is new?
One solution is to write whatever comes into your head, which is how the following came about.
Things could always be worse. That’s a useful reminder, I find. Because no matter how crappy you feel, or dismal your circumstances, somebody else is facing much harder things.
For example, I often think back to experiences I had as a young traveler in Asia. This was in the 1970s, when perhaps the majority of Indians and Sri Lankans were barely getting by. Most of the evidence of this was probably hidden from the average traveler, but you would inevitably stumble upon something that was hard to wrap your head around.
I’d been a few days in New Delhi, after a cheapo bus over from Europe had deposited me there. Wandering around one day I came across a huge pit – apparently the future site of a large building of some kind. It was still being excavated, but where was the big equipment? There wasn’t any!
The work was almost entirely being done by sturdy-looking labourers, dozens or even hundreds of them. Some worked the dirt and rocks loose with picks and shovels; others carried it up out of the hole in baskets they balanced on their shoulders or heads. They reminded me of ants.
I hadn’t the means to understand or appreciate what I was seeing; just another surprising scene in a place full of them.
Three months or so later I was hanging out in a beachside community in Sri Lanka – one as it happens that got wiped out by the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. I used to take my breakfast and lunch at a café not far from the shore. There was a construction site nearby – probably another hotel going up, and a group of workers sometimes had their lunch at the same place as I. Their order was always the same – a cup of tea and a slice of bread.
It got me wondering, of course. Could this be all they had for lunch? It seemed to be so.
I asked around, and was told the wage for such workers was 15 rupees per day, roughly the equivalent of one U.S. dollar. If so, it explained why they couldn’t afford an actual meal for lunch.
I had difficulty grasping, for starters, how anyone could survive a 10-hour day on a construction site with only a slice of bread for sustenance. Then I started calculating what it might take to survive, given the going rates for food, accommodation, etc. on a dollar a day.
My conclusion: impossible!
And yet there they were! Somehow doing it!
Meanwhile, there I was, spending many times more than that stuffing my face and considering myself frugal – at least until confronted with a different sort of reality.
The economic and demographic (and other?) forces at work I didn’t understand and still don’t pretend to. What’s so different about us that we can live so comfortably when so many can’t? One factor must be too many people chasing too few jobs in some places, and the opposite here.
This part of the world is still the land of opportunity, regardless of all sorts of other factors we like to complain about.
Of course, things could be better. But they could always be worse, or at least harder. A lot harder.