Don’t These Animals Know What’s Good for Them?
A few weeks ago a foreigner made the local news here in Serbia. Well, he didn’t exactly make the news, one of his YouTube videos did. A video where he described local bank workers as “tortured zoo animals.”
He called them that because of the way they behaved in front of him: miserable, downtrodden, unfriendly. I suppose the video came from good intentions; this YouTuber wanted to draw attention to the dynamic and see it somehow change. But, he didn’t utter a call to action for higher wages or workers’ rights.
Instead, he demanded better customer service if Serbia wants more people like him to stay.
Note: I’ve chosen not to link to the YouTube video or mention this channel by name, both out of courtesy and to avoid increasing the view count.
Before digging into this, I guess I should explain why he thinks Serbia needs people like him. This country has had to push back against outdated, if not totally backward, perceptions in the international community for decades. The entire region has had to push back against negative perceptions since the Yugoslav Wars. That doesn’t make it easy to rebuild their economy.
Lately, the tides have been turning, though. Serbia’s becoming known as a culturally edgy and affordable destination for digital nomads. Or, for anybody young who’s looking to live and work abroad, typically without a serious career or other commitments, and often with a hankering to “find themself.”
Serbia’s economy has seen some serious growth in recent years, in no small part due to foreign interest. I don’t just mean tourists and digital nomads, but international corporations that have started investing in Serbia and outsourcing labor here.
All that is generally considered optimistic: it signals positive change, growth, a step forward. If nothing else, tourists and digital nomads can be great PR for a country like Serbia. They tend to broadcast themselves and make their surroundings appear desirable, thereby drawing more people in.
Well, they’re great PR until they post videos about zoo animals at the bank. But, with this context I just gave you, the advice from our infamous YouTuber friend should make more sense: be friendlier and more people like me will move to your country.
At face value the feedback sounds valid enough — he’s talking about customer service and we all know that “the customer is always right.” But there’s more context to this place you might be missing, context which makes his demand rather sinister:
There’s a shocking discrepancy between the socioeconomic status of this YouTuber and the locals around him.
I don’t know exactly what bank tellers earn here, but let me put you in the picture more generally. Ask anybody what a typical desk job in Serbia pays and it’s likely to be somewhere between 500 and 800 euros per month; people living on minimum wage earn about 300 euros. (Some people in IT earn much more, while others earn as little as 180 euros working overtime in a warehouse, like my husband a few years back.)
A lot of locals I meet often claim that Belgrade, the capital, is the most expensive city in Europe when compared to the average local income. Expensive for them, but not for foreigners. In fact, many foreigners relocate here precisely because it’s “cheap.” And part of what makes it so cheap for them are the circumstances everyone else in this country is living in.
Oh, and all that money foreigners are pumping into the economy? It helps drive up rent in the city’s most desirable neighborhoods, the same neighborhoods where many of those foreigners live, of course, while locals on typical wages can’t afford to.
So, to sum it up: Yes, people at the bank are miserable, quite possibly because they earn unlivable wages, which is part of a larger economic reality that makes this country so cheap for Westerners, which is precisely why people like this YouTuber decide to move here.
In other words, the economic misery of these zoo animals suits digital nomads quite well because it makes this place easy to exploit. And, apparently, we expect the animals to smile about it.
“After all, you’re lucky to have us here. Don’t you know that? Show us that you know that.” (Now I’m putting words in his mouth, but after distilling his five-minute rant this is the nugget of truth we’re left with.)
Personally, I’m intrigued that he drew on the analogy of a zoo because I’ve been toying with that same analogy in my own mind for quite some time now. I think many Westerners treat this entire country as a zoo — we treat much of the planet beyond our “First World” like a zoo. It’s something to behold, an object on display that we can see and touch, but we don’t enter that world expecting that it will ever touch us back.
That’s the truth, deep down, isn’t it? At least, that would explain why expats here complain so often. (Like, a lot.) They bemoan every grievance, from grumpy bank tellers to the visa process that makes it possible for us to live here.
By the sound of it, you would never know that some of us actually chose to live here, or that we can leave anytime. Maybe we forgot that we can because we’re so wrapped up in these “problems” that plague us. Problems like where to find an epilator or a homeopathic dentist; problems like all the air pollution exacerbating our pet pug’s asthma.
Those are consequences we didn’t expect to live with. Evidently, we cannot deign to live with them.
Because the truth is many of us come to a place like the Balkans expecting it will be something to experience, explore, and exploit, but never something to expose ourselves to in any real or vulnerable ways.
Just like you don’t go to the zoo expecting to find yourself inside the cage. You don’t go to the zoo expecting the animals to break free. You don’t go to the zoo expecting one of them to reach between the bars and grab you. If you expected any of those things you would not go.
But, you may expect to feel sorry for the animals at the zoo. That’s a common sentiment. And, I’m afraid, that’s where this analogy ends. After all, when you visit the zoo and an animal is unhappy or aggressive, what do you think? Do you tell the animal to quit moaning? Do you poke a stick through the cage and prod it?
Or, do you blame the zookeeper? Do you blame the spectators who come and pay money to look at the animals?
I suspect you know what the answer is at the zoo, and I suspect you know it’s not the same in the Balkans. These people aren’t quite animals in the eyes of a digital nomad, they’re just human enough that we can blame them for it. Just human enough to reason with:
“Hey, I’m here to throw you a bone — smile, you animal.”