A country without cinemas

Can you name one? I have been to two, can you believe it! One is smack at the western edge of the Sahara desert unimaginatively named Western Sahara, and the other is actually our neighbour (!), Timor-Leste.

As an ignorant citizen of an almost developed country who has no inkling about the everyday lives of people in less fanciful places, unassumingly stepping foot in one for the first time was an eye opening experience. Read all about it in the papers, or watch them all on the telly or Youtube, but the reality would still slap you in the face, with a lasting reddish impression nonetheless (ouch!).

Ouch!

The impression is the lesson on being thankful for what we have. God knows how long we may enjoy the niceties in life before something happens and takes 'em away. No broadband, no highways, no smartphones - not a big problem for our grandads I bet, but for us it could be hell, no?

I assure you that in 2012 at certain places on the globe, some women in labour still give birth under a makeshift tent in the middle of the desert, and poor people still have to pay good money for a pint or two of blood to transfuse a sick family member. Let alone watching a movie in a theatre 'coz there ain't no cinemas! Yes honey, it took me a week to download one measly movie in these countries...

We tend to forget the painful past easily, a prominent Malay leader once lamented. And did you notice in Sex and the City the movie, there was a part where a certain Miss I'm-A-Trisexual was reading The Secret on a beach? Well, that self-help book just went on and on about being thankful. Have you read it? Samantha sure has..

You can have the book but not the bag, honey!