Time isn't always money

Though I was always taught that short-term thinking is more prevalent in developing countries, where life expectancy is generally lower and the opportunity cost of future planning too great, in the short-term, there appears to be no shortage of time.  A friend and colleague coming on an exchange to our UK office during what was his first trip ever out of Indonesia, said to me that one of the largest differences between his diverse island nation and mine, apart from the freezing cold (it was actually far from freezing, poor lad), was the pace at which people walked around.  The rushing of people between offices, to lunch, along pavements, was alien to him, and left him struggling to keep up.  Somehow in the short-term, developing countries* have much more time.

And a lot of them spend this time making things.  Or talking.  They spend a lot of time talking, and laughing, which I commend.  Here are two beautiful pieces of evidence that I’ve come across in the last two weeks.

Scaffolding

The scaffolding that decorates the outside of the water tank tower.

 A close up of the walk-way. 

I’ve never seen such beautiful scaffolding.  It was built to help build (jenga in Swahili) a 50 litre capacity, 6m elevated water tank in a village called Lyowa, far south in the district of Mtwara on the coast of southern Tanzania.  Its completion is a bit behind schedule (surprisingly?), but by the end of the year it should be holding water that will be distributed to five surrounding villages, none of which have anything like a sustainable water supply at present.  In Lyowa village itself, you either have to queue for over 12 hours or travel 7km to collect water.  So this new infrastructure will make an enormous difference to the many many people.  TAEEs has been coordinating this project, and getting irate with the contractors (the ones that run and up and down this scaffolding in wellies).  I got to the first horizontal platform, looked up, and came straight back down.  To be fair, it was more the capacity for it to hold me and the 90kg guy coming up behind me that spurred my descent.

The cashew nut

(korosho)

The fruit and nut from a cashew nut tree that I accidentally pulled off.

Though God or some kind of creationist or maybe even Brian made the cashew nut, not the Tanzanians, they are responsible for getting the nut out of its tight case and roasting it for the perfect amount of time.  Man, I’ve not tasted cashew nuts so good in all of my 30 and a bit years.  Each fruit yields one nut, and one small bag (say 500g) of cashews contains about 100 nuts, so that’s a lot of fruit to collect, nuts to free and roasting to do.  And I bought around 3kg for approx. £20.  An example of how some things in this world aren’t quite fair, perhaps. 

But then when you’ve got the time, and don’t have the money, time spent of any activity, however arduous or exhausting, that will yield even some small pennies, is worth the time investment.  Below is an extreme example: a woman, sat in a very exposed area, breaking big pieces of hard volcanic rock into smaller pieces, in the hope that someone will come by at some point, choose her pile over the many adjacent ones, and buy a few buckets worth.  Hard hot work.   

A lady breaking big rocks into smaller ones, with the TAEEs crew in the background doing some filming, whilst buying 10 buckets from another lady.

But even in the UK, ‘craft’-work is rarely rewarded for the time and skill put in.  When you work out the hourly labour fee for the teddy bears and bunnies (and now even woolly elephants), that a friend of my Mum makes with the wool from our flock of sheep, it comes out at about £2.  Way below the minimum wage. 

But it’s not about that, is it?  Nothing is quite that simple.

*though I hear Indonesia is now a middle-income country, probably in a great part thanks to the power of palm oil