hi from Tambacounda! a little too drained right now to be forming complete sentences ... I won't write much right now, instead a memo:

Attn: reader

Subj: Tambacounda is really what I imagined it to be! Maybe with more trees. I think it's the heavy Malian influence. Ethnically and linguistically, it's dominantly pular and mandinka. it's cheap eats, sandy streets, empty, dusty, yellow by day and electrified by night. Tambacounda is faces carved into trees, scars carved into faces, blue tattoos on black skin, and beads, and papayas, and parades. And blue-turbaned fulani herdsmen chatting in groups in the shade keeping watch on their flocks. I came down here to prepare some reports before the declaration of abandonment we hosted this weekend. (really stressfully last minute, typical). It did however give me the chance to meet and interview some girls from an adolescent association, Kamben ("union" in mandinka), who formed a dance/theatre troupe and performed at the declaration. Got to spend a lot of time with them, and their songs and stories really stirred me. All of a sudden I saw the present and future of Tambacounda for what it is and will be, which despite progress, is not easy for girls. instead, pathetic and inescapable in many ways

As usual my ride back to Thiès was delayed two days - which actually gave me a chance to get out of the office and deep into this town. I'm trying to upload some videos from the declaration weekend .. wait and see

Charles Piller and Doug Smith recently wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times on some startling discoveries into the global fight against the most ravaging diseases in the developing world. (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gates16dec16,0,3743924.story?page=1)
While I don't normally write about public health, I found this issue to be pretty compelling. And given the onslaught of attention paid to AIDS in today's pop culture and consumer culture, between Bono's One campaign, Project Red, and the more and more Hollywood stars joining the ranks of UNICEF ambassadors - the awareness it's generating is phenomenal, the funding even better. But there's a dark side of this crusade that even the experts are only just starting to glimpse.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given an astonishing $8.5 billion to fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Most of their money is funneled through two major combatant organizations on that front: the Global Fund and GAVI, a Geneva-based organization that finances vaccines. Rates of deaths from AIDS in Africa are finally leveling-off, but overall health and healthcare on the continent is worsening. Why?

Piller and Smith’s article begins with a sickening anecdote about the pathetic and almost morbidly ironic state of affairs in African healthcare. Thanks to anti-retroviral drugs provided by the Gates Foundation, a Lesotho woman was successfully living with AIDS. But when she gave birth to an asphyxiated baby girl and the roach-infested hospital lacked a tube to give the infant much-needed oxygen, it died not long after.

According to a report commissioned by the Global Fund and World Bank, “Health delivery systems in Africa are now weaker and more fragmented than they were 10 years ago … [The weakening has been] exacerbated as the Global Fund and other programs now promote universal access to [AIDS] treatment." Another study, this one done on GAVI, shows that while vaccination drives have been inestimably beneficial - for example, curbing the rate of death from measles across Africa by 90% - there has emerged a distressing relationship between GAVI funding for vaccinations in Africa and child mortality. “Overall, child mortality improved more often in nations that received smaller than average GAVI grants per capita. In seven nations that received greater than average funding, child mortality rates worsened.”

How can pouring billions of dollars into fighting diseases that kill millions, devastate economies, and debilitate entire countries possibly have such cruel correlations?

The Gates Foundation and others like it, with their strict focus on epidemic have contributed to a wider health crisis in a number of ways, not limited to the following (as I paraphrase from Piller and Smith’s article) :

- By targeting contributions into the fight against such high-profile killers as AIDS, Gates grantees have increased the demand for specially trained, higher-paid clinicians, diverting staff from basic care. So, aside from doctors and nurses leaving the country for higher wages and safer conditions elsewhere, within the country - within single hospitals - caregivers are diverted from child and primary health care to these higher-wage specialty positions that offer double or triple the salary.

