Another day

Well, it’s the end of yet another tense day here in Lilongwe. Again, the city basically shut down, due to the ongoing protests, which have now seemingly collapsed into anarchy. All of my meetings were again canceled today, so it was basically a snow day for all of us. I didn’t get much done, as Jorge and I kept checking the updates on Twitter. We worried for some young friends who had been traveling around Malawi and Tanzania, and who were supposed to be on a bus back to the city. I wondered how we were going to get food for the week, with the market shut down, and the gorcery stores reportedly looted. I worried about the violence and chaos coming closer to home, closer to my babies.

To deal with the anxiety, I baked cookies. And then ate LOTS of them.

Then, sometime after my lunch of cookies, I had this strange sense of déjà vu. I have dealt with perilous situations before – my time in Darfur was basically one crisis after another. So at first I thought all this conflict was bringing back memories of difficult times I had experienced in Sudan.

But then I realized, it wasn’t a conflict I was remembering, it was a catastrophe of an entirely different sort: Hurricane Katrina.

In the days and weeks after I evacuated from New Orleans in 2005, it was so hard to tell the fact from rumor. Who can forget the melodramatic interviews on Oprah, the (eventually disproved) tales of babies being sexually assaulted in the Superdome? And every horrible misdeed that was reported was just taken as truth, because of course, that’s what people’s stereotypes of New Orleans residents allowed them to believe.

And here we are again, imagining violent Africans wielding machetes and wreaking havoc…after years of being shown Africa only in the light of famine or war, is it any wonder that we don’t even doubt that people are capable of such violence?

Once the dust clears, I wonder what I will find – the battleground of burned-out cars and smashed, looted buildings that the reports have been evoking; or the ghost-town, shell of a city where most people just want to keep their heads down and get back to their normal life – the vision that my friends who have been in town today tell me they’ve seen. I hope it’s the latter, but by now I just don’t know what to believe.

Weird things you'd never think about

So, it might come as a surprise to you that the world wide web is not, in fact, the same worldwide.

In fact, when you live in a place like Malawi, it can be quite different. While you are probably seeing ads for drugs claiming they will finally quell your Irritable Bowel Syndrome, the ads on my computer screen are frequently in Arabic.

But here is something I see almost every day when I log in:

I mean, come on - I have been through the US immigration process, I've seen it up close. You mean there are suckers here in Africa that think getting a green card is like winning some sort of Powerball game? I have no idea what happens if you are silly enough to try to "win," I have no intention of ever clicking on one of those virus bombs myself.

Let me paint a little scenario for you:

Your little one is sick. He has a fever, and a cough. You know from your friends, the websites you frequent, your parenting magazines, that a fever that lasts several days should be checked up by a health professional.

So off you go, off to the clinic. Unfortunately, however, you live in a rural area, so it is an hour-long drive to the clinic. You go early, because they don’t take appointments. When you arrive at 7:30, which is when the clinic is supposed to open, there is no one there apart from a rather surly security guard. He writes your name on a list, so that you can go in the order you arrived.

All the other chairs are already taken up by other moms and babies, so you find a seat on the floor. Then you wait. And wait. Around 9:00 AM, the clinic staff start to show up. They dither around for another 30 minutes, chatting amongst themselves, shuffling papers, hardly even noticing the presence of the patients.

Finally, patients begin to be called. Half the time, though, the patient list isn’t followed. Instead, the nurse lets in whoever manages to be closest to the door. So you shuffle, you scoot, you hustle your way ever closer to the nurse’s office every time the door opens.

Even though the little boy next to you looks almost comatose, and is clearly in need of emergency health services, the boy isn’t noticed, and his mother is not called in until it is ‘her turn.’ You hope that the baby doesn’t die while you’re waiting. Will that mean you have to wait even longer?

Almost four hours after you arrived, you are finally called into the nurse’s office. The nurse doesn’t greet you, or smile and say hello. She just motions you to sit down, and begins asking questions. What is wrong with this child? Why didn’t you come earlier? Don’t you know that fever is very serious?, she chastises you. You feel ashamed, but because she is a little scary, you don’t say anything. Then, without ever looking you in the face, the nurse hands you two pills from a jar on her desk, and tells you to give them to the child, and to come back if your daughter gets worse. You are not told what illness the child has, or how to prevent it. You are not told what the pills are. You are excused.

