Newspaper column: Thoughts on Being in a Developing Country

We seem to be in the process of messing up our country - an observation which causes me to think there are times when it’s worth reminding ourselves how fortunate we British are.

I am on a balcony overlooking a town in a place where a great many people struggle to survive. I’ve been in this developing country for a week and, travelling around, have found myself thinking that, when they are older, my grandsons along with every other child in Britain should be encouraged to spend time in such a place.

Why? Because, not only do we tend to take our own good fortune for granted in the UK, many of us seem to feel we are somehow automatically entitled to our nation’s wealth and financial superiority. Which, of course, is not the case. There are no God-given guarantees. We could, at the hands of idiots and charlatans, slip and slide and lose the influential status we have held for centuries. 

We seem to be squandering the family fortune. We can’t even build a railway without scrapping it and losing £billions.

What I can see from my balcony in the tropical rain is a population hard at work. Few people in this place have things anywhere near as easy as we do. There are no safety nets. There is, for example, no such a thing as a state pension. Kids are expected to look after elderly parents whether they’re able to, or not. If you want any kind of health care beyond the most rudimentary you either pay or, more likely, you continue to suffer. My wife’s recent hip replacement? Not a chance!

What is so apparent in this hot and humid place is the indomitable force of human nature. This green and pleasant land teems with humanity and the invincible spirit which goes with it.  The towns and villages heave with human endeavour to such an extent that a fleeting visitor has difficulty in engaging with it. 

Travel somewhere close to our shores and you can more-or-less make out what’s going on around you, even if you can’t speak a word of the language - but in a place like this, the seething chaos of struggle and travail seems unreadable or untranslatable. 

You cannot even understand how anyone ever survives a journey by road, so anarchic and wild is the driving. There is a system, if you have the courage or stupidity to study it for long enough. Traffic, in a land like this, is like water. It simply flows around obstacles or hazards. It is up to each driver to do the best they can to stay in one piece, be that on a bicycle, a tuck-tuck or a whopping great big bus.

These people-carrying juggernauts, resplendent in their ornate paint-jobs and chromium and old as the hills, roar and belch vast quantities of black smoke as they career through the rainforests. The passengers who climb aboard or alight in the most random and isolated of places, seem to enjoy the perilous nature of it all. Old ladies and neat white uniformed schoolchildren smile and wave from the open windows as these Leyland-built land-sharks scour the jungles looking for payloads of human flesh. Men dangle perilously from the open doors. 

And everything else gives way to these vast ungainly ferries of the hills and jungles, except for the countless stray dogs who seem to feel they have a God-given right to sleep on asphalt. Why? And why is it that I’ve not seen a single dead dog on these roads where mayhem and anarchy rules?  

There is so much mystery in this teeming, crazy, gently-smiling, jungle-land. For me it is a vast library stuffed with mysteries that can never be explained.

When it comes to death-defying dogs, you can only reach for the half-answer that the traffic is like water, somehow managing to avoid any obstacle no matter how unimportant or irrelevant. No one owns the roadside canines. They just are, in that zen-like way that says: I exist, therefore I am. Maybe the drivers - who are only just in control of those great blunder-buses - think the same way. Perhaps they and the sleeping dogs are attuned to some fatalistic mystical existence that a Westerner like me can never understand. 

And I don’t really understand any of it. The cheerfulness, in the face of grinding poverty. The levels of politeness amid the seeming chaos. The filth and grime which produces so many countless, immaculate, white-uniformed schoolchildren. The Buddhist chanting at dawn which penetrates the roar of traffic. The narrowness of the gap which, in this place compared to ours, seems to exist between life and death.

I am fascinated by every existential minute. Observing it is good for me, and I think it’d be good for anyone from our overly-privileged land. The mystery of it. The excitement of not being able to understand or interpret. The contrast is both shocking and invigorating.

But I am a mere visitor with the luxury to make observations. I do not want to live like this.  I do not want the anarchy of the “fittest wins” or mayhem triggered by individual desperation. I do not want small and weak government to replace our communally-minded world of joined-up thinking.

We Brits need someone to grab the wheel of our slightly out-of-control jungle-bus and say: “Steady as she goes…”