When Essentials become Luxuries

My twelve year old daughter took part in a speech competition yesterday. The participants had to choose between three topics. She chose to speak about conservation and eventually decided to focus on global warming. This became a family affair as we all dug in to get information that could be used in her speech, starting with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and following this up with documentaries recently screened on local TV about the topic. Then the most difficult part came, where the essentials had to be reduced to a speech no longer than 5 minutes in language that she was comfortable with as a twelve year old. She didn’t win but she did well. We are very proud of her.
As part of the preparation for this speech, one of the books consulted recently appeared in Afrikaans, the title which translates to English as The Perfect Storm. One of the chapters was written by Leonard Sweet and then translated into Afrikaans. In this chapter he writes that in affluent countries like the USA, on average every person uses between 1000 and 2000 litres of fresh water daily! In poor countries like Tanzania, each person uses between 2 and 5 litres of fresh water daily! I can’t remember who it was that once said that we will stop making war about oil somewhere in the future and then people will start making war about fresh water.
Southern Africa has just experienced a bad drought, but fortunately it started raining over the weekend. I went into a fairly remote area of Swaziland today, sliding and slipping on the gravel road which leads up to my destination. My car’s a mess, all covered with mud, but I’m thankful for the rain!
As I was driving along, noticing streams running and water holes filled with muddy water, I thought about the words of Leonard Sweet. By the world’s standards we are definitely not rich. But we have so much – so many luxury items that are not essential to survive on: TV, computers, DVD players, electric shaver, cell phones, two sons at university! And then I thought to myself how we would survive if we had only the most basic things and how it would feel if five litres of water was considered a luxury instead of the normal two.
A friend of mine used to be a pastor in a fairly wealthy congregation in Pretoria (South Africa). One day he said to me that he just wished the day would come when he was no longer the poorest person in the congregation and could do the same things which his church members could do for recreation. My immediate response was that I envy him. I wish the day would come when I was no longer the richest person in my congregation, when I didn’t have to feel guilty every time I bought something which could be considered as a luxury item.
I’ve come to terms with the situation in which we are, but there are times when I still ask myself the question if we don’t have way too much.
Robert Heilbroner suggested the following as a way to start getting an understanding of how a billion people are living today:

• First, take out all the furniture: leave a few old blankets, a kitchen table, maybe a wooden chair. You’ve never had a bed, remember.
• Second, throw out your clothes. Each person in the family may keep the oldest suit or dress, a shirt or blouse. The head of the family has the only pair of shoes.
• Third, all kitchen appliances have vanished. Keep a box of matches, a small bag of flour, some sugar and salt and a handful of onions, a dish of dried beans. Rescue some mouldy potatoes from the garbage can; those are tonight’s meal.
• Fourth, dismantle the bathroom, shut off the running water, take out the wiring and the lights and everything that runs by electricity.
• Fifth, take away the house and move the family into the tool shed.
• Sixth, no more postman, fireman, government services. The two-class-room school is three miles away but only two of your seven children attend anyway, and they must walk.
• Seventh, throw out your bankbooks, stock certificates, pension plans, and insurance policies. You now have a cash hoard of $5.
• Eighth, get out and start cultivating three acres. Try hard to raise $300 in cash crops because your landlord wants one-third and your moneylender 10%.
• Ninth, find some way for your children to bring in a little extra money so you have something to eat most days. But it won’t be enough to keep bodies healthy, so lop off 25 to 30 years of your life.

This isn’t unrealistic. Many people I know in Swaziland, live in exactly these kind of circumstances. But most of us will never be able to understand this.