The next time your child gets sick, what will you do? Will you make that hour-long drive to the clinic? Or will you just go to the drugstore, get some children’s Tylenol, and hope that your daughter gets better?

We did a community assessment a few weeks ago where we went out and talked to local mothers in Malawi, and this is basically what they told us. They walk miles, wait for hours, then get treated harshly, sometimes even abusively. All for a couple pills. And yet they still go! This is the miracle of healthcare in Africa – that people even turn up at health facilities at all!

Almost every day I hear government officials and aid workers complain of the peoples’ ignorance, their apathy. ‘We tell them what they should do, why don’t they do it?’ they ask. What we should be doing is asking ourselves why we expect poor African mothers to consent to a standard treatment that we would never accept ourselves. Because they are poor? Because they don’t know any better? Because they should just be happy with the scraps they get? As you in America are debating the need to reform the healthcare system, please don’t forget that inequity is unacceptable, in rich and poor countries alike. All people have the right to quality healthcare.

Speaking of packing

One of the things that every expatriate does is stockpile food from home. We’re all guilty of it. I have a 3-month old package of Philadelphia cream cheese sitting in my fridge right now that I can’t bear to open. It is so precious, so rare! I just like to open the refrigerator door and see it twinkling back at me in all its foil-wrapped glory.

A lot of the foods that we take for granted are difficult to find in many African countries. In Eritrea, the only cheese I ate for 5 months came packaged in little foil triangles. In Sudan, they follow Sharia law, meaning no pork. One time I returned to Darfur from home leave, toting a 50-pound backpack of food, stuffed with pepperoni, prosciutto, and pre-cooked bacon. I felt a little guilty cooking the stuff around the housekeepers, but it was so good.

Malawi is better than most countries I’ve worked in, in that we can get quite a lot of good imported foods from South Africa, so for the most part I don’t feel deprived. But there are a few things from home that every American likes to bring, so that on a rough day we can whip up some of our favorite comfort food. Each time we travel from a developed country, we push the limits of our baggage allowance, then hoard our precious commodities like crazy once we get over here. For me, those items are:

Bakers chocolate for making brownies (This makes me very popular)
Parmesan cheese (the real stuff and the fake. It’s all good.)
Tony Chachere’s
Refried beans
Wonton wrappers
Chocolate chips
Marinated artichoke hearts
Creole mustard
Andouille sausage (the real stuff, from Louisiana)
Cheese of all kinds. It stinks up the plane, but who cares!

This is actually pretty restrained. I know people who work for the US government here who get free shipping from the states, and they have olive oil and salsa sent over by the gallon. I once went into a friend’s house and saw, stacked high up in the pantry, packages and packages of American toilet paper, shipped over on Uncle Sam’s dime. I mean, I would understand if we only got the scratchy brown stuff here, but the toilet paper here is great – triple-ply, little patterns stamped on – that’s luxury, folks. You wouldn’t get toilet paper like that in Chad, let me tell you.

Nothing ever works here the way it is supposed to. Take buying a plane ticket, for example. You go to the website, find the flights you want, pay with a credit card, they take your money, and presto! E-ticket!

Well, in Africa, you go to the website, find the flights you want, pay with a credit card, they take your money, and….and….um, still waiting here….

Yeah, no tickets.

Even though our credit card was charged by Kenya Airways two weeks ago. Jorge has been to the Kenya Airways office 3 times, we have called the Lilongwe Airport, and we have even called the head office in Nairobi. The reservation is confirmed, but there are no tickets associated with it. I don’t quite understand this. And apparently the people at the Kenya Airways offices can’t do anything about it, because the ticket was bought online.

I really don’t need this stress right now.

Jorge thinks it’s no big deal. They took our money, we have the reservation, he says. They have to give us the tickets.

Only this is Africa. They don’t have to do anything.

Once, while traveling with my family, I did a really stupid, Gwynnie thing and lost my plane ticket from Kenya to the U.S. (And my sister’s. She shouldn’t have let me hold it in the first place). We got to the airport 12 hours before the flight was to leave, and started trying to get the ticket reissued. The British Airways person in Nairobi said this would be no problem at all. “I just need to get authorization from the head office.”

