My wife is Peruvian so I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Lima. Much of Lima is pretty developed but it gets pretty rough in the “pueblos jovenes”. There’s no running water or drainage. Water is brought into these areas by truck each day and waste is either dumped into holes or simply thrown into the unpaved streets. there’s no electricity. A lot of people live in huts made of grass in the desert areas surrounding Lima. Getting around is not a problem because there’s lots of cheap minivans or “collectivos” to get a ride on. It’s better now than it was 15 or 20 years ago because Peru’s economy seems to be improving, but that’s not saying much.
As long as we’re discussing this, where does Mexico fit in? Is it considered to be a third world country?
My personal experiences.
First of all, I do not consider India a Third World Country. At the most it is a developing third world.
Now. My father’s family is upper-middle class. My father’s brother lives on a certain street in New Delhi, say First Avenue. They have TVs, DVDs, game systems, new clothes, phones. They live elegantly. They have a car.
My mother’s family is lower-middle class to poor. My mother’s sister lives near my father’s brother, say on 25th Avenue. (Really, they’re that close). They live in tenement housing. They have no fridge. There is one TV in the entire neighborhood and everyone gathers to watch the cricket matches, etc. They take the bus. However, they hold their head up high and own their own property.
Down the street from my mother’s sister there are people who live in abject poverty. 4-10 people per house, including babies. Polydactyly - an easily solved problem - runs rampant. Diseases and sickness is prevalent. Babies die regularly.
Calcutta. Men bathe on the streets, fully naked, with a tiny bar of soap which they are lucky to get under a broken pipe. In the desert of Rajhastan women are still married at the ages of 13. Bride-burning still occurs. I would still not walk alone in some of the small villages.
Bombay. Modern, efficient (mostly) with McDonald’s and beef consumption.
And this is all in a moderately developing country which will soon be First World if they get their act together. I truly cannot imagine what happens in a Third World Country. But everyone here is right; Third World conditions are heinous beyond beief and there is a sharp dichotomy between even the middle class and the poor. When you look at some things, like the damn documentaries everyone insists on making, you think: it’s not that bad. But then someone like Wesley comes along (and don’t get me wrong Wesley, I’ve always liked you) and you think: it isn’t that good, either.
Oh, and I don’t know if it’s important but I’m American.
If you’re interested in travelling to one of these countries, I can’t recommend volunteer workcamps highly enough. I just did one for the first time this year, and I wish I’d known they existed years ago. It’s a great, and very affordable, way to see a country you wouldn’t normally go to as a ‘tourist’.
I second Ravenman’s recommendation to TRAVEL. In fact, I see your post as a major reason why it is important, especially for Americans, to travel. Reading statistics and descriptions are one thing, seeing is QUITE another.
My first visit to a third world country was to visit a Club Med in the Dominican Republic. Talk about the most out-of-place setting for a luxury resort. From the airport we had to take this 3+ hour bus ride essentially through the country to get to the resort. As there are few roads to begin with, you get to see it all from the one road: farms, cities, etc… It was the first time I’d ever seen those stereotype, latin american propaganda/political posters on the walls. And after seeing the conditions first hand, it finally hit me why there are so many revolutions in such places: when things are THAT bad, you have NOTHING to lose (and everything to gain). That is, “why not ?” try to trade up for a better life. It can’t get worse !
Along with the unpredictability of things, I guess what struck me is just how much I take for granted. Not just (lack of) starvation or medical care, but basic, everyday things like will I have something to put on my feet today ? Or do I have a place to sleep, and if I do, will it have a roof ? You see how these people live, and you realize they ask themselves such questions (or don’t bother as they already know the answers are the same as they were the day before). There we were in this air-conditioned bus, going to our air-conditined rooms at this plush resort. And outside we’re seeing shacks (and that’s being generous) with no windows, often no doors, and sometimes, only marginal roofs. (Yes, I felt like shit).
And it doesn’t take going that far to find such conditions. A mere three blocks off the (nice) main drag in Cozumel (a popular diving and cruise ship destination), you will find similar housing situations. Someone earlier asked where Mexico lies, and I would definitely consider Mexico in that “third world” condition.
However, after seeing such conditions there, I took a trip to Belize. And I would consider that place even “lower” on the “third world” scale. A hurricane had recently come onshore. And talk about kicking a place when it’s down !
Anyway, the point is to get out and see for yourself before you make any judgements. I’m not saying you need to take a world tour, but go visit some of these places. And make sure you see more than a little isolated resort. Find out where the staff of that resort lives, and check out how they live.