(On a side note, Rosalie, a nurse I met in Ziguinchor, explained to me that in Senegal, on top of free HIV-testing and free anti-retroviral drugs, most HIV/AIDS patients qualify for small living stipends. Shortly thereafter she accepted a job offer in France).

- The focus on a few diseases has diverted funds from nutrition and transportation, undermining the effectiveness of the foundation's grants. Many AIDS patients have so little food that they vomit their free AIDS pills. For lack of bus fare, others cannot get to clinics that offer lifesaving treatment.

- Gates-funded vaccination programs discourage caregivers to screen for other illness. In effect, parents travel for hours to have their children vaccinated - often their only contact with health providers for years - and leave without worse medical conditions treated, or even addressed. Most of GAVI’s funding goes to vaccinations for children against hepatitis B, a disease they normally don’t contract until much later in life. Many die before they even reach that point.

So what are we left with, at the end of the day? Do we continue to pour resources into the fight against a few diseases at the expense of overall health care, and worse, survival? Luckily, though Piller and Smith’s article didn’t mention this, but Nicholas Kristoff’s (sigh) blog did, the Global Fund is beginning to allocate 20% of its budget to strengthening health care systems and infrastructure. (ie. equipping hospitals with $35 oxygen valves)

la fin d'année

New Years was as it should be, celebrated with good friends, good food, mediocre champagne, laughing to the point of hurting, dancing to the point to dropping.

But on a larger scale, the year came to a close in Senegal amidst overtones of blue. The joyfulness of the festival season was accompanied by the mourning of two major public figures whose passing lent a gravity to these weeks of celebrations. And I think the poignancy of it comes really from the significance of the two deaths, or better, of the two men, and what they represented to the people of Senegal.

The first was Chérif Samsidine Aidara, the well-loved religious leader and president-appointed ambassador of peace in the Casamance region who was shot to death in his village home on the eve of Tabaski. The four gunmen are as yet unidentified but are almost certainly members of the rebel separatist group Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de Casamance (MFDC), which has already brought so much unwarranted grief to this otherwise quiet region of Senegal. After the deaths of some of its head figures and the increasing intolerance it's faced recently from the once-sheltering governments of neighboring Guinea and Gambia, the rebel group was thought to be largely weakened, if not fragmented. I think on the whole, the murder came as less a reminder than a surprise about the continuing problem in the South. A problem which has existed for 20 years teetering between conflict and peace, and which seems to be once again tipped in the direction of the worse. Adding to the bitterness of the deed, the assassination, too, occurred almost a year to the day after that of another peace-promoting consul to the region, Elhadji Omar Lamine Badji.

A less frightening, but equally shaking death occurred a little over a week later, when Serigne Salieu Mbacké, head of the Mouride brotherhood (one of 4 major Sufi sects in Senegalese Islam) passed away, peacefully as 92 year-old beloved religious leaders often do. The Grand Marabout was a direct hereditary descendant of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, a figure who not only created the vernacular Sufic tradition - but who also represented to the people of Senegalese a fixture of resistance against French imperialism. Millions of people traveled to the spiritual center of Touba this weekend to mourn his passing. Millions of people were touched by his insights, spirituality, and leadership. I think most people carry a sense of deep and emotional gratitude for his contributions.

Bear in mind, I meant this to be more reflective than depressing! And while the first death was very cruel and signaled the re-aggravation of a distressing situation; I think the second - like the natural death of any great leader - represented something more venerated. Mbacké was the face of a deeply cherished tradition: something that syncretized the tenets of Islam with the ways of the indigenous to create something profoundly Senegalese, and in that sense, almost nationalistic. His life and death touched almost all Senegalese people, regardless of their religious affiliations.

On a last note, I think this gives form to the idea, the feeling, that we are always fluctuating between these extremes of sadness and joy. The world has its ugly conflicts, galore, but it also has this rainbow of culture that offers us so much beauty and value and dynamism. Maybe one makes the other fuller, complete. And I think, also, this is reflected in the mood this time of year. New Years is all about second chances, rejuvenation, hope, and resolutions, etc. of course, but it also reminds us how quickly time passes. How one year fades so imperceptibly into another, and how unable we are to hold time in our hands and let it go at our discretion.

honestly beautiful. (I guess the weak of mind should stop reading here)

I have never felt such intimacy in sheep anatomy.

It was Tabaski (Eid). I nervously watched the slaughter, for once I use that word completely free of tongue-in-cheek. Alone at home, I listened all morning to the last bleatings of my neighbor’s black and white patched sheep. Sooner or later, its soft staccato cries were mingled with the slow, smooth sharpening of a knife. And low voices in Wolof tongues, intuitively respectful, as if timid in face of the imminent act. As if expressing the bare minimum, necessary to the task at hand. My heart was racing. Cathi came home at that point and we walked around the corner just as a couple youthful strong men were holding down the animal that was at this point no longer struggling (as cliché as that always sounds, he did seem at rest). His neck was positioned above a hole dug in the sand to contain the pool of blood that would come flowing out immediately and heavily. Impeccably dressed as ever, Old Man Papa took the knife to its furry, elongated throat, as I think I might have been holding my own. Against my expectations, it was silent, except for my rather misplaced, if murmured, “godDAMN,” forcing myself to watch because I somehow sensed it was only right to do so. In some unmarked fraction of a minute, I think, he gave up life, at which time the deed that started as a ritual commemoration turned into a mundane step in putting food on the table. What was a living animal quickly turned into flanks, haunches, loins, hinds, sides, and whatever other warm, wet organs it offered mankind.

I spent the holiday with my friend Sidate and his family. It was a day where the shade is cold but the sun is hot. While my friend slept in (in his defense, after an all-night marathon of putting final touches on Tabaski garments, a trip to the mosque, and a double slaying), I sat shivering in the shadow of a mango tree chatting with his brother Cheikh who, machete in one hand and cigarette in the other, was unhurriedly chopping the horns off a disembodied head. By the time we got into his late father’s lay-off from the national police force, he was crouched and skillfully maneuvering a smaller knife, removing the skin and then the choicest parts from the skull. It seemed a little like undressing. (He doesn’t like the job, doesn’t even like killing chickens).

I don’t know why, but what surprised me was the dispersal of the job over time and space. While the actually killing took a matter of minutes, the separation of the body, the cleansing and drying of certain parts, and the cooking of others took the remainder of the day. And spacially, what started as two contained bodies, with time, spread all over the backyard. A hole of blood here, a hole of refuse parts elsewhere, long stringy tubes salted and drying on various clotheslines, Mama cutting up legs on the porch, Combé stirring up who-can-say-what over a fire, and me watching Cheikh flaying heads in the cool, leafy shade against a blood-spattered wall. I spent the entire early afternoon in the midst of dismembered parts of all colors, but looking more or less unsurprisingly like what one would expect to come out of two sheep, and felt ok.

The reason it’s been so long since I last wrote is that, in short, the last week and a half of my life has just been a marathon. So explains the chaotic pace that follows:

I’m writing this from Thiès, home sweet home, a little chilly, but familiar Thiès. Familiar beds, familiar rooster morning wake up calls, familiar tasting water, familiar patterns, familiar companionship. Familiar quiet. I have the windows open to let the sun pour in with all the familiar sounds from the neighborhood (though there doesn’t seem to be much variation in neighborhood sounds from one region to another, give or take a few cars and mosques). I have this feeling as though I’ve returned from a periphery so great a distance from - well I don’t know what, because I can’t really say what’s at the center of this great sphere, on whose outermost edge I've been living the last two months. But I’m back now! A little drained and readjusting.

So we had the declaration this weekend!! The long-awaited, long-prepared-for Declaration for the Abandonment of Female Genital Cutting and Child/Forced Marriage in the village of Niassène. It was so big and hectic and long and profoundly moving. Well, let me start further back than that.

Last weekend - which is actually two weekends ago for those of you who respect Time in a linear, unambiguous fashion - I went to Cap Skirring. Which is supposed to have some of the most beautiful beaches in West Africa, and certainly some of the most extraordinary I’ve ever found. A friend of a friend named Jonah was in Ziguinchor bogged down with rather too much work condensed into too short a time period, and needless to say down for a journey to the coast. We walked miles on the beach, which was just really quiet and clean and peaceful, that’s all. Big, long, sandy stretches between water and coastal forests, like neutral no-man’s lands. Not a high rise in sight, just empty horizons in either direction, and traces of vacancy-boasting hotels and campements barely visible through the green thicket. And amongst this lovely backdrop, dozens of cows! Who are just the most docile, or lazy, creatures and kind of an absurd addition to beach-going. Them and a harmless dread-headed lunatic wearing nothing but pink swim trunks on his head. We were only a kilometer or two from Guinea Bissau, which the lull of our cow-dotted paradise kept us from reaching.

So back to reality, or at least back to Ziguinchor. A couple of volunteers came down from the north in the week before the declaration, and it was just really nice having them around. It had been some long time since I last hung out with girls my own age or even people speaking a language I didn't have to think about. The office last week was buzzing like a beehive! Dozens of people coming and going, painting signs, all these preparations culminating in this high strung excitement, and I didn’t really know what to expect from the declaration. We hosted a press conference on Saturday in a neighboring village (see the video in the post below - yes, my attempts to dance like that has earned me something of a reputation in Casamance land!!!) And the next 20 hours or so were stuffed with rounds of dancing, sleeping, and plate loads of meat. Saturday night we walked down to the sight that was naturally drawing a crowd and watched dozens of women using what looked like canoe paddles fussing over mammoth vats of rice and stews. 

The declaration was big, and not going to be pinned down manageably in the following words. Lots of dancing, although this time by organized dance troupes and masked dancers. But because the earth is so dry now, their movements created overhanging clouds of dark dust which was just gross and harsh to breathe in. Still feeling this dry layer of dirt coating my lungs (or else its in my head) ...  A lot of singers and speakers, village notables as well as government representatives. But the part that I can’t stop thinking about is the appearance of the former cutters from 15 or so villages (though there were over 100 villages in attendance). Many very old, and at the same time sad and proud … I mean it IS this bittersweet sort of moment. Can you imagine how huge this is? These people coming together to publicly renounce something as old as marriage itself. Whose pain it entailed was simply as common and necessary as the pain of childbirth. Something that was as natural in their society as, frankly, male circumcision is in our own. (Can you imagine what it would take to eradicate male circumcision in the US? A practice which, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement affirming has insufficient health benefits to warrant its recommendation as a routine procedure … but this isn’t the right arena to get into double standards … a later post maybe) But God, these women. Who at such a late age had to find and transition to some other source of income (It is kind of counter-intuitive, losing jobs in the name of development). They were just dignified; but that doesn’t even explain it. So … it was a very big moment. That’s the only word that really does it - big! Grand.

It was really sad leaving my friends in Niassène and my coworkers in Ziguinchor. Goodbyes are so hard, when there's unspoken doubt about la prochaine fois ... but I think the overall exhaustion took the edge off of it …. I hitched a ride early, early Monday morning in a car with some other volunteers, enduring the long and bumpy journey back north, over land that two months ago had been spectacularly green, and is now so brittle and yellow. Through the Gambia, waiting forever for the ferry - only to see it arrive and unload some cars and a couple Fulani herding 50 or 60 sheep. Poor animals!!! with Tabaski (officially, Eid ah-Adha) around the corner - the holiday that entails the slaughter of millions of sheep in the commemoration of Ibrahim sacrificing only one instead of his son. Our (ok, my) nervous laughter at all the sheep strapped to the roofs of cars turned into outrage when our chauffeurs decided to buy themselves a few and tie them down right there to the suitcases. It's only the transport that bothers me. But I don't know if I can watch.

