Body in Motion

In the beginning, when I was new to Africa, I was filled with awe and discovery. Writing about my experience was easy because I needed an outlet, somewhere to set pieces out and turn them into the logic of a puzzle. I was challenged to get outside myself, out my comfort zone and reach into the world, discover how to be somewhere other than what I knew.

But that was nearly ten years ago. I no longer live with an African family, eat their food, watch their television in the evening. I no longer spend my Saturdays wandering through markets for the sheer enjoyment of the experience. I am in my comfort zone, sheltered in an expat community, eating pizza, choosing my own music, never learning more than a few words of Chichewa, with Malawi all around me. Like nested Russian dolls in the surrounding shell, I am completely enclosed within another culture. We expats carry pieces of home with us. Cheese-Its. Black nail polish. Organic coffee. We hoard them, share them with members of our tribe. We stretch to see how many pieces we can fit in our Russian doll. We return to the motherland to resupply.

A few years ago, I went to visit some Congolese friends who’d emigrated to South Africa. I ate pondu with them and listened to Koffi, making jokes in French, hanging out at the Congolese internet cafe. I shared in my friends’ pride in their non-South Africanness. It was the only time in my life that I have had the privilege of an outsider’s look at someone else’s expat community. What do you chose to bring with you? What do you leave behind? How long are you away before where you are is more ‘home’ than where you have come from?

My view of my own expat community will never achieve that same level of objectivity or even introspection. In daily life, we tend to ignore the opportunities to step back and examine our interaction with the world.

Last year, the Washington Post ran an article about the world-renown violinist Joshua Bell who played in a Metro station at rush hour in ordinary clothes and behaved as any street musician might. His performances were filmed to see how many people would pause to hear his playing. Of the 1,097 people who passed him, only 27 people paused or left money in the opened case on the ground. The rest continued on with their day unmoved.

I wonder how many of us are truly capable of examining the world in which we live on a daily basis. We each live in a Russian doll of our own, embedded somewhere within the bigger world around us. You may be an expat. You may simply be an urban dweller who doesn’t leave the neighborhood much. Maybe you live in a remote area with little access to what else is out there. Wherever you are, whoever you are, we all have the chance to lift our eyes and examine the wider world outside of our self-imposed Russian doll.

Living in a country other than one’s own, some cultural differences stand out more than others.

Lately, these differences have led to me to spend a lot of time thinking about trash. The streets of Lilongwe are fairly clean compared with Kinshasa or Nairobi - or even New York when I was growing up. But every time I’m on a field trip, driving though Malawi’s beautiful savanna countryside, someone in the vehicle rolls down the window to toss a piece of garbage out. Even my gardener leaves a pile of trash in the back corner of the garden despite the presence of a trash bin not 50 feet away.

I grew up in the coming of age of environmentalism in the US, when global warming still had to be proven and Tom Selleck did primetime specials on using fluorescent lightbulbs. My family had blue recycling bins for newspaper, cans and bottles. We insulated our windows in winter to conserve heat and re-used plastic containers. I cut up soda can ties so when the landfill got washed into the ocean, fish wouldn’t get caught in the plastic. I was green.

Now I live in a country where the principles of environmentalism follow different rules. There is no recycling center in a 500-miles radius but the useful life of any object far exceeds that which is expected in America. Shoes are repaired endlessly and anything that’s not already totally dilapidated is reused. In the case of dilapidation, the parts are consumed for integration into the reuse of other things.

And my carbon footprint? Even harder to say. While the average American’s food travels about 2500 miles from source to table, mine doesn’t come from much farther than a few hundred kilometers - but then I’m on enough long haul flights a year to get shunned by GreenPeace for all eternity.

So what now? I’m turning old wine bottles into glasses and vases. We have a lively vegetable garden. But when I go back to the US, I forget the milk carton doesn’t get lumped in with the rest of the trash. For the moment, I’m going to focus on stopping my teammates from rolling down the window of our gas-guzzling Land Cruiser and tossing their trash onto Malawi’s undeveloped grasslands.

Having spent the majority of my adult life on African soil, trips back to the US are full of both nostalgia and contradiction. Visiting my mother’s workplace in the Bronx is one of the most dramatic of these contradictions.

