John Linton .......and then I met a man who had no feet. (I don't know the ascription).
On the flight to Colombo I read an article in a US paper (I forget which one) that reported on the unfortunate top business school graduates who had been 'pre-hired' last year before they graduated by Bear Sterns and now their $US180,000 a year first year of employment jobs were no longer available to them and it was much too late for those affected to apply to other broking houses. Apparently, according to the article, these first year employees could have expected to have earned another $US200,000 on top of their 'base salary' in performance bonuses.
It made me realise that I had pretty much made a complete financial hash of my own working life when a first year graduate in the USA is earning twice as much in the first year of their working life as I do in the last, or 'lastish', year of my working life.....enough to make you cry......
....and then we drove from the airport to the hotel
and witnessed at first hand for the second time in a few months how cheerful so many Sri Lankans are who work so back breakingly hard for less a day than most Australian's would pay for their work day sandwich lunch.
Because we had finished all of tasks we came to accomplish and because it was one of the myriad of public holidays in Sri Lanka yesterday (unknown to us when we booked the trip) which meant we couldn't really talk to any of the people we might have liked to talk to, we took a trip 'up country' by car to see the elephant orphanage and another widlife 'park' where you could gain an initial understanding of just how much communication is possible between humans and elephants.
In an attempt to try and alleviate the incredible stress of driving through Colombo's nightmare traffic as much as possible we left the hotel at 6 am in the morning and partly because of the early hour and partly because of the public holiday the 'city' part of the driving was pretty easy - leaving the city. As for the 'country' driving - all I can say is that it added a previously unexperienced level of sheer terror to anything I've previously experienced.
Apart from the main business, government and 'embassy' districts of Colombo it's pretty clear to a casual observer that poverty is very common throughout the parts of the city we have driven through to meet with various people. Of course there are some very nice houses and some very nice districts but the overwhelming impression is one of 'scraping by' in the majority of cases. Driving on the 'main road' from Colombo in the direction of the old capital city of Kandy made the poverty seen in Colombo seem almost affluent and the hard work done by Colombo residents a cake walk compared to the manual field and paddy labour being done as we drove to our tourist destinations. (whenever we could bear to open our eyes).
Of course - similar/same/worse scenes can be seen over much of S E Asia, India and the 'Middle East'.
I had read up on Sri Lanka during the time we were evaluating where we would set up a support and development centre and was aware that most of Sri Lanka's 20,000,000 or so people live without most of the 'essentials' of Western/Australian life and that, apart from the highly educated, a common monthly wage is less than $A50.00 and often less, much less, than that. Seeing what that means first hand is not something 'research' can convey to you - or at least to me.
Seeing 60 or so elephants in 'the wild' or close to their 'natural state' was quite an experience (despite being a tourist in the midst of other tourists) and it was something that will be quite unforgetable. It was counter pointed by the 'mahouts' and other personnel who tended and cared for the elephants who, our driver told us, earned around 50 cents a day for a seven day a week, 12 hour a day working life with 'accommodation' provided in a communal shed and their food.
The disparity of what's available to a child born in Australia (or the USA, Europe etc ) compared to a child born in Sri Lanka is appalling in the 21st Century.
Many people in Sri Lanka have no shoes, some people have no usable feet and at least one elephant has no leg (blown off by a land mine in the Wild Life 'Sanctuary' in which he was born courtesy of the civil war now in its 27th year).
It puts the current 'crying' about "Australia's terrible broadband speeds and costs" in to perspective.