#144 – a $450,000/year not enough to live

I recently spent a week visiting the North West coast of Ecuador. It was a very beautiful visit and at the same time I got to learn more about Ecuador. Just like many other countries around the world there’s a big gap between the rich and the poor, the big cities tend to have more services and some nice neighborhoods. The northwest cost and north part of Ecuador tend to be the poorest and sometimes more dangerous. Some parts that are close to the border with Colombia tend to be a hotbed for narco trafficking. I met a lot of nice people and heard few stories, the coast of Ecuador has very distinctive culture compare to the center and east part of Ecuador. I feel every time I visit the coast, I feel I am in Colombia more than I am in Ecuador; people are very warm, they like to chat and of course they love to listen to music and to dance.
I arrived at 9:30PM in a small town called Jipijapa (pronounced Hippi Happa), I didn’t want to stay here but I had no option because there were no bus services to go further at that time, which meant I had to spend the night until the next day. I was hungry so I ate from what was available from the street vendors. It was warm and humid so you tend to see a lot of insects especially cockroaches but after a while and lots of traveling you tend not to pay too much attention because it’s very frequent to see these things in many warm and humid countries whether here in Latin America or in Asia. I asked the vendor where can I find a place to sleep and he pointed me to a hotel across the street from the bus terminal. It was a house that the owner converted one level to make it a hostel/hotel. I couldn’t find the entrance or a reception area for the hotel so I knocked at the door and the lady answered me and came down and opened the door. She said she had only one room available so I was lucky. The budget accommodations here are sometimes nice and clean or could be a dump and most of the time the price doesn’t mean the quality of the accommodation much difference. At the end of the day, once you flip the light switch off you would think it’s a Sheraton.

What makes me wonder when I travel in these places is how people seem to be happy with the little they have in material sense. Many of the houses have tin roof tops and the old and poor ones have rusty roof top. Many of these houses have windows that don’t have glass, you could see some have covered a transparent plastic bags to look like glass windows. Some just put what looks like a bed sheet to act as a curtain. I remember on that night, you could hear Latin music and because of the humidity and hot weather with houses that have tin roof it makes it unbearable to be inside so you see many people sitting outside their houses. The neighbors next door to the hotel were sitting drinking beer while listening to the music and one of them was dancing in front of what you would call a house, and I looked at the house, it’s more of a one room that has two windows in front and doesn’t have glass windows, but if the music and the dance make any indication they seemed to be having a great time.

Next day I woke up and continued my trip and went further north along the coast, I went to a town called Canoe. Canoe is frequented by tourists, so you would expect that it’s full of fancy buildings, but no it’s not, it’s a very modest town, with mostly sandy roads and only one main street. I stopped by a restaurant to have dinner and noticed a young guy may be he was in his twenties, he was sitting at a table eating, I found out later that after the tourists just finished their dinner, he went and he started to eat the left overs. For a second, I thought it’s disgusting but then I thought maybe he’s happy and who said that the food is not clean. I think the most that hurts when you see something like this is when you think about all the food that gets wasted in restaurants in rich countries.

Next day when I woke up, I heard people screaming outside the hostel, it turns out the sewage in the street was about to flood the streets and the people who work in the municipality and the locals were arguing each one accusing the other they didn’t do their job of cleaning the sewage. With all of this, the general atmosphere everywhere I visited was poor but people seem to laugh and happy and even sometimes when you ask them they say they’re happy.
Couple of days after I visited the coast I went back to Cuenca, I was reading on the internet about a Canadian couple who earns $450,000 a year and they were complaining that they struggle in making a living while earning this huge amount of money (original link to the story). I also read about a lady in Florida who decided to leave in her will a $1.8 million house for her dog, and last year she gave $100,000 allowance for weekly haircuts and designer shopping for that dog (here’s the link if you want to read the story).
It makes you upset reading something like this, some people complain and waste their money on silly things but others struggle to have a roof on top of their heads. After all, you realize there’s something wrong in this world. I thought may be these so called rich people have been stripped of many other aspects of their lives to make them feel secure and unable to live happily with all the material wealth they have.