Some Thoughts

Hello Everyone!

Okay after a bit of a low key week (yes maybe a slight understatement) I am back in action. Still taking it slowish (so don’t freak out mom), but feeling ALIVE again. Maleria is not a fun sickness. I have been forbidden by my mother to “post a dramatic (me? Never!) blog entry” about having maleria at least until one week after I’m entirely cured so as not to alarm you all. But don’t worry. I’m okay. Today was the first day I felt like a human again! And so in about a week when my mom is convinced that I won’t die, I will tell you more.

So what have been I doing while ill? Well mostly sleeping, receiving MANY visitors both in the hospital and at home, working on my project, and reading about other horrible illnesses such as AIDS and other foreign aid disasters. Okay so two books that I really recommend: The White Man’s Burden: how the West has done so much ill and so little to help the rest by William Easterly and 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa by Stephanie Nolen.

Sometimes even after being used to being here, and being far more exposed to most to areas of such extreme poverty I am still sometimes just shocked and overwhelmed by some of the realities of life here.

AIDS and the reality of the incredibly high prevelance, the ever-increasing rate of infection and the economic, social and political devestation wrecked by this pandemic is just one of these issues. SO how did the crisis develop? Here are some thoughts from Stephanie Nolan that I found incredibly illuminating, and I hope you will too. “The idea that the virus had come from Africa, one more disaster from the “dark continent,” was seized upon in the West in the late 1980’s, and many African leaders, sending the racism that lay behind this theory, began to deny that AIDS was a problem, long past the point that their countries were in grave trouble.”

This is perhaps my FAVORITE passage, as it really applies to perceptions of Africa in general. I feel I really relate to this after my own minor health crisis, as dealing with people’s responses to my being unwell in “AFRICA” was interesting, as they were always well meaning, and often quite misguided, to say the least. “There is always a danger in talking about “Africa”—as if it is one place, one country, one homogeneous story. Africa is FIFTY-THREE (my emphasis) countries, many of which are themselves made up of HUNDREDS (again my emphasis) of peoples and cultures. Prosperous South Africa has more in common with France than it does with anarchic Somalia, the deserts of Mali, or the Kibera slum of Kenya. As such, there is no monolithic story of AIDS (or I will add any other sickness or situation!!) in Africa. However there are factors that are common across sub-Saharan African countries, from the legacy of colonialism to the patterns of conflict and migrant labour which had had a direct influence on how the story of AIDS unfolded in the region.”

So you, like I was, may be wondering why Africa? How did the AIDS crisis get to be so devastating here? How is it that by the best estimates some African countries have an HIV prevelance rate of well over 40% of all adults? How is it that, again, by the best estimates it is thought that of all those in Africa infected with HIV ONLY 10% have been tested? How did it become this way?

I think Nolan has some great thoughts. She says, “A great many things made Africa particuraly susceptible to AIDS, some of them innate to the communities where the disease flourished, and many others imposed from outside. The key one is poverty. Put simply, millions of Africans are living with a virus from which they might have EASILY (my emphasis) been protected if they had had access to education about it, or the to the means to defending themselves.” Heartbreaking right? The AIDS pandemic in many ways may have been entirely preventable. However Nolan continues, “A lack of resources led Africans to do things—to sell sex, to stay with a philandering husband, to leave their families and seek work far away—that they might not otherwise have done; this too spread the disease. And the destitution and weakness of many sub-Saharan states crippled their abilities to respond once their populations were infected.”

So where does this poverty come from? Well, welcome the West onto the scene (surprise, surprise…sorry for the cyncisim. I swear, being away from America, I become increasingly disillusioned with Western life and values. Note my post on children.) Well this poverty (as Nolan adds), “Has its roots in the colonial era, when Africa was viewed as one huge source of raw material for the Western powers. As such its economies have been deliberately underdeveloped (I will note, another egregious story), and its peoples kept, often through violent repression, as a sort of indentured work force. The superpowers use Africa as a board in their global chess game, warping politics and development all across the region in their ideological battle and quest for control of Africa’s rich resources (a statement that is ALL too true today…but sorry folks. We will have to talk about that in person when I get home…)

Okay, a little bit on our great Western “let’s help the poor people, but really we’ll fuck them over” schemes… these have had A LOT to do with the spread of AIDS in Africa.
So in the 1980’s there became a lot of Western attention focused on development and poverty alleviation. Massive financial institutions, such as The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund decreed that the most debt-ridden African nations should overhaul their economies, or they would stop sending assistance. This became known as structural adjustment, and although it may have seemed like a good idea at the time it became a colossal disaster. It’s badly conceived user fees denied poor people to whatever health and educational systems already existed—further cutting off access to the minimal infastrucutre. Thus, by the 1990’s, this near century of foreign meddling had reduced much of Africa to a corrupt, conflict-ridden, impoverished mess—at which point rich donor countires refused to send more money to bail African governments out of the mess the West itself had largely created (for more, please read The White Man’s Burden). AIDS emerged as an “African problem” at the height of this donor crisis. So people began to ask, why single out aid for this disease when there is so much “wrong” in Africa? Why is AIDS different than the famines, wars, corruption, shortages of schools, clinics, clean water and dozens of other terrible diseases in Africa? Nolan has quite an eloquent response to such a question. “The difference is that AIDS underlies all of these problems—and it is amplifying the damage even as it undermines the ability to respond. This is because it targets the young, productive generation. It makes countries more vulnerable to political instability and environmental disasters. AIDS is stealing the hard-won gains of the past few decades: lowering school enrollments, productivity, life expectancy, child survival rates and economic growth. AIDS is horribly, inextricably tied to conflict and to famine and to the collapse of states.”

At the end of the day, from all that I have seen, I think that the West ascribes a different value to lives here in African. It’s as if because there are so many “problems” citizens should have correspondingly lowered expectations regarding the length and quality of their lives. It is if as if a dying African is expected, and thus less value is placed on that life. It is as if that dying African is different than a dying Canadian, Brit, European or American. It is as if a dying, sick, hungry African is just normal, so it’s okay. I don’t understand this. How is it that we think that to be infected, to be ill, to be hungry here is somehow less terrifying, less tragic than in the US? The only difference between someone infected here, and someone infected at home is that the person here has had the bad luck to be born in a country that is economically, politically and socially marginalized. The only difference is that they are black, and usually poor and thus their lives can slip away unremarked.