Gestation Period ?

This is the beginning of my fortieth week in Indonesia, a duration which the same as the gestation period for humans. I could get very allegorical about what my 40 weeks here has produced (apart from the loss of about 13kgs !) but I'm not going to do that.

Last week, an Indonesian friend asked me whether I was enjoying living here and what were the biggest differences between my life in Ireland and my life here. I listed off a few of the obvious and easier to explain differences (weather, food, motorbikes etc.) but the question did prompt me to think about some of the larger contrasts between living in a rich country and living in a poor one (and believe me, for those of you in Ireland who are dreading the budget on 9th December, Ireland is still a very rich country).

The big obvious one of course is money, but more importantly access to money. You need money to get money. Everybody that I have met here so far, whether living a hand to mouth subsistence existence in a village or working as a government employee on a regular salary, operates with practically no savings and therefore no backup in the case of emergency. There are government owned pawnshops in most towns and as most people don't have bank accounts, this is the first port of call in an emergency. The credit union movement is also quite well established here and VSO is planning to place a volunteer with the Credit Union head office in Maumere next year to help them develop their management skills. Of course, access to finance and seed capital is recognised as one of the biggest limiting factors in preventing people from becoming self sufficient in even the smallest ways - if you want to open a small kiosk selling cigarettes or a sewing business, you need some start up money to buy your initial stock or your sewing machine. This is why micro finance or microcredit operations are proving to be so important in helping to break the poverty cycle.

Another big difference between life in Ireland and life here is connected to lack of infrastructure. This one is pretty significant and affects many aspects of life, here are just a few examples :

Transport
Transport in Flores is privately provided and not subsidised. By Western standards it is cheap (a trip to Ende, about 160 kms away, will cost about Rp70.000 or less than €5 for one seat in an 8 seat car and will take about 4 to 5 hours) but for a poor villager this is a huge sum of money.   


Roads
Are not great (this is why the trip to Ende takes so long). In the rainy season many are impassable except by truck so connections between towns on the same island are difficult. 


Electricity
I am lucky to be living in the hospital as we rarely experience power cuts. However, another volunteer living in Maumere can now predict when her electricity will be off - every fourth night from 6pm to 10 pm. A volunteer in Ruteng (western Flores) tells me that they have no listrik every day between 12 noon and 4pm. Part of the problem is infrastructure - Maumere has expanded in recent years and more houses now have electricity but the power station can't keep up - but availability of fuel (diesel) for the generating stations is also a problem. As the rainy season approaches, there is a higher risk of sea tankers not being able to dock and unload and road tankers not being able to make it through the landslides.
           

Water
Again, I'm lucky. I have plenty of running water for washing which has been available almost without interruption and I can afford to buy 20 litre bottles for drinking. However, villagers who do have water have to collect it from a communal well or tap, drag it home and then boil it. Access to water in some villages is almost non-existent and the focus of many development projects is on providing access to clean water. The link between water and health does not need to be spelled out.   


Healthcare
Two of the biggest contributors to the stark difference in life expectancy between developed and developing countries are access to healthcare and education about healthcare. There is lots of reading material available on the WHO's site (HERE for example) and you can also contruct interesting comparisons between selected countries using chosen indicators HERE.


There are of course lots of other differences which I guess are really the luxury aspects of living in a rich country : entertainment options, internet access (with obvious implications for educationand business), nice restaurants, access to more than ten things to eat (but think of all those food miles), refuse collection services - ah, the list is endless but is often what your tax is spent on (apart from servicing the growing national debt of course !).

Anyway, that all got a bit serious, I'm off to do some  work now. For further reading, look up the UN's Millennium Development Goals here.