The Bronx is the poorest urban county in the US, even including middle class neighborhoods like Riverdale. The public school where my mother works is just a few short blocks from what was at one point named the most dangerous block in New York. And yet as I drive to pick her up, I can’t help but notice solid brick apartment buildings (some with more charm than others) and clean streets with minimal graffiti. There are no garbage piles or street children begging by the side of the road. The kids walking past look well-dressed and well-fed.

But poverty in America isn’t about bellies bloated with stage 2 malnutrition. It’s about kids who grow up with at least one parent or close relative in prison, kids who are not hungry but survive undernourished on processed foods with no vegetables in sight. They go to a school where the janitor sleeps overnight for fear of being on the streets after dark. Just as children in the Malawian bush can’t imagine the development in Lilongwe, these kids have never seen a cow and don’t know that the bread they eat comes from wheat growing in the rich Midwestern earth. There are check cashing (at high interest) outlets on each corner and Popeye’s fast food where a supermarket might have been.

American poverty is buried under bright new sneakers and digital cable, hidden behind access to credit and fancy cellphones, when in reality, it’s the lack of the cultural capitol needed (like knowing someone who’s attended and completed college) and strong social supports that hinders people from finding a path to the American dream.

While many of the residents of this neighborhood are African, this isn’t Africa. It’s not one of the poorest countries ranked at the bottom of the human development index. Poverty alleviation doesn’t have to be about those living thousands of miles away any more than those living thousands of miles away are all poor. Each corner of the planet is filled with contradiction. Finding a way of out poverty is just as complicated.

In a slight but significant change of program, April 25th has been promoted from Africa Malaria Day to World Malaria Day.

Why the big change? I guess some higher-ups in the UN took note that one of every 5 child deaths in Africa is still due to that old bugger that killed at least 4 Popes.

I know you’re heard all about bednets on this blog before but this year, there’s some great data to back it up. As bednet coverage in Malawi has increased over the last few years, the anemia rates in small children (attributed largely to malaria) have decrease by over 40% since 2005. So not only are the kiddos getting malaria less, but less anemia means they’re stronger to fight other diseases.

Needless to say, we’re all pretty excited. So raise your glass or your mozzie repellent in toast and if you’re feeling generous, part with a few dollars, euros, or kwachas so we can part with a few more mozzies.

Since I was little, Sally Struthers has been asking us to sponsor a child somewhere in the world who is living on less than a dollar a day. I’ve been working in Africa for the better part of the last ten years and have become accustomed to what I see in the village -where most African still live- that once made me stop and think. Six year olds taking care of two-year olds. Kids running around with swollen bellies full of parasites and orange-tinged hair – a sure sign of malnutrition.

In the countryside after the rains, the fields are full of green green crops and overripe mangoes lie rotting on the ground, and I can’t help but wonder how people here can be so poor. The soil is volcanic and fertile. But it’s malaria season, flooding has brought cholera to the surface, and bridges to health centers have washed away only to be rebuilt after an interminable period of time.

Here in Malawi, 133 of every 1000 children born dies before they turn 5. Amazingly, this figure is down from 189 deaths in 2000. Forty-six percent of children are stunted from malnutrition, and only 64% make it through enough school to considered be literate. Over half of Malawians live on less than a dollar a day.

I was in the bush last weekend, face to face with a young man speaking decent English with a good head on his shoulders. He has 2 small children, his wife has passed away. His salary comes out to a bit over a dollar a day, making him just slightly better off than many others in the village. But averaged across his small family of 3, he and his little boy and girl are each living on about 35 cents a day. Even if his kids don’t go to bed hungry, any extra cost -a minibus ride to the health center, a few secondhand clothes- will seriously set them back.

Progress is made slowly, but today out of each thousand born, 56 more children than at the beginning of the decade make it to their 5th birthday. Each step, however small a stride in keeping those most vulnerable alive, is bringing us closer to a world in which a child can grow up to earn more than a dollar a day.

I recently discovered that a friend of mine who’s never been to Africa before will be moving to Malawi with the Peace Corps in a couple of months. In honor of his impending arrival, I give you The Basics: 10 Things You Should Know Before Coming to Africa.

