Cultural Differences with TV and Death

I usually catch the morning news with breakfast in the restaurant or canteen, whatever you prefer to call it. And while I am eating my fried eggs and drinking some tropical fresh fruit squash and I am invited to witness first hand horrendous car crashes and incidents of murder and mayhem in full technicolour. Now coming from Britain you never see a dead body on TV. It is described as being morbid and unnecessary and ghoulish even. So to see the police pulling a murdered woman out of a river with the wire used to tie her up with and stop her swimming still around her legs and arms, I found almost sickening. It was like some nasty horror movie and it was quite distasteful. And then the news switches to a car crash in which 2 died, and the police are looking at the crumpled remains of the driver and putting a newspaper over his head but the camera still saw all. And the other driver was laid out on the road with a black trash bag covering his head, it was most disturbing. Then some poor guy who had been the victim of a hit and run was lying on the road with his shoes used as weights for the piece of cardboard covering his body but again the cameraman managed to position his camera to see under the cardboard and see the guys face distorted as it was squashed up against the road surface. I don’t really see the point of catching the nasty side of all this destruction, yes we all know people die in car crashes and get murdered and yes it is all horrible and gruesome and most people would rather not have this shoved in there face while eating. But here in Latin America it is the norm to have it on the TV news and front page of newspapers, perhaps it is to convince most people that your miserable life here in the third world isn’t that bad after all, you were not killed by a murderer or died in a high speed crash so you should be grateful you whiners. Life can be depressing enough without having this stuff force fed to you, if all you have to look forward to everyday is exploitation at work and poor salaries and living in a dust bowl called Lima then perhaps dying in a crash isn’t that bad after all.

Dead Bank Robber on the front of a Costa Rican News paper

The jungle has turned into Scotland again overnight and it is cold today and drizzling with rain and very foggy and some of the guys are hoping the fog lifts as the flights today will be cancelled otherwise. I am still baffled by the cold weather, how come if we are so close to the equator that we can have this very cold wind. Far too miserable for me.