I just happen to be in India right now. I didn’t consider India third world until I got here. After all, it has the world’s largest middle class, a booming tech industry, etc. I would have posted earlier, but the electricity went out last night =).
But the middle class is somewhat overated. An experienced college educated tech person who speaks perfect english might make $300 a month at a call center. They likely own a motorcycle (cars and gas are similar to American prices) and live in a home. They most likely do not have heat or a/c (temperatures reach 110+ in summer and 20 in winter- and call center people typically work night shifts and have to sleep through the heat of the day). They probably do not have hot water, but if they are lucky their shower is indoors. They cook on a gas range powered by a tank that sits in the middle of their kitchen floor. Most electronics are out of range (they are at American prices) except the cell phone, which is essential in any developing country because the land network isn’t good. Nobody has realiable electricity or safe water (they say the water in the cities is chlorinated- but do you really think they’re going to shut things down or even tell anyone if something goes wrong that day?).
I can look down from my “luxery apartment tower” and see slums. People live in knee high cardboard and plastic tents perched right on the edges of the loud dusty roads and open sewers. They bathe right at the side of the road anywhere there is an open spigot. Their kids, with distended stomachs and open sores, run up to cars and beg at red lights. I havn’t seen a lot of death or starvation, but I’ve seen plenty of polio and leprosy and other nasty but treatable diseases on the streets.
In Delhi, at night, the people that cart people around until the point of exhaustion on cycle rickshaws pull over to the side of the brighly lit and loud road and balance on their rickshaws to sleep. Taxi driver sleep in their cabs. Bus drivers sleep on top of their busses. Some people just plop down in the middle of the center dividers of the freeways. People with shops (usually a self-storage style concrete cube with a metal roll up door- sometimes a cardboard and plastic creation) roll down the door and sleep right in the shop wedged between the goods. The city seems just as full of people as in the day- except they are all asleep outside.
The pollution is horrible. The Delhi moon is hazy and orange. You can’t see the stars. There are no trash cans, and while I’ve seen dumps, I’m not quite sure how they get used. The sides of the road are strewn with trash. Trash everwhere- even deep in the Himalayas the gulches are filled with trash. In the heat the pollutiion will choke you. And slogging through shit isn’t that unusual an experience. There just arn’t enough toilet facilities for everyone, and those that do exist cost a bit of money and usually arn’t that preferable to plopping down wherever you happen to be.
People make their livings here in ways we’d consider absurd. You’ll see construction sites of freeways and high rises full of hundreds of rag clad people and machines sitting idle. People are less expensive than gasoline. People pack loads of hundreds of pounds on their bicycles or backs and take them across town. Open air barbers (with one razor for all) are the order of the day. A tailor’s shop is a room with a foot-powered sewing machine. People weld with no safety equiptment (or eye protection) right in the open air on the side of the road. A lot of food is cooked in street stalls, where sanitation and refridgeration are unheard of (but the food sure is good). Everywhere you look you see people working. There are millions of small shops and street stalls.
What strikes me most is not the unpredictability, but the danger. My apartment on the fifteenth floor doesn’t have smoke detectors. Busses zoom down one lane cliffside mountain roads at breakneck speeds so they can try to fit one more trip in the day. There are few traffic laws and no enforcment. It’s not uncommon to see huge trucks driving in the wrong lane in the dead of night with no lights. 1500 people die on India’s roads every day. There are open holes in the streets. The water in most places is from the same river they wash their clothes in, use the restroom in, and that their industry spews it’s untreated waste in. Usually things work out with minimal loss of life, but when there is an earthquake, industrial accident, disease outbreak or whatever, there arn’t things like building codes and emergency procedures to save you.
India is lucky in that it has decent medical care. But outside of the cities your hospital is going to be a shack with a green cross painted on it that says “clinic” and it’s a bumpy seven hour ride to a place with better antithestic than whiskey. And in hospitals you’re usually asked to pay for stuff like casts, medicines, whatevre upfront, even in emergency situations. Your family is expected to bathe, feed and otherwise take care of you and you better hope they ask for screened blood from volunteer clinics for transfusions and bring some clean syringes.
Don’t judge solely by appearances - sure, you may see what you and I would call “shacks”, with no windows and a tin roof, but people that live there often live fairly well – and are extremely house-proud. People constantly sweeping the floors, keeping the walls brightly painted and so on. Just cos it’s not a stone-built, air-con house, doesn’t mean you’re living in misery.
