It is unfortunately too easy to look at these countries and wonder why they can’t improve themselves? Decades ago, I spent nearly two years travelling through West Africa and South East Asia; it was an experience that totally shattered my view of life. I have tenaciously clung on to a bit of the accent that I acquired over that period, as I never want to let go of it. Prior to, and for several years after, I always wondered how people can choose to live in squalor? And I don’t mean the rickety homes made from corrugated metal sheets or palm fronds, my reference is to the filth! I still struggle to understand why anyone would so callously dump so much garbage right next to where they live & breed? I couldn’t get my head around it. I asked tens and tens of families that I met, why they don’t designate an area for their garbage and either try to bury it, burn it or both?
Over the years, I still couldn’t understand it. But in recent years, I believe I do now, understand it.
It is so traumatic – the images never leave you – to witness people living in squalor. It is an experience that’s impossible to expunge.
It is so easy to blame those folk, for the conditions they live in.
But, their plight is similar to those of an alcoholic working in a brewery! or a morbidly obese person working in a cake shop! How to get out?
A few hundred years ago, these folk only had biodegradable waste. Then over the years, they were mocked for eating with their fingers and handed plastic plates & cutlery. They had to be enlightened. They had to be educated. They had to be brought out of their primitive ways. They just couldn’t be left alone. But why?
We can’t go back in time to fix the past though.
The past is what it is. We all have to let go. But how do you get people out of squalor?
Investment?
I don’t have the answers. But what I have learnt, is that blaming these folk for the conditions in which they find themselves, ain’t going to get them out of those conditions
It is truly depressing…
Knowledge can improve the world we live in 