10. There are children everywhere: in the village playing, in the city begging, in the river washing (a few of them are in school, too).

9. There are people everywhere. People live life  outside from cooking and washing to socializing and working. And if you’re over 18 and still alone in the world, they want to know why you’re not married/reproducing yet.

8. Not matter how far in the bush you are, you can always find a cold beer. And 5 guys waiting for you to buy them one too.

7. The following items are considered legitimate supplies for vehicle repair: twigs, cardboard, tree sap.

6. Toilet paper in public restrooms is about as scarce as Democrats in the current administration.

5. The phrase ‘time is money‘ has no meaning. Be prepared to spend most of your time waiting for a bus/your lunch/your bill/a meeting/change. Note: change will never come. If you overpay for something, that’s your problem. The overage will be consumed by the business.

4. Never assume anything. This includes but is not limited to ‘yes’ meaning ‘yes’, ‘no’ meaning ‘no’, ‘I understand’ meaning ‘I have processed what you said and will act upon it’, a right indicator meaning a right turn, a business being open during regular hours, or a confirmed reservation meaning your hotel room/restaurant table/plane seat will still be there when you arrive.

3. Traffic laws are optional. (What’s the difference between a drunk driver and a sober one? Only the drunk driver goes straight, the sober one goes around the potholes.)

2. Electricity is optional. It generally goes out when you’re about to cook dinner. It will take between 10 minutes and 3 days to come back on and will blow out your speakers with a power surge when it does. (What did Africans do for light before candles? They had electricity!)

and…

1. Just when you think you finally have her figured out, Africa turns around and bites you in the ass. But hell, I still wouldn’t live anywhere else — for now.

The road this morning was lined with men slashing brush with old-fashioned scythes. Long blades of grass flew into the air, cascading down on top of them and over the road.Everything is growing; a dollar’s worth of bush mangoes will buy you more than you can comfortably carry.

It’s still rainy season here and the land is a vibrant green that threatens to overtake all else. Amid reports of flooding in the region, we have three dry weeks and worrying follows. Will the late planters have enough water for a harvest? It’s hard to understand the threat since maize is shooting up from every undeveloped bit of earth, even in town.

A flash thunderstorm barrels through, turning questions of dehydration to drowning, as maize as tobacco are awash in their own soil, hail pummeling from the skies. Farmers’ income for the next few months is washed away in less than an hour.

Irony leaves a dry taste in the mouth.

It was in the matatu on the was to Ol Kalau in the Central Highlands that I first saw the Great Rift Valley. I’m not quite sure what I expected – perhaps something in the nature of the Grand Canyon, maybe just an enormous crack in the surface of the Earth. It was so green and so vast and there were peaks that rose up from within the valley. Dormant volcanoes. As we descended down the road carved into the escarpment, there were baboons on the side of the road, lazily watching the Friday afternoon traffic go past. The winding road finally spread out across the floor of the valley. As we passed Lake Naivasha, I saw zebras grazing alongside cattle and trees whose branches reached out toward each other. Although the road was only barely tarmacked, thinking back I feel myself gliding along the bottom of the valley. It’s all a euphoric haze that cannot be matched.

Don’t think I haven’t been paying attention. Rafiki zangu, don’t think I haven’t been watching.

I wrote the above on the Great Rift Valley some years ago now. It was my first trip out of Nairobi on my first trip to Africa. My first zebra sighting. And the beginning of what can only be described as life-altering infatuation. In short, I fell in love the way you do when you are 20 and seeing the world beyond your doorstep for the first time.

I lived with a Kenyan family and ate ugali and tried to speak Swahili on a good day. I drank Pilsner baridi (being sure to throw a few drops from my glass to the ground for the ancestors) and stayed out at Carnivore til all hours. I tracked rhinos with the rangers in Nakuru Park. I attended NGO meetings in Kibera slums. I went down River Road.

Daniel arap Moi was in power. Kenya was a post-Embassy bombing multi-party democracy. World Bank was still trying to reform the civil service. No one had cell phones yet and internet cafes were still expensive. Raila Odinga was the main opposition leader.

