Living right in the middle of development has positives and negatives. New Frontier Consulting is located in the Chinese countryside to help facilitate economic development where it needs to happen, but somtimes those negatives make you feel anew the need for progress.
We would all love for roads and bridges to go up in a week, but the truth is any development will take time, and that time will pass very slowly for some. Still the benefit of the finished road or bridge is well worth the wait.
Our town is trying to keep up with the growth and after months of brown outs every night, they began installing new transformers to provide electricity for all the village folks coming into town for work. And every time they work on the new electric grid, this side of town goes down.
Walking through the streets in China's county seats takes me back to what early settlers to America's West must have felt like going into town. There is more than one reason they wore boots, and one was the dust, dirt, and mud. The streets are paved here, but the nearness of contstruction and land moving disguises many our streets beyond any recognition of concrete.
There is a cost to development. Things do not function smoothly all the time, but they are improving much faster than any other country I can think of. It takes patience. We need to apply patience in so many ways. Patience in infrastructure development has been mentioned, but also patience in training all the millions of China's rural residents.
I guess, this is just an opportunity to remind myself to be patient when the electricity is out all day. That is what the frontier is like.
