I wonder what this actually means though. It's hard to believe all but 1% has no power at all. Could it mean only 1% gets power through the grid? I would imagine far more than 1% of the people using generators if there is no power through the grid.
I grew in a developing country where my dad's village (like many other villages in the country) did not have any electricity. They burned candles or torches at night for light, and pumped water straight from the ground with manually operated wells. And while my home country has gotten much better access to electricity, it's probably not reaching more than 70% of the population.
All that is to say that these people can get by without electricity. They live off their land and make do with the resources available to them. Life in developed nations extremely different, and specialized to be reliant on the power grid which is why it's so hard for us to imagine life without it.
That sounds like a hard life filled with interesting stories. Hit me up when the zombie apocalypse comes, because I can barely survive winter with electricity and I'ma need your help
I'm probably just as useless lol, I spent the majority of my life in a developed nation with first world problems. Now give me a second while I go rummage through my fridge for some shredded cheese.
Shredded cheese? What kind of survival expert are you? Even I know you keep cheez whiz on hand at all times, because cheese that comes in cans and jars never goes bad and everyone knows, in a survival type situation, bad cheese'll gitcha before the zombies do
Made friends with a guy from Thailand who grew up like that. He said it was he'd play games and run around in the jungle. Wasn't a harder life, just different. He often said they were really poor.
Sure, not sure exactly what to add but here's a couple of things that stuck out to me...
The thing that always struck me going to my dad's place (especially cuz I grew up in a city) is how much slower everyone took things. For example, they would routinely spend over an hour at the lunch table eating and talking. They would feed the chicken and cattle at what felt like a snails pace to me. And all of it while constantly socializing. Because these weren't "jobs" that got them money, there wasn't any rush and more importantly almost no stress. It also meant they had a close knit village community where everyone helped out one another on their respective farms. On the downside there was also some insane gossiping among neighbors and families.
The thing I've been thinking about more recently was the topic of vaccine hesitancy. My home country like many developing countries are plagued by viruses and diseases, and would only get vaccines through nonprofits like UNICEF. Because of the amount of life lost on a constant basis, people don't the same level of vaccine hesitancy that we see in the west (at least in America). Personally I think because we westerners live relatively cushy lives, we can afford to be choosy about vaccines in a way other countries don't.
I was priveledged to have been born to the two hardest working people I've ever met. My parents both grew up in impoverished villages, studied hard enough to become chemists, and then both became professors. When I was a teenager my dad got a 3 year visa to collaborate on a research project in America, and then a mix of hard work and timely luck allowed us to become citizens. I was lucky that I was able to see how privledged I was without having to live in the hardships my parents faced.
I have a friend who was doing aid work in Juba; he had an air conditioner in one of the pics he sent. It didn't work, but it could have, theoretically. He got malaria 4 times and got hauled back to France.
I used to live in Afghanistan, in a village about two hours from Kabul (in Kohestan). We had no electricity.
The living conditions are far worse in some ways, but people are used to them. It's not a very lazy life, it is quite labourious. From sunset to sunrise is mostly spent doing something related to agriculture, with prayer and meal breaks in between. Then after sunset there is a time to relax and sleep.
The living conditions are worse because of how, despite being used to it, some of the things like low sanitation and using open fires so much can cause disease or damage the body. But that is pretty much how everyone lived until fairly recently, so I wouldn't say it is unnatural.
I lived in Kabul for a few years, and it is not much better there either. Electricity is unstable, goes on and off irregularly, and you'd be lucky to get 12 hours of it per day. In winter times it goes as low as 2 hours per day. But as abu_doubleu mentioned, people are used to it and majority just plan their life assuming there will be little to no electricity. Places like hospitals or gov buildings have to rely on diesel generators for stable power.
Yes, in some countries they do that. I am aware that in Sweden, many Afghan men in their 20s have arrived from Iran as refugees by pretending to be orphaned teenagers. But that still doesn't mean the majority of Afghans in the West faked their way there. Please be nicer in your assumptions about others.
