Impacts 3. Struggling to make ends meet(1/2)

This happened a few months back. I was meaning to write abt it in the blog but forgot completely. Jes remembered that I didn’t write it afterall. My friends and I were having one of those long discussions we used to have every now and then on the terrace about worldly matters. Lol.

I used to work in a construction company and was incharge of handling the quotation part. A client would come with the drawings of his house and I made a rough estimate of how much we were gonna charge for each floor for the foundation and the finishing based on factors referring to the drawings. And if u were to build lets say a house consisting of 8floors of an AVERAGE sized house, it would come up to a certain figure(don’t forget this point). So we took into estimation that an average individual gets lets say Rf6000 per month. But to make this interesting lets say that he actually SAVES Rf5000 each month after paying phone bills, net, food, electric, tuitions on kids, books, clothing, kasauti package, etc etc.

We found out that it would take him exactly 40YEARS to come up with Rf2,400,000 to complete the construction for his house………for ONLY the foundation. Meaning for the whole project it would take him around 80Years to collect that amount of money. Then lets look around Male’. How many houses do you see under construction to be made into 8floors and some even more? So the question now arises how do they do it? Where does all the money come from. And this is a community where hundreds and thousands of ppl are struggling to make ends meet.

Im not implying that all the owners of those houses are thieves etc etc. We DO have the option of doing it the Maldivian way of sharing the expense amongst the family members and uncles and aunts. And most ppl prefer taking loans to help them with the funds needed. But what about an average person who is making an HONEST living refusing to fall victim to fraud, theft, bribery and whose parents dont have the means of capital to start his own business or a family business?

So whats the whole point of this post? Quite frankly I didn’t think up of a point around which to build up this post on. But then again it might be that Maldivians are payed that little. We should not be struggling to make ends meet. There should be a minimum wage that would ensure each individual to live peacefully without having to take 2 or 3 jobs at once and cramping up the whole family into tiny suffocating rooms. A way for the youth to survive without being dependant on their parents. A survey needs to be carried out throughout Male’ and the islands distributing them into different regions to find how much an individual would require to make ends meet. Then a minimum wage should be allocated by the government or any other means they choose to do it to implement that. So that Maldivians can actually SAVE from their salaries without having to bleed for it.

We see tourists coming into our country all the time. Most of them aren’t big businessmen or merchants. Most of them are people who live normal average lives back at their countries. But still they manage to save more than enough to travel thousands of miles to resorts with their families for vacations. Us Average Maldivians on the other hand have some choices too. “where shall we go for our holidays honey? Ive taken some time off from the office”. “Oh! I know. Lets go to Villingili, or we can go to kuda bandos. Theres even hulhumale’ now. And if it’s a long holiday we can always go to an island of a relative same as we did last year and the year before that. Yayyyy!!!”.