Construction pace

Today I went home at around 9:00 pm and I saw the same familiar scence two blocks from my house : A new large devlopment under construction (about 15 10-story high condos) with construction workers still at work. Most of the workers look Indians or from Bangladesh. By the time I normally leave home (7:00-7:30 am) until I get back well into the night the construction continues. Not only that, they are also working on Saturdays and Sundays.

This pace of construction is not unique to our neighbors. Near to my office at downtown, there is a new mega-development at Marina Bay where construction work is done 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This Marina Bay is beign built on reclaimed land, this is, land that used to be under the ocean. It's a facinating process: They build walls in the sea, drain out the water and refill the hole with sand and rocks. There was a recent political conflict with Indonesia because they claimed Singapore was illegaly "depleting" Indonesia from their sand.

A Third example is a new trading building under construction right in front of my office and it's the same story: Working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It is clear that this fast pace of construction cannot be achieved either in Mexico or USA. For whatever the reasons (legal, historical, tradition, etc) work could not be done at midnight or during weekends in our countries. But people here are so determined to improve their economic well-beign that they understand that hard work needs to be done to succeed. While they keep quietly working non-stop here in Asia, the rest of the world is taking a break. I suspect I know how the race is going to go.