Anti-Climacus

The flip side to yesterday's musings on colonialism at Undisclosed Tropical Island is the less readily apparent facts. One day we took a bus tour of the northern part of the island (the southern part being more mountainous and so less inhabited), and it was not hard to notice the housing conditions were frequently sub-standard. As it happened, that evening I had dinner with someone who works for an NGO that disburses grant money to fund infrastructure projects across the world, and as additional luck would have it, her territory had previously been the Caribbean, including Undisclosed Tropical Island (though she'd never been before). She judged the island to be at least comparatively well-off: the telltale signs for worry were non-existent--the children all appeared well-fed and there were a strikingly large number of schools at all levels. Add to this some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much our hotel might reasonably clear in a year, the information supplied by our driver (who used to work construction) about the costs associated with building the hotel--in the millions just for stone--, a rough calculation of how much a good dedicated taxi driver might make in a year (there's a fair chance he makes more than I do now in US dollars, and very good he makes more than I did as a grad student), and one might begin to suspect that these American eyes only capable of seeing poverty might have been missing part of the story.

It's not difficult to see the other side: many of the homes built using government grant money (it sounded a lot like our driver named an amount in the hundreds of thousands, but I'm assuming I misheard--though it is all beachfront property so it's not impossible) have additions put on, and rather nice ones; it's possible that the sugar cane industry--shut down by the government in the middle of the last decade--might have been shut down not only because it ceased to be economically viable to manufacture on the island, but also because alternative revenue sources (i.e. tourism) could make up the difference. And this is to say nothing of the somewhat condescending idea that I might be able to look around and tell who is doing well and who is doing badly, or take the pulse of the whole island from what a vacation can indicate.*
 

*Attempts to wikipedia statistics in order to get a better sense were not particularly helpful, which just goes to show, students, that wikipedia is for the lazy and won't get you all the information you might need.