View from a village

(This may be shared freely as long as it is kept intact).

I have visited a village where every house is made of mud and thatch. There is no glass. No iron sheets. Floors are made from beaten earth. People are dressed in woven rags or animal skins. Their teeth are blackened and twisted or missing. Many have sores or the scars they leave behind, the result of disease. Few are old. Many are children, though many of them will not reach adulthood. Perhaps one in five does not see their fifth birthday. Hunger is common, despite the chickens and goats running around the settlement. Harvests are plentiful or sparse at the whim of the gods. When there is great hunger, sometimes there is war, a fight for scarce resources. There is no piped water. It has to be carried from the far-off river in earthenware jars. There are no baths or showers, no flush toilets. Not even pit latrines have reached this village so cholera and diphtheria are commonplace. There is no electricity, no television, no radio. Not even books or a school. Children learn what they need to know at their parents’ side and, if they are lucky, are later apprenticed to an artisan to learn a trade.

There is no hospital or clinic, but wise women and wizards invoke spirits and use barks and roots from the haunted forest. Some are effective, some useless or worse. Many women die in childbirth. They cannot control their fertility. Children come when the gods decree and depart as mysteriously, though rituals and prayers sometimes help.

No-one from this village will become rich or travel more than a few miles from where they were born, unless in pursuit of war. They will not fly in a plane, ride in a car or even on a bicycle. When they look heavenwards they cannot contemplate sending one of their number to walk on the moon or a craft on a voyage through the solar system and beyond, bearing pictures of home and beaming back pictures of strange worlds from the coldness of space.

Their world and their lives are the village, the tales of their ancestors and dreams of a life beyond death when the struggle to survive is finally lost.

Seeing this village reminded me in many respects of others I had seen in Africa. I rode through it in a driverless buggy, listening to a commentary as I watched villagers frozen in their activities and imagined their lives. For this was the Jorvik Centre in York, the reconstruction of a Viking settlement that existed over a 1,000 years before, yet surely representative of the lives of the bulk of humanity from the depths of history to almost the present. Even today you are the exception if you are never hungry. In the sense of having no food at all. Not missing lunch. You are in the minority if you can read, if you have been educated, have running water, have electricity.

If you expect your children to outlive you, you are privileged indeed.

So please stop complaining. We live in a golden age of human achievement. Telepathy has been realized with mobile phones – you can talk to your loved one wherever they may be. You can travel the world either physically or from the comfort and safety of your armchair. If you are sick you expect to be made well. Treasures beyond the imaginings of Kings and Queens of old are on every high street and within your grasp.

Okay, you are of the privileged elite of the planet if you are reading this. But even in the rest of the world, where insecurity, sickness and death are commonplace, it is still a golden age or, at the very worst, it is no worse than in the Jorvik village.

The trickle down theory of development may have turned out to be a crock of shit, but there are still crumbs from the table of the rich. Like bicycles and pit latrines. Chlorination tablets and vaccinations. Condoms and mosquito nets. Radios and books. Metal tools and spectacles. Hybrid crops and fertilizer. Jobs, maybe back-breaking, unsafe and lowly paid, but still a world away from Jorvik village.

If you visit Jorvik village and say you would prefer to live there than live in the modern world, I won’t call you a liar, but I will find it hard to believe. We have never had it so good. There is much to be proud of and much to enjoy.

Yes, I know it is easy to see the negative, but I am not thinking of that today. Sometimes we should remember the positive.

If you want a challenge, try to make things a little bit better. Picture the world you want to live in and do what ever you can to make it reality. This is how we have arrived at today. Everything human made was once a dream in someone’s head.