Hong Kong officials are obsessed with public health and safety. Every conceivable risk has been identified and then warned against. Every activity seems fraught with danger, if you take the time to read all the millions of signs dotting every public (and many private) walls.
It occurred to me today when I was on the Hong Kong MTR (Mass Transport Railway, like the tube), listening to the ridiculously frequent Health and Safety announcements [Hold on to the handrail at all times, Hold on to the handrail...keep holding it, don't stop holding it...Keep holding the bloody handrail] that I realised I had forgotten to post my blog about health and safety in South East Asia.
Well, actually, if it was about health and safety then it would be a pretty short blog as the south east Asians don’t have any concept of what this means.
Coming from the UK, where you have to wear a hard hat to bring a builder his lunchtime sandwiches, or wear full high-vis day-glo body armour to cross a site road, I was delighted and amused by this at first.
“Oooh…look at that bloke on the Laotian building site wearing a straw hat, rather than a hard hat. And above him, look at that bloke standing under that wobbly pile of bricks. Oh and – ha, ha, ha – look at that guy 50ms up a scaffold with no rail and no harness painting the roof on his tiptoes.”
After a while I realised when people would point these sanity contraventions out that it had ceased to be strange. Even some seriously odd things. “What? Oh, yeah I see it, a wheelbarrow full of bricks being winched 12 stories up a building.
“Wait, are those BRICKS falling out? Yes, it appears they are.”
Seriously, some of the things that you see in South East Asia are so that’s-not-ok, what-are-you-doing, don’t-be-a-fucking-idiot unsafe that a 2-year-old would point at the person doing whatever it is and say: ‘moron’. Not that I’m some kind of – god forbid – health and safety inspector but there are a few that make me want to get my virtual clipboard out and start tutting with the best of them.
These include:
1. In many places petrol is sold at roadside shacks in plastic litre-size soft drink bottles. Soft drinks are also sold, often at the same places, in plastic litre-size soft drink bottles.
2. Scaffolding seems to be made out of balsa wood/kindling.
3. Dogs (I know they’re not capable of knowing what they’re doing but still) lying in packs in the middle of the road asleep. So much so that bikes have to swerve to avoid them and cars often have to wake them up so they can drive.
4. Motorbikes being ridden by four or five people, their kids, their dogs, a couple of chairs, a table, wardrobes, livestock, trees, goldfish in bags, full-size mirrors etc.
5. Temples open to the public often have massive holes in the ground. At Angkor Wat there are ditches cleverly overgrown with long grass; at Ayutthaya after sunset one evening I managed to fall into an open manhole.
I could go on but if you’ve been to SE Asia you’ll know what I’m talking about. Life is cheap here and people do what they can to get by. If necessity is the mother of invention, poverty is the mother of necessity.
And yet, despite the nuttiness of it all, I do like the way people are allowed to think for themselves, expected to look out for themselves, rather than in England or Hong Kong where the nanny states assume you have a mental age of 6 and the self-preservation instincts of a pissed lemming.
