Daniel's blog

Due to problems with getting my Chinese visa, I spent over three weeks in the Czech Republic around Easters. Coming back home after three months in Latin America and having stayed in India right before that, it was a bit of shock. While living in a relative luxury and having access to all amenities they need, the people were still grumpy, complaining about their lives. I wished I could send them all to live in an Indian city or a Colombian countryside for a while to see how happy people can be with the little they have. But is it really that simple?

I was lucky to be in India during Diwali (the festival of lights, something like our Christmas) last October and even more lucky to have been invited to a party along with one of my Indian friends from Warwick. In between firing crackers and drinking lots of whiskey I had great conversations with other people there, in particular with a son of one Indian MP. Having studied politics in London, he was very knowledgeable about functioning of European states and quick to compare them with India. His two favourite words to describe Europe were ennui (a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest) and effete (lacking in wholesome vigor; degenerate; decadent – both definitions from dictionary.com); I could not agree more with him.

The European society has made an enormous progress in increasing its living standards over the last 100 or so years, far beyond how have people ever lived before or how they live in other parts of the world. Free health care for everybody, maternity benefits and guaranteed pensions are a norm as is free or heavily subsidised education, unemployment benefits, housing benefits, agricultural production benefits and the list goes on.  Yet there are two crucial problems with this system. Firstly, it makes people lazy and secondly it creates an impression that this ever increasing trajectory can be sustained forever.

My flight to from Colombia to Spain a month ago was delayed because of a Spanish general strike against a new austere budget giving me an excuse to stay in Madrid overnight before catching another plane home. One of the first things that struck me when I landed was that apart from the odd immigrant, there were no people selling stuff on the streets, a common sight in Colombia where it was no problem to get chewing gums, cigarettes etc. anywhere and at any hour of a day from omnipresent vendors with small carts or simple paper boxes. In Spain, as in other countries of Europe, people can afford not to work and have all their basic needs catered for. The millions of street sellers and crafts men in India or Colombia do not run their businesses because they love entrepreneurship so much, but because if they want to feed their families and have somewhere to live, they simply have to. People in the developing world work much harder and face more serious problems than people in Europe with their 35-hour work week early pensions and social safety net but they still enjoy their life more.

The second problem is reconciling this lazy nature with an illusion that living standards have to increase every year, leading to sovereign debt crisis we are seeing in Europe right now. With the adoption of Euro, countries for the first time in decades had to start functioning like companies. If you borrow monies, you have to pay them back or default – you can no longer press the print button and supply more funds to the market. This is a shock mainly for the Mediterranean countries whose living standards are higher than they should be given their labour habits and policies, competition laws, education level or technological development. People will have to learn to accept that their comfort of living cannot be automatically increasing every year and that on contrary, it is perhaps a time for readjustment of living standards downwards to where they really should be.

This will be a bitter pill to digest for many in the West. When it comes to life satisfaction, people in developing countries have an advantage of living in an opposite form of ignorance. Unlike Europeans, who think that they can always get more and more, they are often unaware of what all they can achieve. Even the poorest people have TVs at home now and they see in them lifestyle very different to their own. But because they do not believe they can ever attain such standard of living they do not fall in depression and disillusion with their current state. In the absence of a critical amount of role models from their communities who have achieved such things, they accept they will never get there and find happiness in their daily lives.

One man in a Colombian countryside where I was staying for a weekend said that his biggest dream is to see an ocean at least once in his life. If he took a chiva (a local bus) to the nearest town, he was only six hour bus ride away from the ocean. Even though he could afford the ticket, he will probably never go there. Nobody from his village ever went there and he is not able to pluck up the courage, make the decision, and venture out into the unknown land beyond his village or a town. But this man did not live a sad life, worried that he has not seen the ocean yet, he was a happy man finding joys in and around his village.

Colombian people in general are a very happy lot. Despite having lived in a country torn by a bloody narco-war for decades, they think that Colombia is the best country in the world (and they are very close to being correct!). When I was in the city of Medellin, my local friends were telling me that Ron de Medellin is the best rum. After I moved to Manizales in the Caldas region, my friends there would argue to death that Ron de Caldas is best rum in the world. Whatever they had, it was the best for them! Can you imagine living in a country where all people have such an attitude?

On balance, I am not trying to argue in this blog post that people should start living in ignorance and be satisfied only with what they have at the moment; far from that. But they should learn to appreciate what they have now while setting up their society in a way that would motivate them to be in charge of their own lives and if they want to, to allow them to have better living conditions along with rise in their productivity.

These posts came up on my facebook newsfeed after some of my friends voted in their first free parliamentary elections; results of the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt and in Tunisia. I found them very moving as many people around the world take freedom for granted but there are still many nations for which it is an unattainable privilege.

>We just got back from the Masai Mara National Park. We were lucky enough to be there during the great migration when thousands of animals come from the Serengeti park in Tanzania to graze in Kenya. The name Masai Mara means a Masai river. And Masai is a name of the tribe living there. We had a chance to visit their village and to see their traditional pastoral way of life.