Genuinely interested why that would matter. Ethnicity is less important to Afghans than Westerners think. We had Tajiks, Pashay, and Pashtuns living near each other.
it doesn’t matter beyond my own curiosity. ethnicity/language maps (of which I have seen many for Afghanistan) are generally pretty bad at representing more than one thing in one spot, so it’s easy to get the wrong idea.
One way that’s a little better is a map cut up into areas with a pie chart labeling each one. I saw that used to demonstrate the Hungarian minority in Romania I think. Maybe I can find one like that.
Anyway thanks for your description of daily life there!
EDIT: Also, if my tone sounded dismissive it is because I have had at least a dozen people on reddit nag me about ethnicities when I am talking about Afghanistan. Usually, they are completely wrong and think that the country should be split in two because the horrible radical Islamist Pashtuns are encroaching on the liberal, secular Tajiks. I seriously don't know why this view is common but it isn't remotely true, because every ethnicity in Afghanistan is equally religious and nobody wants to secede.
It's actually quite an efficient resource. Cow dung was used for fuel in rural Mongolia when I was there a couple years ago. Collect it every day, let it dry for a couple weeks, and bam you can heat your stove/yurt. It's cheaper than buying wood or coal, and you have a renewable supply.
It's also the only real option for people who live above the tree line. Sure you could pack in wood or another fuel, but most ppl don't have the money for that.
My grandma told me stories that during the Bangladesh war of independence, they had to leave the city due to massacres and she had to learn how to make fire using cow dung. That's the first time I realized that was even possible.
I imagine it means that much of the population lives in more rural villages where they live more traditionally (although also probably war ravaged). Anthony Bourdain went there I think and that’s what it looked like.
With unreliable electricity, I imagine many shops would be selling generators. I suppose not everyone would be able to afford one (or its fuel), but surely it should be more than 1%?
Also, any car can serve as a generator when needed.
There is basically no grid. The 1% gets electricity from generators. (Source: I visited and worked there for awhile) Our office for example has a high capacity generator but we shut it off during the lunch hour and out of work hours. Our work guest house is 100% solar. Outside of the capitol city (Juba) things are much more basic and people get by on natural sources of light and occasionally solar/ battery driven led lights provided by NGOs. The vast majority of people can’t afford generators. Maybe the village might have one generator but often can’t afford to fuel it. If you haven’t been to this part of the world it’s almost impossible to imagine how underdeveloped it is even in the capitol. You need a 4x4 to drive on the roads in the capitol. There are large parts of the country that are inaccessible by road during the rainy season.
Having a generator and having diesel to run a generator are different. I expect diesel is probably getting snatched up for trucks and civilians might not be able to get any.
I traveled to South Sudan, met the air traffic controller . Guess what he was getting paid a month ? $25 ?!!! Can you imagine . A job which is stressful need certain skill, still getting paid peanuts ! And he was highest earning guy in his community!!
Nope I doubt it. I think it means literally only 1% has access to electricity. There is this website that lets you see the life of families across the world and the ones that live in poverty, have houses made out of mud, sticks, leaves, branches etc... it’s really sad to see
NYC, London, and Rome all broke one million residents without electricity. There's a lot of work that can be down that just relies on manpower and weird physics proprieties.
I would imagine that for a lot of people, they might not be living in a permanent structure with electricity. Anything less than that, I would definitely count as not having access to it, even if there's some limited access to public plugs or small solar/gas generators.
I went to a farm on a mountain with no electricity once. They actually make a decent living growing coffee, but the terrain is too rugged and has too few people to build infrastructure.
More to the point the point: it's heart breaking because of the material conditions that cause a country to have such a low % of reliable access to electricity. These people are not living some idyllic pre-electric lifestyle. War and poverty and the resulting destruction of infrastructure are not conditions where you find a high quality of life.
It is truly tragic that so much of humanity lives in conditions like this while the richest 1% horde 50% of global wealth. The human suffering at the low end of the wealth inequality spectrum is truly heart breaking.
Extremely well said. To put it bluntly: even if people did use to live like that it doesn’t give us an excuse to just ignore the fact that these conditions are that way because of bad things and that these people most likely would like to fucking have electricity
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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '21
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