I wonder if I would rather do as in the picture presuming I felt I was building whatever I could for myself, or do what I do, making what I do, and not be sure of just what it is I have got to show for it.

Also, I have a sudden urge to listen to Led Zeppelin IV....

"Tarmac road? You were lucky!"

Brad,

Building? That looks like firewood to me. Hell, if that's the best building material she can get, I'm taking my state-controlled life of wealth and comfort all the way. I'll leave the freedom of the hovel to those without the choice.

J

Building in the sense of building equity (I assumed she was going to market and trading).

Brad, this is a horrid subsistence level existence... nothing positive about it whatsoever.

An all-too-familiar sight in and around Addis Ababa is the firewood carrier. Many of these women walk up to 30km to gather bundles that weigh an average of 35kg - close to some of their own body weights. Bent like question marks under their loads, the majority of these women earn less than $12 a month. Yet their work is their only means of survival; usually they are the only income earners in the family. Lonely Planet: Ethiopia & Eritrea

Pietr: next to the muddy tarmac there was plenty of mud and stones, trust me. A most filthy experience especially during the seasonal rains...

The other thing of course is that the use of firewood like this is environmentally horrible. Firewood use = deforestation. Deforestation is bad. There is nothing (except perhaps for clean water) as important as getting electrical infrastructure working in places like this. Firstly you relieve people of this horrible, literally back breaking labour, and secondly, the deforestation stops.

Amen to that Michael. Lenin got a lot of things very wrong but the importance he set by electrification wasn't one of them. Of course it means burning fossils and uranium and Algore would not be pleased. So let's all offset our carbon and build them a wind-farm! Yeah, right, whatever!

A few points to consider:

Take a good, long look at that photo. Just a few generations ago, something very much like what this woman is doing was the kind of work that most people in the world did. Dirty, backbreaking, living-on-the-edge-of-starvation work, day in and day out, from dawn to dusk, seven days a week.

And they had been doing it just that way for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Until we understand how different our lives are, and appreciate that something extraordinary caused a sea change in the way ordinary people live from everything that went before, we cannot comprehend the beauty and fragility of the gift we have been given.

If, then, I were to build a concrete block factory building, install generators and industrial sewing machines, and hire this woman, and many more like her, at a modest rate of pay---$5/day or $10/day--- to sew pieces of cloth or leather together, I would be condemned for exploiting her.

And, yet, if we asked this person if she would like such a job, with steady pay, a cafeteria, a medical clinic, possibly even a pension, does anyone actually think she would refuse? Indeed, wouldn't she tell all her friends and relatives to come to the factory also, and brag of her good fortune?

But the next time there is an international meeting of the "right" kind, would anyone be surprized to see the pampered children of the west skipping their subsidized college classes to march in the street, and throw rocks at the police, and destroy whatever "globalist" business places they came across, vehement in their demands that any such opportunities for impoverished wood carriers be stopped immediately?

Until we can comprehend the enormity of the moral inversion that allows such a "demonstration" to claim the ethical high ground, while those who bring the modern world to women carrying wood must apologize for everything they do, we cannot begin the grasp the depth and width of the challenge confronting anyone whose enterprise crosses international, as well as cultural, boundaries.

The great moral challenge of our age is that there are a great many people, all well meaning and high minded, I'm sure, who would rather see women carrying wood into the nth generation, rather than allow the spread of market economics and technology around the globe.

But, then, they don't expect their children to carry wood, do they?

As someone who has had the knack of doing physical work(for many years), I was merely complimenting the good sense of the woman.
When carrying a large load, the first thing is balance.
The second is getting into a comfort zone as regards the weight distribution.
After that if you have any distance to go(such as up the fire escape with wall panels to the 22nd floor), you think of your feet.
Barefoot on cool, wet tarmac is preferable to stony(possibly glassy)packed earth, or a bad shoe with grit inside, or even a flip-flop if it gets stones in it.

But best of all is a purpose-built work shoe (or boot!Boots don't have VAT charged on them).

veryretired

You make a very good point and state it well. Get this man posting rights.