Up to date, enough.

declaratin

African films, alhamdulilay!! part quatre (or something like an alternative to Blood Diamond)

Film about child soldiers in Sierra Leone created by Newton Aduaka, recognized film director and former child soldier himself (in Nigeria). trailer, in all it's chaotic, bloody, and drug-fogged reality: Ezra
Might write a little more about this later, for now I'm dashing off to a conference in Bignona. What follows is an interview with Aduaka. (I think Plan is a organization protecting children's rights, emergency aid for children, etc ... Aduaka won Plan's Special Child Right's Award as well as the United Nations Peace Promotion Prize for his film)

What prompted you into making this movie?
It was twenty years of accumulation, exploded into the screen. The film was in a major part inspired by the situation in Sierra Leone and conflicts in Ivory Coast, Chad, Mozambique Angola, and Rwanda. Children are told they are fighting one thing but they don't actually know what they are dying for. This, for me, is very tragic: people dragging children into situations they should never see or even think of.

The Plan prize to you was decided by four young people and two adults. How do you feel receiving the UN peace promotion and Plan's Prize?
I feel overwhelmed and I hope "Ezra" will help Plan and the UN institutions that awarded the film in what they are doing.
It was a difficult film for me to make because of myself being a child of war. I did not realize how much a child keeps in his subconscious when he goes through war. You live with it, it forms you. I was afraid that I would not be able to communicate.
Coming back to the film, the reaction to it is beyond my expectations. I saw that the Plan jury was young people; it means the film is really connected to people and I hope then, that people do not just see it as a film, but that they spent some time meditating on what they understand from it, because it is a film about the future of African children.

What does the grand prize, the Yennenga Stallion, mean to you?
This is a symbol to me to keep doing what I am doing. My cinema is really engaged, direct, and clear. Things are too desperate. It is time for clear speaking and not ambiguous cinema. I think that we have crossed a barrier which made us so inhuman. War brings nothing but destruction. While the background of all this is the exploitation of minerals and oil, the children who fight don't even know about it. There is nothing in war but profit for some people while the rest see their lives destroyed. To take a life, to premeditate it, is crossing the line. We have to go back to what I believe is human. It is not human to kill or make any act that causes you or anybody to kill. Either by proxy, by signing up for troops to go and kill, by signing up to ship arms into a country for children to kill are terrible things. We have to move away from that.

What is Plan doing to help children in Sierra Leone?
Children are among the most vulnerable groups in the aftermath of war. Providing support to children amputees and former child soldiers is a moral and social imperative in the recovery and rebuilding processes.
At the end of the conflict in Sierra Leone in 2001, thousands of children were released by the fighting forces. One of the major challenges these children face is successfully reintegrating into society and building a hopeful future.
Post-traumatic counseling and support
Plan's psychosocial trauma and peace education project in Sierra Leone consists of activities that include workshops, counseling sessions, peace clubs and expression activities including drama, games and sports.
Since 1999 Plan has also supported a "RapidEd" project in camps for internally displaced people in Sierra Leone, which combines therapeutic emotional healing activities and self-expression with basic literacy and numeracy education. The methodology, developed by Plan in cooperation with UNESCO, is based on experiences in other war zones and is also being used to help children in neighboring Liberia.

I intended to limit the scope of this blog to all things Africa, you'd think it were a wide enough playing field! Having said that, the following link has nothing to do with the old cradle of humanity; it nevertheless touches on a lot of topics that are gaining importance on a truly global level, some issues I've addressed in previous posts. It is a NYtimes multimedia piece - interviews with four Palestinians in Gaza. They talk about their struggles due to international sanctions, which are due, but not entirely due to Hamas's politics. One of the segments recounts the problematic mingling of religions in a place and time of increasing religious orthodoxy and fundamentalism. One talks about the schism between Gaza and West Bank Palestinians. More than one talks about looking to the west as a long-shot hope for a better future.