Watching Kenya’s elections and stability unravel over the last five weeks has been heart-breaking. Kenya was my first home in Africa and I still consider the people I lived with there to be jamaa yangu (my family). I have sat down many times to write this blog post, combed through horrifying and depressing newspaper articles, spoken with Kenyans and I knew then and now, and wondered how to begin.

If you ask me whether I saw this coming, I could tell you that tribalism was alive and well when I was living there (I could have easily written a post similar to this on Kenyans). I could tell you that crime and corruption has shaken the credibility of what should have been a model African government. I could tell you that two years ago, I learned that the US government was watching Kenya for signs of political fragility.

But none of that really matters, because I would have told you that I did not believe Kenya would be willing to let herself collapse like this. Even now, watching the country crumble, I still can’t believe it. M, an award-winning Kenyan blogger whom I admire greatly, has seen it with his own eyes and it is well worth reading his thoughtful and sage words.

As for myself, ‘euphoric’ is no longer the word that comes to mind when I think of Kenya.

I don’t write much about my homeland, the US, but it’s always there in the background, shaping how I have entered and how I see the world. Instead, I tend to write about where I sit and what I see around me. I spent much of last year writing about Congo’s drawn out and tumultuous elections process, hoping to draw to eyes to what was one of the most dramatic political events in Africa in the last decade.

The US elections certainly don’t need any more publicity. And I’m not going to plug any candidates here, because the truth is that I’m an undecided voter. But I do believe strongly in personal responsibility to take part in the political process.

Which is why it has been so frustrating to me that I have found myself a disenfranchised voter in the last 3 major US elections. My applications for absentee ballots have been completely botched, from receiving ballots for the wrong congressional districts to responding to my application for an absentee ballot with another absentee ballot application. A courteous letter to the state Board of Elections explaining my predicament yielded no response.

Excusing my kvetching, but I sit here, I can’t help but feeling just a wee bit disgruntled. After all, I am an eligible voter who will have to live -whether domestically or abroad- with the outcome of the next election. And since my job is funded by a federal government program, I have a decent-sized stake in the outcome of both the Presidential and Congressional elections.

I have written to my Congressional representative, whom I like very much and would certainly vote for had I the chance, in the hopes of some help in jumping on the voting bandwagon.

I’m not sure if I find it distressing or comforting that poor countries are not the only ones who have trouble running fair and transparent elections. Either way, if you happen to be in the neighborhood, don’t bother to give the NYS Board of Elections my regards.

For those of you who have been following along at home for some time, you probably already know that I’m a malaria geek. So when a new report hits the media with a lovely tale of how malaria is on the run in this part of the world, it’s really pretty exciting. In Rwanda, malaria deaths have dropped more than 60% in a few months, just by those in a position to do so making sure that enough mosquito nets and effective malaria treatments drugs reach the population.

Malaria has received more attention and consequent funding in the last few years than in has since the failed global eradication campaign of the 1960s and ’70s. The efforts of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, the World Bank Malaria Booster Program and the President’s Malaria Initiative have mobilized incredible resources and political support to half the burden of this disease.

Battling malaria should be a simple issue. The politics are not as controversial as with HIV/AIDS, the technical issues are less complicated than TB, and there are more resources available than clean water has. As the report says, all we need to do to get mosquito nets and treatment drugs to those who need them most: kids under 5.

I can tell you from first hand experience that this small feat is not quite as straightforward as it sounds. Even with the wealth of global funding available, there is often still not enough money to go around. It’s only recently that the mosquito net manufacturers have been gearing up their production facilities quickly enough to respond to the need for product. The new artemisinin-based antimalaria drugs need to be stored at cool temperatures - much cooler than health centers in the tropics where electricity is a constant challenge.

I spent most of my days trying to find a way to make things happen, whether it be ensuring that trucks have fuel to carry drugs to where they need to be or working with the Ministry of Health to determine which drugs to order in the first place. At the end of the day, it’s hard to believe I’ve accomplished more than a few sent emails. But reports like this one are enough to make one believe that baby steps will take you where you’re going. It just takes patience.