What is unique about the Masais is that they are one of the few tribes that have not changed their traditional way of life. They have the same traditions they have had for centuries and while some of them might seem illogical and even funny to us at first sight, they have allowed them to survive until now.

Here are some examples:

Jumping competitions and polygamy.
Masai men often engage in jumping competitions. They do so for two main reasons. Firstly, if there is a pretty girl, more men get together and the one who is able to jump the highest, gets to marry the lady. That is of course providing he has enough cows to give as a dowry (10 cows is a standard). Secondly, if you are a really good jumper and can jump more then approximately 80cm you can pay only 7 cows instead of 10. If you have lot of cows or you are a good jumper you can have more wifes, usually up to five.

Houses with no chimneys
When entering a Masai house, the first impression is that there is almost no light inside and the second one is the heavy smoke that hits you as you go further inside. This is because there is a fireplace in the middle of the hut and only one small window on the side wall, there is no chimney.

When we were discussing these observations with rest of our party over dinner, some people found them illogical and funny indeed. But myself and our friend Klaus from Germany actually appreciated that there must be a reason why they are behaving in this way. Klaus called it the unconscious intelligence.

If you able to jump high, it means you are healthy and physically fit; e.i. you have good genes. If you have lot of cows, you are able to feed your family. It therefore makes sense for such man to have more wifes and kids then man who is weak and will not be able to secure his family (I am not advocating polygamy here, just trying to find logics behind local customs. Also remember, that there is no welfare state in Africa). As for the house, it is able to withstand long periods of heavy rain without any leakage despite being made from wooden branches, grass and cow manure.

I would be the last person to speak against progress and innovation and this article is not meant to defend the traditional ways of doing things. It is to remind us that everything is happening in a certain way for a reason and before trying to change it, we should understand what that reason is. Having understood it, we will be in a better position to judge if there is a better way of doing things and in determining what that way is.

>I am now in Nairobi, a great and vibrant city, but one of it’s nicknames is Nairoberry (my backpack with a camera got stolen already). Yesterday, I had a great chat about the security situation here with one friend who has been here for 12 weeks already. She told me that it is a very safe place if you do not break the rules.

In the main header of my blog I wrote that life is game and that it has it’s rules. My stay in Nairobi is a game as well and I broke one of it’s rules. I put the backpack next to my chair instead of having it on my lap while eating out. It was not the Kenyan’s who broke a rule by stealing my backpack it was me breaking a rule that you never keep your things out of sight here.

It is a very simple and powerful idea that can be applied to anything. Always get to know the local rules and be willing to follow them. The final takeaway is that the locals never break rules. It is their game and as a visitor, you have to play it. If you break any rule, you might get punished. In which case it is not the local people being bad or treating you unfairly, it is you breaking a local rule.

Here are some other rules I have Iearned here so far:
- look confident and that you know what you are doing
- walk fast on the streets, focused on where you are going and do not look people in the eyes (unless you want to speak to them in which case do so all the time)
- always bargain and offer either a bit less than what it usually costs or one third of what they quote you. Do not be afraid to walk away from an offer
- take time to ask questions, speak slowly. Do not ask yes/no questions because answer to those will always be Yes, ok, no problem…

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What do you see when you look at countries on a map of the world? Do you focus on the black lines determining national borders or the blue lines showing rivers? Or are you trying to locate the small dots representing capital cities? And how about all the green/brown space in between those lines and dots? Have you ever thought about what is going on there?

I had yesterday a nice skype chat with my friend from AIESEC Kenya. We were remembering the great time we had at IPM in Tunisia, an international AIESEC conference, couple months ago. There were 250 young people from 107 countries across the world and one afternoon we did a really cool exercise which showed us the map of the world from a different perspective.

Imagine a big rectangular room representing a map of the world. And now imagine people from all those 107 countries sitting within that room according to where their countries are located. I was representing UK so I was sitting in the middle of the room, near to the top. Only the guys from the Nordic counties were sitting behind me, slightly towards the left. Oh, and than there was Teitur from Iceland, he was sitting alone behind me, more on the right. When I looked in front of me towards right, I could see my friends from Latin America sitting in their respective positions. Right in front of me, well behind the guys from Spain and Portugal, the black continent was sitting. When I looked more towards the left, I could see the Europeans and than little bit lower, my friends from the Gulf were sitting in the middle of the room. Further away there were all the delegates from Asia and Australia.

I did not see any black or blue lines, I did not see any dots. All I could see was just people, people just like me. When looking at the map of the world, we often focus only what we see on the paper. But behind that piece of paper, there are nearly 7bn of people living their daily experiences, just like me or you!

>The Economist has designed a new map of Europe! It has changed location of countries taking into account national stereotypes, current realities and other interesting issues.

Have a look here for full commentary: http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16003661″>