I just saw another one of those provide drinking water to an African village dealiebobbers.

which sounds like the right thing to do for our fellow man. 

Giving a village a good water supply can transform and even save lives. It doesn't take much, either. Just a simple well and a hand pump.

The problem is what happens after the pump gets installed.

The jungle telegraph will put the word out that so and so village has clean water and immediately someone from the village next door will show up with an empty bucket asking for water. If he's lucky he will simply be sent home empty handed. Most likely he will be roughed up and sent packing. The concept of sharing is often pretty alien to a lot of those people.

The other village will retaliate by coming back in force and there will be fights. If the other village loses (which is likely) they will send a nocturnal raiding party over to poison the well.

Then the now useless pump and wellhead will be torn up and sold for scrap and that will be the end of that.

Africa wins.

The other thing that often happens is that a widget factory may open there and will bring in outside leadership and do well. Then they make a mistake. The hire a local to a position of responsibility.

Take the department that makes the frammus, a part of the widget. The frammus department is doing well. They are easily keeping up with widget production. The workers are all carefully selected locals. One of them appears t be a bright star. Some suit near the top thinks it would be a good idea to promote him to department head of the frammus department. Bad move. The newly hired frammus department leader hires his brother-in-law to be his replacement. Inside a year all of the talent in the department has been replaced by the new department heads friends and relatives and the frammus department turns into a bottleneck because of incompetence, goofing off and absenteeism. The onetime leader of the entire widget factory is now the biggest bottleneck of the whole shebang.

With the frammus production so low total widget output is now in the dumps taking revenues with it. The whole place collapses and Africa wins again.

I do not know why but from what I have read this is the cycle of Africa. It's a shame, too because they have a tremendous amount of ressources that could easily be exploited and the place could easily become the breadbasket or even paradise of the world.

 

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY