The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “infrastructure” as “the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g., buildings, roads, and power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.“

Buildings

In Africa buildings are often made of mud and cow dung or random peices of plywood. Some older style houses are made of leaves:

In Japan buildings look like this:

Roads/Rail

In Africa it sometimes takes 2 days to cover 220 km, in Japan you will get there in 2 hours on the road or a Shinkansen train can get you there even faster (in 45 minutes).

The reason it takes so long to get places In Africa is because roads look like this:

In Japan roads look like this:

or this:

Power Supplies

In Africa they don’t usually have power. In fact in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, we went without power (pretty much) for three days. When it came back on it was for a few hours at a time. In Zambia we couldn’t find anywhere with power and therefore with warm food (but on the bright side at least we had food). In fact, I knew I was really used to being in Africa when I was speaking to a hotel owner about things to do in the town while the power cut out and I didn’t even skip a beat from my conversation. I was just that used to it.

Japan looks like this

Needless to say we had some serious culture shock in Japan!