Another side

[afuna]

I've been thinking a lot about how Australia is different from the Philippines in ways that I could not imagine before I actually started staying here. As a tourist, of course I noticed things like how clean the cities were, how green the cities were, how nice various things are, but living in rb's house for the past three days has opened up an entirely different perspective.

This is split off from my previous entry because the mood is entirely different. Three things make an entry, yeah?


There are a lot of things that are different here in Australia than back home, and they've combined to pretty much thwap me upside the head with a series of realizations. So many things are easier in ways that I had not realized could matter

Like: having drinkable water straight from the tap.

Tap water back home is not drinkable in the same way. You either need to filter + boil + let rest so that the rust and all the sediments settle to the bottom, or if you have money you give up and start buying purified water five gallons at a time, because it's too much hassle to prepare the water from the tap. I was introduced, in a recent post somewhere, to the concept of needing drinkable water to wash hands/food/etc which makes perfect sense, and yet boggles me because drinking water is either effortful or expensive, so wow! Though, it's not that the water back home is so very horrible; I drink tapwater when I head out to restaurants. Most of the time, they probably even filter it. It's just that it's not guaranteed to be safe.


Like: being a "major" enough country that you can "just google it" for something in your area

Say, being able to use Google Maps to look for shops for slightly more obscure hobbies online. clickthecity.com, etc, work well for locating restaurants and moviehouses, but aren't very helpful for looking up things like yarn shops in the Philippines/Manila area.

Google did kindly point me to a bunch of blog entries and comments to sift information from. Some had been obsoleted by years, so I had to filter those out, and after days of following links and sifting threads, I found the (only?) four places to buy yarn/thread, which I'm listing here in case anyone ever needs the information: Dreams Yarnshoppe in Glorietta 5 (good-quality, but expensive, mostly imported), Craftworld in Megamall, Rosario in Pasig (a collection of mostly threads, but occasionally some yarn from Baguio), Carona in Megamall (mostly sells fabric and sequin/feathers/etc, but there's a corner where they sell crochet thread and yarn. I found this place once but I can't seem to find it anymore; not sure if I'm searching the right floor). And again, it's not that the information is horribly impossible to find, it's just effortful because there's no organized way to get the information.


I am struck by the realization that so many of the things (tiny things!) I take for granted as good enough could be better (so much better!). More than that, small improvements can make a huge impact. You can laugh at me now; haven't we been saying this a lot about the tiny bugs in Dreamwidth, and how reducing the friction slightly can enhance the entire experience by a disproportionate amount? Turns out I never connected it back to the physical world.

What would it be like if these things were also convenient back home? And I keep leaping to the conclusion: it would change things.

I can't predict how or what or when. It would change things in ways I am unable to imagine, because I cannot make myself accept that things could be that easy. The concept is too big a leap away.



Occasionally I see people qualify complaints with "I know, first world problems, etc". I get where they're coming from -- I live in a third world country, but I occupy a very privileged position within it -- and basically it's saying I need to get things off my chest, but I am aware that other people have it way worse so I feel guilty now but I really need to unload.

But, even though I can sympathize, sometimes it makes me twitchy because I see it the other way around. I've noticed that when someone says "first world problems", oftentimes they're referring to something that would be a minor thing to lose, but would be a major thing to gain.



I have a half-formed idea, about how the guarantee of quality is what separates a developed country from the developing. I sometimes see people point to the malls, or the occasional rich man's rich-man's-toys to indicate that hey there is prosperity here after all, but those are exceptions (even when the malls seem like the rule). Look at the minimum, not the maximum, at the poorest, not the richest; we shouldn't look at whether the rich can afford to live in style, we should look at whether most of can afford to live at all. It's not about whether we have any state of the art facilities, but about whether the majority of our population can receive some (any) medical care at all. Many of our basics are much cheaper, food is definitely cheaper, but what guarantees of safety do we do without, in order to get things that cheap?

(But then can we afford to regulate that much? Literally afford as in afford to pay with money. But in the long run, can we afford not to? And then a quiet niggling thought, does all this point to my being too "westernized", too idolizing of ideas that are unsustainable in the context of my own country?)