Fastforward 11 hours and we have no time left – we need to board the flight. No one in London had answered the phone in all that time. The British Airways person tells us sorry – she can see that we have tickets, and that we have reserved seats, but she can’t let us board the plane. My dad, bless his heart, finally had to whip out the Visa and buy us new tickets, so that we paid twice for the same seats. They eventually re-funded his money, but the lesson was learnt.

In Africa, just because they take your money, it doesn’t mean you get the tickets. We are a little stressed here, folks. Let’s hope it all works out.

African sunsets

This was a long and tiring week. I have had a bad cold all week, and sniffled, sneezed, and coughed my way through the national training that I was leading. The training went well, but I was wrecked, with a throbbing head, on most evenings when I finally made it home.

On Thursday, as I drove back to Lilongwe, it sprinkled a bit, and there was that wonderful first rain smell. It's impossible to describe. It smells a bit like concentrated dust, but there's a freshness behind it as well. It's all the smoke and dust and grime just being washed from the sky. All I can say about the moment the rains finally arrive in Africa is that it is magical, even if you have been here your whole life.

The other thing that never gets old for me is the sunsets. I looked out the car window Thursday and saw the most luminescent, fiery, orange sun you've ever seen, hovering over the acacia trees and maize fields, glowing through the mist of the rain. The sunsets here are a total Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen cliche, and I love them. They make me feel I should be sitting in front of a big canvas safari tent, looking out over the savanna while sipping a G&T. They remind me of the wonder I felt when I first arrived in Africa - in Zimbabwe in 2001 - and rode along roads lined with women carrying baskets on their heads and babies on their backs. Even though I am so often tired now, and disheartened, there are times when I fall in love all over again with Africa. Watching that sunset was one of them.

As for the family, we are still sick but doing a bit better. Despite spending all that money on a halloween costume for Milo, we did nothing yesterday to celebrate. There was a party a the U.S. embassy yesterday, but Jorge thought you needed to have an invitation to attend. When we found out that anyone was welcome, Milo was already fast asleep.

Milo is growing so fast. He rocks back and forth on his hands and knees now, as if at any moment he's waiting for the starting whistle so he can take off crawling. He eats all types of mushy, soft pureed foods, which look disgusting to me. And just this last week he has had two teeth poke through. Poor me, driver's ed is just around the corner....

A little lesson in inequality

Every year, almost 10 million children around the world die before the age of 5. Do you know why most of them die?

If you don’t, you are not alone. If you think it’s HIV or Malaria, you agree with the majority of Americans. And you are wrong. Sixty percent of Americans incorrectly identified these illnesses as the leading causes of death for children. In actuality, malaria and HIV only account for 11%.

What is really killing kids? The simplest of things: pneumonia – 36% of child deaths; malnutrition – directly or indirectly leads to 35% of deaths, and diarrhea – 18% of deaths. Every year some two million babies die within their first month of life. That’s equivalent to all the babies born in the U.S. in a year.

The saddest thing is that most of these deaths – about 6 million each year – can be prevented through simple, cost-effective interventions like rehydration salts and antibiotics. This seems like something we as Americans should do something about, wouldn’t you say? I mean, who can argue against saving kids?

Well, do me a favor and tell that to your congressman, OK? About 4 billion dollars a year are spent on child health programs worldwide, but 12 billion dollars a year is needed if those 6 million kids are to be saved. For its part, the U.S. appropriated 450 million dollars for child health programs last year, but funding has generally stayed flat for the last 10 years.

I guess that sounds like a lot of money in these troubled times. But consider this: the U.S. government spends five billion dollars a year on HIV programs alone, and HIV only accounts for 2 million annual deaths worldwide. We have the money folks. We’re just spending it elsewhere. I read today that the Bush administration has spent a billion dollars on abstinence education despite no evidence that it works. Doubling our child survival funding each year would only cost an extra $1.50 per American resident. Imagine what we could do with an extra five dollars, or ten dollars.

I’ve seen too many sick kids in Africa, and I hate knowing that they die for such stupid reasons. Can you imagine an American kid dying of diarrhea? So I am appealing to all of you, start getting active on this issue. The U.S. Coalition for Child Survival is a great place to start for information on how to help. And there are many great organizations out there that you can donate to.