Well, the problem is that those people are not happy. Lik, at all in any fathomable way. They are “happy” at times in the same way a child from the streets of Calcutta is “happy”. If you ask them would they prefer their life to another, they will literally start breaking down in tears and tug at you pant cuffs begging you to take them with you. There’s a reason The Buddha saw that “Life is suffering”.
i knew some guys who rode motorcycles thru Eastern Europe to South Asia for a coupe months. At times they would stop and say hi to the locals in the fields and take video/pics. No one spoke each others languages but you would see women hunched over working the fields and the land was breathtaking. At first they took pictures because they thought “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago”. Well, the people would be friendly but often would become very excited asking for help, telling the camera to tell the world about how desperate things were there, the crimes that were taking place or handing them some crop they pulled from the earth to give to our scientists to help them. Well, “asking” isn’t the right word, more like hysterically weeping and begging. The stopped talking to locals in the fields and though to themselves “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago…”.