What is 'development' anyway?

Hardly any paid work, houses that fall down every few years, an ‘out-of-date’ system of bride-price, a poor transport network and communication system...the list goes on. These things are every-day realities in the lives of millions of rural Papua New Guineans.

However, what, exactly, is wrong with any of them?

It’s just that I have a problem with categorising countries into ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, like developed countries are inherently superior to all others. Making an exception for better health care, which of course I think is very good, have we done ourselves any favours by getting rid of all of the above and replacing them with salaries, expensive houses, cars, cell phones, exotic holidays and even marriage as we know it?

In a Papua New Guinea village, few people receive a salaried income. But no-one goes hungry and everyone has a house to sleep in, provided they’re willing to work for both (i.e. build their own house and tend their plot of land).

In a Papua New Guinea village, houses do not last like buildings in the West and they’re not as big or as comfortable. But everyone owns their own house, no one pays rent, and no one has a mortgage. Houses are rebuilt every 5-10 years or so with material freely available from the abundant natural resources available to all.

In a Papua New Guinea village, a man pays bride price for his wife. But the husband, and many families in his village who helped with the payment, have now invested in this woman and so have a vested interest in looking after her. And, importantly, the wife's family have been compensated for losing a valuable helper and member of their community.The man has shown he is serious about marrying her; the husband's village has shown that they’d like her to become a part of their community.

In a Papua New Guinea village, few people travel widely; most grow old in the same village they were born in. But no old person is hidden away in a special home because their family doesn’t have the time to look after them. Older folks get looked after by their children and others, eating every meal with them, seeing their grandchildren every day and constantly being part of a community until they die. Few people travel widely, but when they do travel, even if they turn up unannounced, there is always a place to stay and food to eat. Hospitality is valued.

In a Papua New Guinea village there are no landline telephones or computers for internet (although now, there may well be cell phones). But they do have this really cool drum called a ‘garamut’ which can be heard from miles away :-) Different drum beats signify different things: an important visitor has arrived, someone has died, there is a fight...

Ok, so that last point isn’t really an improvement on cell phones and email access, but my point is that I really like many things about Papua New Guinean culture. I like how it’s relationship-oriented.

Obviously, I’ve presented an overly-rosy picture in the descriptions above. Sometimes people do go hungry, not hungry to the point of death, but hungry nevertheless. Sometimes a community may pay bride price because they owe the family in question something, not necessarily because they totally approve of the marriage. Sometimes old people are not looked after like they should be. Sometimes poor transport means that access to medicine is limited. A man in the village I stayed in for five weeks during orientation fell out of a tree, was paralysed instantly, and had to wait 3 hours for a vehicle to drive past before he could start the 2 hour bumpy ride to a hospital in the back of a flat-bed lorry. Life in Paua New Guinea is not paradise.

However, I wonder how much of our ‘development’ actually increases happiness. High powered, high pressured jobs, ‘lowly’ mind-numbing jobs, mortgages, traffic jams, pollution, family breakups. Sometimes, during surveys, when I’m living in these PNG villages, I wonder what it would be like to settle down there and learn to build a bush house and farm my land. Would I have been happier having grown up in one of these villages, living off the food that my land produces, with my friends and family around me, or would I be happier living the life an average Brit leads? I don’t know. But I know that I just don’t like the assumption that the West’s society is in better condition because of ‘development’. What is development anyway?

Sorry, this is a little more philosophical than normal. I couldn’t help it. This issue bugs me. Any thoughts? (No, this doesn’t intentionally follow the last post.)