Parts of it make sense to me, but other parts are still ringing false (because not everyone in a developed country has that same guarantee!), which means I need to examine it a lot more.

Comments

[jadelennox]

But, even though I can sympathize, sometimes it makes me twitchy because I see it the other way around. I've noticed that when someone says "first world problems", oftentimes they're referring to something that would be a minor thing to lose, but would be a major thing to gain.

Yes! Thank you for putting into words what I've been grappling with since, well, since last week, when we had to boil our water for 2 1/2 days. Amidst all the excitement of "OMG WE HAVE TO BOIL OUR WATER" and "oh, stop griping, it's actually pretty clean even before you boil it" I was bouncing around trying to get to well, the point you just made. The relatively minor inconvenience of losing potable water for a few days is nothing compared to the immense convenience of gaining potable water from the tap.

I find that, if I don't know much about a country before I meet somebody in the Internet who lives in that country, in my mind that place is automatically first world. It's my own weird way of parsing what you call your privileged position in your own country. I don't like my own ignorance.

Three small things

[frith]

Since it sounds like there are already water mains in the Philippines and that wages are very low, how expensive can it be to have a water purification plant and reservoir, to employ city workers to sweep the streets and to establish and maintain city parks? Getting everyone wired to the internet and making local Google searches worthwhile sounds way more expensive, but walk-in clinics/doctor's housecalls shouldn't be unaffordable. What other differences, "small frictions", are there between the Philippines and Melbourne? *curious*

[branchandroot]

Look at the minimum, not the maximum, at the poorest, not the richest; we shouldn't look at whether the rich can afford to live in style, we should look at whether most of can afford to live at all.

This. This is how people ignore the places in the US that don't have water, electricity, plumbing. (Largely reservations but not entirely.) Because they're looking at averages, instead of at the whole picture.

[hatman]

Not sure how much I can really add here. (Not really awake anyway, though I have waited and mulled and attempted to give coffee time to do its thing.)

But yeah... Potable tap water (for all that I can't stand to drink plain water) is huge deal. It took the flooding of the local treatment plant a few weeks ago (forcing us to spend a few days boiling our water before we could use it) to make me realize how much we take it for granted here. (And, even so, bottled water is readily available, as are a number of filtration systems.)

I know in some corner of my mind that there are people for whom this is the daily reality. But I've never been to those places, never lived that life. It's a very vague and distant reality.

I have a half-formed idea, about how the guarantee of quality is what separates a developed country from the developing.

And yet, as branchandroot mentioned, the US doesn't guarantee quality. There are places here without water, people without access to food, shelter, and medical care. We have the resources to provide at least that - which I'd consider a basic standard of living - but there are too many who fight the idea of "socialism" and too few who contribute privately. (In the larger picture, we also have the global resources available, but not - for a number of reasons - the distribution.)

Interesting thought, though, that the idea of these things as necessary/desirable/whatever is perhaps a "westernized" one. Certainly, industrialization has its drawbacks. We pollute our environment, adopt less healthy habits, do all sorts of crazy and dangerous things to our mass-produced food, and so on. (Reminder: Coffee still not working. Coffee which was made with water that was generally potable already but further filtered by our in-home system. With roasted, ground beans that were shipped to our door with no indication of what it took to get it there. We have TV shows here solely devoted to showing us where our food actually comes from. As a curiosity. Which has too many implications for me to chase down right now.)

Where was I?

Ah, yes. Happy medium. Moderation. There are issues with too much industrialization. But I think things like clean water, sufficient food, adequate shelter, decent medical care, and a reasonable education should, in this modern world, be considered human rights. We're far, far from that being the reality. Even, as mentioned, in this country. But, at the same time, it's a reality that's within our grasp.

I don't know.

[oona]

I really liked this entry. I won't attempt to inject my ideas here, though, but I did enjoy the read. :)

[thorfinn]

Capital Expenditure (provided it's on things you actually will use) is almost always more profitable long-run than Operational Expenditure...

The difficulty is that the latter is almost always quicker and easier to obtain.

That principle applies at just about every level, from the personal, to the household, to the community/corporation, city, state, country and the whole world.

It's a Thorny Problem, especially as when you make a capital expenditure, you better be right that you're going to actually make use of the thing in question, or it is a massive waste.