Dry irony

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.

Nyumbani

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.

Disenfranchised!

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.

Malaria makes the Big Time

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.