Why is Sri Lanka Poor?

I'm sure there are many global political and economic reasons for Sri Lanka's relatively low income per person, to do with balance of trade, commodity prices and of course the ongoing civil conflict in the country.

However, that stuff is very complicated and I haven't got the knowledge or the space to go into all that in this blog. My theory is more simple, and it is that it is impossible to get anything done here!

Taking an everyday example – today I will do the laundry...

First of all, because of the heat and humidity (leading to sweat), the mud roads and the grubby buses, I have to do laundry more often than back home in the UK. So, having accumulated a large pile of dirty clothes I go and fetch the washing machine from the kitchen, and put it outside - yes, all 40 kilos of top-loader have to be moved outside on to the porch. It's 7am Saturday, the sun is shining and I'm feeling optimistic about having nice clean clothes by the evening.

Now, you might be thinking "well, at least they have a washing machine" and this is a fair point: a large number of people here wash with their hands in a pond or tank (reservoir), so we are lucky in that respect. Our host family had to work abroad to get enough money for a washing machine, with Amma (host mother) going to the Persian Gulf four times in domestic service. Also, the eldest son is in Japan where he works as an engineer. But they have a washing machine which is half the battle.

A local bathing place and laundry spot, populated with water monitors (see my earlier blog post).

Anyway, now I need soap powder. I jump on Tatha's bike - of the old fashioned police bicycle style - and head down the dirt track to the main Kadurupokuna road where there are some shops. In fact, within ten minutes bike ride there are about 30 shops selling soap powder and other groceries, and none of them seem to make much money. It seems that in Sri Lanka if someone has a good business idea, everyone else tries to jump on the bandwagon and none of them end up making much money. Nevertheless, shopkeeping is generally considered a reasonable business.

Arriving at the nearest kiosk, I find that they have only tiny packets of soap powder - enough for a couple of shirts maybe. These sachets are popular here because so many people are low paid or underemployed they don't have enough cash to buy bulk boxes. Therefore soap powder, toothpaste, shampoo and milk powder can all be bought in tiny packets with only one or two portions. With inflation running at 30 percent at the moment it seems unlikely that most people will start upgrading to the economy bulk size! So our shopkeeper, dressed in a sarong an sporting a hearty "rice belly", passes me the two packets of "Sunlight" and with the insanely annoying radio jingle of this soap brand ringing in my ears I cycle back to the house.

Our large shopkeeper with tiny packets of soap.

It is now 8am, and I'm back at the washing machine, having loaded the clothes, connected the water, added my tiny sachets of soap and plugged in the power supply. Switching on the wash, I sit down to a cup of coffee made with hot water supplied by our host family’s grandmother, Athamma. She boiled it over a wood-burning stove (another economy measure – nine out of ten people in our region cook everything over wood collected from the forest). I’m starting to relax now – maybe I will have a nice clean shirt this afternoon.

Alerted by a lack of noise on the veranda, I dash out to find that due to the weak electricity supply, the machine has switched itself off while filling up the drum. In our area it is common for the electricity to be out for a whole day or night, and when it is on it regularly isn’t enough to power even a low energy light bulb. So it’s now 9 am, and depressingly I’m still at stage one. The only thing to do now is wait for the current to increase.

Now the day is getting hotter – maybe 33 degrees Celsius in the shade. There’s still no current so using the fan, blogging or watching TV are all out of the question. After an hour of power-out and reading last week’s newspaper, the current comes back on and I finally get the washing machine going. Now I settle down with the computer to get through that pile of emails.

Some time, and two or three snails-pace dial up emails later, the machine has finally finished and emptied its waste water onto the pineapple patch (the place where the papaya pinching parakeet hangs out). It is now 11am and the sun is very bright, so I get the clothes out on the line to dry.

Twelve noon and due to the baking equatorial sunshine the clothes should soon be dry – but I hear a shout from Athamma out in the garden: “wahinnavar” – it’s raining! So we pull down armfuls of the washing and bring them in, getting soaked by the monsoon shower in the process. I know that Sri Lanka is not alone in having regular rainfall, but this time it’s just taking the mick!

Not just laundry

Maybe my washing is a trivial example, but in my experience getting anything done here is a similar process. I am told that things are more efficient in Colombo, but in the rural areas people seem to accept a slow pace of life, and they are relaxed about achieving things over weeks and months rather than days. This also offers some explanation for why though the Sri Lankan economy is growing, it has not developed as quickly as other Asian economies, and still has a very long way to go before they have the comfortable living standards we consider normal in the UK.

So, why is Sri Lanka poor? Perhaps it is because it is such a lot of work to get even simple things like laundry done, and there is not much you can do about it. You can choose whether to work like mad and achieve one or two things a day, or you can sit back and relax and enjoy the sunshine, accepting you won’t achieve much. I’ve tried both and I know which is more fun...