Whether I would call that living “fairly well” is an open question; however having food to eat, a home to be proud of, an income, etc. are all good things. I wonder whether these same people have access generally honest police protection, civil rights, competent public services, easily accessed potable water, antibiotics & general healthcare, and so on.
Let’s not forget that something like eight-hundred million people aren’t getting enough to eat. Here is a chart showing proportion undernourished population by country. When forty percent of a nation doesn’t get the minimum daily energy intake (you can search the site for the definitions), it is hard to argue that they are living fairly well.
Well, I think it is historically regarded as such by nearly everyone, including most Mexicans. However, it is certainly in the upper tier of countries that can be regarded as developed.
I live very close to Mexico, about 5 miles or so. I work right on the border, with many Mexican nationals. The city across from us, Juárez, has some terrible social problems, largely blamed on the fact that it acts as a magnet for migrants from the rest of Mexico and Central America. The older residents of the area tell me that live was decent there until the 1980s (anyone who lived there before 1980 is considered “old stock”, as the population has doubled or tripled since then), when growth got out of hand. I used to visit there quite often until the mid-1990s when the murder rate really surged.
Tijuana, Mexicali, and a whole string of other border towns which have sprung up also have these problems, though I am certain that Juarez is the worst of the lot.
When I went to the “interior” of Mexico for the first time, I was surprised by how relatively calm and peaceful it was, and how prosperous things seemed. The catch was a millions of people have abandoned these areas for Mexico City, the border cities, and many have also emigrated.
I know many Americans see immigration and think all Mexicans are aiming at coming here, but frankly what we see in this country is just secondary to the greater movement of people away from rural areas in Mexico itself. The Mexico City are has also surged two or three fold in the last 30 years or so.
This sort of rapid change causes problems that generally have not happened in the “first world” for quite some time now.
Many Americans that I know have never met a middle class (or upper class) Mexican, and seem to have no idea that they exist, but there are millions of them. And in many ways the middle class in Mexico is completely “Americanized”. What really stuns me is how their attitudes toward their poorer countrymen are often very similar to some of the old prejudices that Americans have held to “Mexicans” in general. There is a also racial divide in Mexico, though it is largely unspoken there. But the more European someone looks, or the less “Indian” someone is, generally determines what social class one is in - and I think this is true of most other Latin American nations. Some of the Mexicans I have worked with, who are middle/upper class citizens of that country, are somewhat put off or confounded by the fact that Americans don’t consider them “white” even though they are heavily European. In fact in terms of cultural values and lifestyle many middle class Mexicans are probably more “European” than the average white American.
I know I am off on a tangent, but my point is that it is a very heterogenous country, not all Mexicans fit the American image of what a “Mexican” is at all.
I am not too familiar with the far south of Mexico, but places like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Yucatán (away from the coast) are truly impoverished and underdeveloped, and have Native majorities. The situation there is more like that in Guatemala.
By the way, Costa Rica is probably at the cut off point between what would be considered “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “developing”, it is not actually richer than Mexico but is more stable and egalitarian, and has high standards of health and education. I would bet that Costa Rica matches the more ex-Communist countries of central Europe (Hungary or Poland).
Yes, I would have to second Colophon although sometimes I feel as though the type of poverty I see in urban India is very different from the type of poverty my parents grew up in on the Goa/Karnatak border. But hey, my parents grew up with no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing. They both had just enough to eat, but not much more. They studied by oil lamp light. They travelled by foot or would take wind-powered sailboats downstream to other villages. My grandparents houses had tile slats, wooden bars as walls and cow dung floors. The highlight of their lives was to walk to a movie theatre miles away and sit outside listening to the sound of the music. The biggest medical thing in their life was the neem tree-it was the source of almost everything medical. This was post-Independence India…so think the 40s-60s. And they were lower middle class.
When they told me this stuff I was like “whaaat! I feel so bad for you guys” and they got very, very huffy and were pretty much like “those were the best years of our life.” These are the people who are going to buy themselves their first luxury car, have every appliance known to man…they long for the days when their major chore was to make cow dung patties in the fire. The only thing they lament about the area now is how dirty it is-I guess back when they were growing up it was just a pristine fishing village. Now it is a big navy port.
And my grandmother still lives in that house with the wooden bars in front…that just happens to be the style of construction thereabouts. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all ghetto or whatever.