Interesting post, I guess we have all wondered the same thing, but with your travels and descriptions, you did a good job of posting our question.
Keeping poop out of the water supply is a big problem in many of these places. Seems like it has to be taught over and over.
simply a factor of IQ.
It’s an attitude problem.
That, and a culture that values blame-fixing over problem solving.
Slums are just the physical manifestation of something going on (or not going on) in people’s heads.
I travel Europe and have seen none of this kind of stuff you describe.
Hey, waaaiiit.
The problem with 3rd world countries is that they were not founded on Judeo-Christian values. This is important because our culture is unique in that we uphold honest and decent behavior as the key to mutual prosperity.
In every other culture prosperity is either a means to greater power or it is obtained by dishonest means.
This is part of why so many people in the world hate the USA is that they assume that we are wealthy because we *MUST* have stolen it. They just can’t conceive of some of the things we do - like when you see an old lady drop a $100 bill you pick it up and give it back to her. In most of the world you’d take it away from her and chide her for being so foolish with her money.
We have a Somali family who have left islam as neighbors and they marvel that Americans don’t have walls around their homes. They marvel that they were total strangers in the community and they were still invited to a BBQ. They marvel that they are measured by what they do for everyone else and not by what they do or do not have. It just doesn’t work that way where they are from.
People who have Christ in their hearts don’t need to worry about things like prosperity because prosperity is a natural side effect for a community of Christians.
FWIW, there's a principle in economics that's called something like the "efficiency of scarcity" or something like that. Basically, it says that in any economic system the scarcest resources will be used most efficiently, and the most plentiful resources will be used least efficiently.
I had someone explain it to me this way:
Which is the most productive grain farm: one in Western Europe, one in North America, or one in Africa?
The answer is that all three of them are, because it depends on how you measure productivity. The European farm is most productive in terms of yield per acre, because open land for farming is more scarce there than in the other two places. The North American farm is the most productive in terms of yield per unit of labor, since we don't have millions of people aspiring to pick grain by hand over here. And the African farm is the most productive in terms of yield per unit of energy, since they have plenty of low-skilled labor and plenty of land, but no cheap energy.
/sarc
The thing that always gets me is the the bathrooms in the third world. Why do they have to be so wet? The floor usually has at least a quarter inch of water, the walls are wet, the toilet is wet, even on top of the toilets are wet. Of course, the countertops are all flooded and the mirrors have water on them too. Every friggin thing has water on it. How does this happen? Who goes in the bathroom and sprays or throws water just absolutely everywhere?
What kind of mama teaches their kids to do this? “Now little Johnny listen to me, whenever you go in the bathroom, do your business and then when you’re all done, throw water on everything you see. And then people will respect and love you.”
The casual observer would conclude that they simply don’t care.
In Africa the counties were so poor they would rob sailors of their clothes but not their money.. They wouldn't take money because the police are brutal there.
When oppression is the daily dose of life....so goes the spirit to lift yourself up.....
It’s simple. Why bother do to do anything right when you can get yourself into America? (that is if you’re lucky.)
You have to think in terms of the food chain.
If they buried the poop, then the chickens could not eat it.
Hate to burst your bubble,but “third world” doesn’t have to do with wealth, or lack of it. During the cold war some pundit stated that the countries of the world were in three camps, the free world, which are the US and the West,the Communist world and the non-aligned countries or third world.
Milton Friedman had an interesting related comment.
He observed a third world construction project, and asked if it would not be more efficient to use a backhoe, instead of the many men they had digging with shovels. The manager/politician in charge told him that they did it this way to provide more jobs. Well then, why not have them dig with spoons then? asked Friedman. It was more an indictment of the Government’s wastefully inefficient economic policies than it was of third world culture.
Sometimes they don’t have the equipment, sometimes they don’t have the know-how, sometimes it is due to culture (traditional or political). Whatever the reason, it is changing at dramatic pace, by historical standards.
Technology is spreading much more quickly now than ever before, with better transportation and communication. No place is out of reach anymore. The percentage of the human population that lives in abject squalor - a hand to mouth existence of less than a dollar a day - has been plummeting in the last few decades, and will probably decline into the single digits within a generation, or be done away with entirely. Africa is not just the next frontier for industrialization and a modern standard of living - it is the last such frontier. The robots that are teetering around with their baby steps this decade, will automate much of farming and production next decade.
Enjoy the quaint eccentricities of the old third world - they will make for unbelievable tales for the children of future decades.
Why? Man this one is too easy.
The evil white man of course.
Bauer presents a convincing case for the proposition that “economic achievement depends on people’s attributes, attitudes, motivations, mores and political arrangements. . . . Moreover, policies of many Third World governments are plainly damaging to economic achievement”....Bauer shatters the misdirected attempts to promote Western guilt for Third World poverty. “The West has not caused the relative poverty of the Third World,” Bauer writes. “The opposite is the case. The contacts established by the West have resulted in improved living conditions, longer life expectation and much wider choice for hundreds of millions of people in the Third World . . . . Indeed, millions of people who would otherwise have died survived because of Western techniques and ideas, notably medicine and public security which came with colonial rule.”
-- from an online review of P.T.Bauer's book Equality, the Third World, And Economic Delusion
Honestly I don’t give a darn what they do in their own countries but I am sick to death of them coming here and still trying to live that way. 2 houses down we had Guatemalans? Move in. The gorgeous house is now a dump and I keep having to call the city code people on them. First they were running an unlicensed daycare out of the house.....with huge signs everywhere. I called and they shut it down. Next they be got 10 cars parked all over the street....with flats and non running. I called and they moved them. No clue where. Then they’ve got fricken living room furniture in their front yard, a sofa and recliner. Luckily, Some other neighbor sick of looking at it hauled it off in the middle of the night. Lol
The lawn hasn’t been mowed since the middle of last summer and we had a huge wind storm that broke off a huge limb on a tree in their front yard. It’s still there.
If they can’t assimmilate to our culture they should be sent the heck back where they came from. Sick of them.
Constructing a building: A person on the bottom fills a bucket with cement, who then hands it off to a person standing on a platform 6 feet above them, who then hands the bucket to a person on a platform 6 feet above them, who then hands it to a person above them (about 4 or 5 platforms high, I can’t remember). Have they never heard of the pulley?
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When you have 1.2 BILLION people, who needs a pulley? Where is room for a pulley?