Costa Rica Construction - 24 hours per day.

Do You Know The One Construction Site In Costa Rica That's Working 24 Hours Per Day?

Scott Oliver - 29th July 2009

There's only one construction site that I know of in Costa Rica that's working 24 hours per day, seven days per week come rain - and it does rain here - or shine...

On more than a few occasions, I have discussed education with my girlfriend's 15 year old son and the competition that he will face when he eventually starts looking for a job 'if' Milan decides not to take him on as a professional soccer player.

Needless to say, he knows nothing about work and certainly hasn't got a clue how hard it is to make a living now never mind how much harder it will be for him in the future Maybe it's my imagination but I seem to remember some ancient requirement in school called 'homework' and, what is now an obviously outdated concept which used to be known as 'reading a book.'

I mean why read a book when you've got YouTube, eh?

Construction in San Jose - The new stadium at midnight ...

But this young man seems strangely proud of the fact that he's only read three books this year... Jeez! I'm not in school and read more than that every ten days.

Two Million Minutes (2) is the name of a Robert A. Compton documentary and the amount of time a student leaves eighth grade until high school graduation. The amount of education gathered within these 2 million minutes by 3 different super powers of 21st century is the subject of the documentary.

"What Compton learned in making the film was that high-school students from India and China surpassed U.S. students on every academic level -- which puts the economic well-being of the U.S. at grave risk in a global economy."

"In addition, few Americans realize that India and China -- which have a combined population of 2.3 billion people -- will have an enormous educated workforce in the years to come... The two countries have more than 400 million students in K-12 education compared to the 53 million in the U.S."

Are any of our educators paying attention to these numbers?

In Bill Gate's 2009 Annual Letter (2) he spoke of: "The federal No Child Left Behind Act isn't perfect, but it has forced us to look at each school's results and realize how poorly we are doing overall. It surprises me that more parents are not upset about the education their own kids are receiving."

Compton had film crews record high school seniors in the U.S., India and China in 2005 and 2006. "What we saw and what the film portrays is that our culture has a highly developed athletic and extracurricular system but a deteriorating core academic system," said Compton. "In 25 years, America has gone simply from being 'A Nation at Risk' to a nation way behind its largest future economic competitors -- India and China."

I'm guessing that as long as we are fascinated with talentless "celebrities" like Bruteney Spores and her "extracurricular" activities and we're reading the latest gossip about "highly developed" athletes like David Beckham then I guess that's all we can expect from our children.

So apart from the fact that our educational systems are failing, the US has an external debt per capita (3) of US$44,358 which is 95.09% of GDP. The UK has an external debt per capita of US$153,616 which is a staggering 336% of GDP and China's external debt as a percentage of GDP is a mere 20%.

So not only are Chinese children becoming better educated than ours which will help them to easily compete against our own, they're better money managers and not saddled with an outrageous amount of debt and yes! Coming back to that one construction site in Costa Rica that's working 24 hours per day, seven days per week?

Yup! You guessed it, they're all Chinese building the new stadium in the capital city San Jose.

Written by Scott Oliver, author of How To Buy Costa Rica Real Estate Without Losing Your Camisa and Costa Rica's Guide To Making Money Offshore and the Director of Costa Rica Living & Retirement - Secrets To Happiness, a new DVD which reveals all with 14 in depth interviews..