If anything, it testifies to the increasing universality of these issues. And like I mentioned before, this issue of boundaries between countries and people is getting more and more convoluted. Ten years ago, people in Sudan identified themselves by ethnic group (the Dinka, the Hasania ... there are hundreds ...) today many will call themselves simply "Arab." Enough said for now. The link:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/weekinreview/20071118_GAZA_FEATURE/index.html

ho ho ho

How does one properly celebrate the first night of Hanukkah in a Djola-hearted city on the periphery of a 95% Muslim country? One of the volunteers back in Thiès got a package containing a menorah and some cheap colorful candles (the Crayola crayon type, which will have to do. What can I say? I’ve got a weakness for beautiful Hanukkah candles.) So we video-conferenced. Inbal gave all the participating goyel a brief run down on the Macabees, the destroyed temple of Jerusalem, the oil that burned for eight days and eight nights, and the commemoration of that miracle through our wintery Festival of Lights. All relatively well and fine on their end of the webcam, mine was a little less conventional. We’ve had all of the regional supervisors in town for a conference - it’s fun when they’re all here - and the night before Moussa (the guard) was telling them all about my webcam. (Moussa gets a kick out of seeing my family in the computer). Looking at me and my webcam like we were something right out of the Jettsons, if they knew the Jettsons, the 5 or 6 of them fall somewhere between misunderstanding and total disbelief with the whole thing. So last night, they huddled around my laptop - Arona, Moussa, the other Moussa, Tamba, Insa, Mamadou - mesmerized as much by the camera as by Inbal’s simple ritual, her lovely prayer, the the two flickering lights. (Forget the choppy image and cheap candles and tears of laughter, it was perfect.) Arona decided to contribute a little Djola ditty of his own to the delight of the girls in Thiès.

The significance of this, to me, goes something like this. This is where technology’s carried us, you see? Cyberspace technology like this has certainly nudged a lot of things into antiquity, regrettably. It hasn’t yet eradicated a 2000-some-odd-year-old Jewish ceremony or Djola folk songs. Instead, where the two have spent millennia running down separate roads, last night, they crossed paths. Maybe it wasn’t the first time, but it was an intersection, and a Hanukkah, that won't soon be forgotten.

I can't believe, frankly, it's been six weeks I've been down here. It aggravates me to look back on that much time and not really be able to recall where I put it. I suppose technically I’m not traveling, I couldn’t truthfully say that. Technically I’ve been installed here in this region (for 2 months), but I can’t say I feel settled, on the contrary, I feel like I’m on the move. I still experience those hallmarks of traveling solo: exhilaration and lonesomeness. Exhilaration of discovery - of people, food, sounds, groovy little postcolonial corners, and splendid riverscape views - and the slightly less sexy joy of bumming around new markets - discretely dipping my fingers in barrels of dried beans (if it's ever possible for me to do anything discreetly ...) and hopping over rivulets of rotten vegetables and avoiding eye contact with the more aggressive vendors. And feeling also something like a ravenousness to take it all in. And lonesomeness, well, speaks for itself. When those things fade into habituation - I suppose that signals the end of one’s traveling.

Describing the process of adjustment into a foreign place, a very wise professor told me this: people don’t see you for who you are, but for who they perceive or want you to be. A lot of times - and I assume this is especially true in instances where there is a language barrier - you can find yourself more or less knowingly conforming to THAT person, at the loss of a bit of your own personality. Per Petterson brushes up against this idea in Out Stealing Horses, (and his Nordic protagonist has only moved a couple hours north): People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours […] it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
(OK a little hardened, a little valid nonetheless. When it gets problematic is when their own feelings, opinions, and assumptions are shaped by a very different life experience and understanding of the world; then they really miss the boat.)