I was lucky enough to do the Inca Trail a few weeks ago (by chance, I'm wearing the t-shirt as I type) and enjoyed the fruits of English wealth (responsibly I hope) while walking it with the aid of porters.

These guys walk steep rocky mountain paths that my own knees have yet to recover from for probably 8 to 16 days in a month and expect to enjoy tips of $1.25 a day per passenger. So on top of an undisclosed rate of pay (maybe $7-17 dollars daily) and meals they might earn £160 dollars in tips in a month thanks to the (very) genuine gratitude of western tourists. The work is substantially the same as the wood carrier's but thanks to global tourism the rates of renumeration available are huge - facilitated by the global economy and cheap air travel.

Picking up on pietr's points. While the size of the loads carried at breakneck speed down Inca staircases might terrify us I'm told the pace they walk at is a deliberately chosen optimum and we were breifed to stay out of their way rather than force them to stop or change speed at all. Footwear was invariably cheap
$0.60 rubber sandals - offers of hiking boots were apparently turned down.

Great points by Very Retired. Few indeed appreciate the vast gap between the standards of pre industrial revolution and post. It was the Enlightenment, the Science, the Technology and the Industrial Capitalism 'what did it'. Even the early manifestations - the Dark Satanic Mills - were better than the agricultural fringes; at least the people flocked to them. And the incredible thing is that it only took a few generations to make this fantastic transformation. This was just a brief moment compared to the long history of human kind.

Nobody has commented that the figure doing the back breaking work is a woman. I've seen similar sights many many times in Kenya in the fifties and sixties. Always it was the women doing all the basic things - hewing wood and drawing water, digging the fields, cooking and looking after the children. The men mostly did nothing except get drunk and visit the whore houses. Education was mainly restricted to men thus ensuring a continuation of 'primitive' kids. This sort of culture which runs pretty much throughout Africa is a deadly stricture on any real advancement into the modern world that Very Retired rightly celebrates.

Looking at our own current society, science, technology, and capitalism are things to be sneered at. I wonder what that says about our future.
JR

Wonderful reply very retired. You encapsulated in a few words much of what I feel about pampered westerners and the things we take for granted and the venom we spit back at ourselves.

"Until we understand how different our lives are, and appreciate that something extraordinary caused a sea change in the way ordinary people live from everything that went before, we cannot comprehend the beauty and fragility of the gift we have been given."

Nobly put.

To make that woman's predicament similar to mine, you would have to add people standing at the side of the road, pelting her with rotten fruit and bricks.

[typed from an airconditioned house in a comfortable middle-class suburb, without a trace of irony]

Hear hear veryretired, I second Simon's suggestion. Though I realise that this site is not a democracy of its readers but of its owners. Seriously though you should get this guy writing for you, I was moved, no honestly.
Veryretired explained something which had been bugging me for ages. I knew that the anti-capitalists and anti-globalists were wrong but couldn't put my finger on why, he nailed it right there.

My thanks to those commenters who have complimented my post. I appreciate your very kind thoughts a great deal.

As to my status here, please understand that I am neither as skilled in computer apps, nor the give and take of multiple comment debates, as the members of this site or Chicagoboyz, where I also have the priviledge of posting comments on occasion.

The current situation is sufficient for me. Thank you again for your many kind comments.

Most of us (apart from J) remember that Ethopia was under the Marxist rule of the Derg from the early 1970's onwards - which is a major reason for the level of poverty in the land today (the ex Marxist rulers [a different faction to the old Derg] still do not accept such things as the private ownership of farm land).

However, statism in Ethopia goes back a lot further than this. As far back as the 18th century there was an effort to expose it in a book written by a British person who visited the land. However, Dr Johnson attacked the book (although Samual Johnson's knowledge of the land was based on sources that were centuries out of date even in the 18th century) and his attack was successful in crushing the book (even though the book had told the truth).

So successful was the attack that I can neither remember the title of the book or the name of the author.