Comment on the Situation in the Developing World

This is like a mixture of my own opinion, but extended to an extreme to get you to think and comment about it. I have no accurate facts to back it up, and have no other experience than what I have seen in this small corner of Ethiopia. Even so, I’d be interested in what you think.

You know, I think the trouble out here, and the difference between the developing world and the developed world is that it took hundreds of years for the UK (for example) to sort out offices, bureaucracy, technology, filing, meetings, punctuality, deadlines etc until it was in the reasonable state it is in now. Out here in Ethiopia they are being given computers and foreign ways of working to use, but there is no underlying cultural discipline. There is no support network for the offices, electricity, the water, the mobile phones, the computers. No-one has the skill – it hasn’t developed in the culture over generations, it has been imposed. (A bit like the “they haven’t earned the knowledge” speech by Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park.)

This is why I believe in the whole VSO “sharing skills” idea. Although not perfect by any means, we do need to spend more time getting the underlying principles and ideas and technically skilled people in place here before we start dumping “tax-break” computer systems on the country – computers that, without support become riddled with viruses, break down and are either sitting there useless, or being used to listen to music and play patience. They never seem to be used for anything more than typing Word documents, often re-typing the same memo each time. You might as well use the money to provide more paper and pens to school kids and stick with manual typewriters! (A side issue here is: why do I read about schools in the UK sending paper and pencils to Africa. There are thousands of exercise books and pencils in the shops here in Gilgel costing significantly less than the ones purchased and sent at great expense (and oil) half way across the world! I’m sure this is true all over Africa.)

I also wonder if most of the people here are better or worse off with this interference from outside: Some of the Gumuz people around here (for example) living in their mud, wood and straw houses, growing crops, having families, selling things at the market seem a lot happier than the instructors in the college writing up Chemistry equations on boards for students to copy and ultimately never use in practice because there is no money, no labs and no jobs in that field, all longing to go to ‘The West’ having seen the idealised version on the television. Would it be better if they didn’t know what it was like in ‘The West’?

And the population: I think the population in Ethiopia has doubled in about 30 years. Huge areas have been deforested for fuel and shelter and it is getting continually worse. Any kind of natural control (for that read disease and famine) has been bypassed with medical help and foreign aid, but again, without any underlying cultural change that ‘The West’ was forced to develop a hundred years ago (birth control in particular) and relative population stability – are we making it worse with our “help”?

I think it is possible that all ‘The West’ has done, is changed a country that had a relatively stable population (but admittedly with high infant mortality and low life expectancy) to an ever increasing population that is very close to using up its natural resources and food growing potential. Instead of a million people dying a year, in a few years it may be tens of millions.

Well this all seems very negative, but like I said at the beginning, this is more like a “discussion” document than my opinion, but we really do need to think about what we are doing when we send a box of toys or clothes out to Africa to get rid of that niggling guilt about our fellow humans. But we also need to think, are we doing the best thing? Humans evolved to live in small groups and for tens of thousands of years lived off the land. We seem a heck of a lot more stressed in the “modern” world and are becoming less and less fit. Most people I see in Ethiopia are thin and strong and have a pretty good immune system, because anyone who wasn’t strong when they were young, died. Natural selection continues here. In the UK all sorts of people are surviving who shouldn’t. For the first time in the history of life on Earth we are weakening the gene pool – it’s not survival of the fittest – it’s survival of the richest. I for one would not have got that far a couple of hundred years ago. I would certainly be unable to hunt with my eyesight and probably not even be able to find berries!

Anyway, I seem to have drifted into several different issues, so I’d better stop now.

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