Aug 30. 2014. MONEY

My Tanzania cash goes off into the distance… I am running short of money. My both bank accounts were affected by fraudulent activities, so I had to shut down both cards. How can I withdraw the cash without cards? Both banks told me that they already sent new cards to Tanzania, but it has not still arrived for a month. When I found out that someone in Canada stole hundreds of dollars in my one of accounts, I could not know where my bank information leakage happened. But I realized later that the other account had the same problem as my first one, so I know where the problem came from. I used both cards from the ATM, located in the expensive hotel (unnamable to avoid defame their reputation…) in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Now I regret why I had an act of sheer bravado to have an expensive meal there just before leaving Sierra Leone. I wished I wanted to have a good memory with the best food in the best place in Sierra Leone, but unexpectedly, I am kicking up a fuss every time when I try to contact both banks through Skype to explain my situation. I have never worried about the confidentially of my bank information, but now I am worrying where I will have to withdraw money with the card to avoid those fraudulent acts any more.

There are many things that we cannot buy. Probably, I am punished for squandering money at the last minute. I artificially wanted to make the best memory of Sierra Leone, and it was an improvised and unscheduled visit. Before I knew it, I might have wanted to thrust unpleasant memories of Sierra Leone into the limbo of forgotten things by experiencing the finest class of food, facility, and mood. I believed that spending much money should be irrelevant to proving who I was, but you know, sometimes we want to be given a warm reception, boasting of the strength of MONEY, just like we seem to have everything… We may delude ourselves that we can do everything we want with the piece of paper, MONEY.

There is a great old movie, <Indecent Proposal> by starring Demi Moore. The movie was screened more than 20 years ago, in 1993, but I watched it through Netflix a year ago. A lovely couple got married and tried to live a happy life. But the reality was that the man could never have a job in the aftermath of recession hit, and they could not even receive financial aid because of bad personal credit. They were clutching at any straw to earn the MONEY. Their last choice was to expect the miracle; going to Vegas to win the MONEY. Surprisingly, they won all the MONEY in the beginning, and they seemed to reach their maximum happiness on the bed littering with enormous scraps of dollars. But, there were no limits to man’s greed; they needed more, stayed in Vegas longer, and they came across a millionaire. The millionaire had a crush on that married woman, so he ended up with suggesting indecent proposal to married husband that if he could borrow her just for one night, paying one million dollars. Can we buy everything what we want? Can we even buy love and win someone’s heart within a night with a $1,000,000? A millionaire had everything but love, and he believed he could also use his money to achieve his love. What do you think?

We want better things. Not always, but mostly. Normally, we can get the better one if we have more money. Better home, better car, better school, better food, better condition… At some point, fancy visible materials have become absolute criteria to judge people. Someone is driving a car manufactured at the blah blah, someone are earning how much money at the blah blah, someone’s family own how much property blah blah… It would be endless to enumerate. What is the criterion for happiness? Maybe, all individuals have different standard that can make happy. But those varieties have become unification, to the MONEY. I cannot deny that MONEY is connected to everywhere. Be that as it may, MONEY does not have to be everything for our lives.

TFR is inversely proportional to education level, and education level may be directly proportional to wealth. But it is hard to say if MONEY is proportional to your happy index. Here is the Happy Planet Index (HPI) that ignores money-related figures, such as GDP and HDI. Is our ultimate goal is to be rich? Or to be happy and healthy? Although HPI is not the measurement of which country is the happiest, but the function of subjective life satisfaction, life expectancy, and ecological footprint. And it is interesting to see that Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cuba ranked within 10^th out of 151 countries whereas the U.S. ranked 104^th.

<Happy Planet Index>

http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/

There should be something that leads us to our ultimate satisfaction. But it cannot be MONEY. Yes, waiting night and day for mails from U.S. banks irritates me. My automatic payment has all stopped, my wallet is so empty, and I am afraid to be famished. But I want to believe that this unpleasant experience itself should be invaluable that I cannot even pay for. Experiencing Ebola outbreak in the epicenter, Sierra Leone certainly dropped me into emotional fatigue. But it will be the biggest asset I have had because not everyone had chance to see what it was at close range. And nobody would pay to see it. Perhaps, finding something that we cannot set the price or value would be the most precious property that we have to pursue for our entire life. So, let’s play hide-and-seek to find it!

The last moment to leave Sierra Leone.
What memory of Sierra Leone do I have? What memory should I cherish?