Moral Dilemma!?

Yesterday I was involved in a motorbike accident in Kupang, West Timor. Basically, a twelve year old kid drove straight into me, while I was indicating to go right. He was way too fast and he didn’t have a drivers license. Both of us had friends on the back, but luckily nobody got hurt apart from a few bruises and scratches. But this post isn’t actually about the accident. There was never any doubt in anybodys mind, that I was to blame whatsoever. Shit happens…

All of us went back to my guest house, where the owner of my bike tried to sort out the whole mess. He thought the damage to his bike will cost about 350.000 Rp (about 30 EUR or 35 USD) to repair. There was another foreigner present, who suggested that I pay for the damage, since I can afford it, whereas the parents of the kid will most likely have a hard time coming up with that kind of cash, it being almost a month’s salary. Now, I know that’s a lot of money for an indonesian family, but I think if I would have paid it would give everybody a totally wrong picture. He’s a tourist with lot’s of money, so never mind my own responsibility.

I didn’t like the way this guy was talking to me and personally, I think he’s a wanker, to put it bluntly. He got me thinking though, and I was wondering what other travelers out there think. Is it alright as a traveler to pay for damage you did not cause, but were involved in, so that a local family in a third world country does not have an additional burden on their wallet?

Boris, the sole author of Travel-Junkie.com, happened to get more than his fair share of the Wanderlust-gen and now tries very successfully to fulfill the role nature has foreseen for him. For that reason he can usually be found in some obscure, far-away region of Earth swimming with the big fish, chewing some beetle nut or chilling out in his hammock.
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Posted in Miscellaneous on 12 September 2007 | Read article in Deutsch | Share This | Comments Feed