The Face of a Dollar a Day

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.

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.

Waiting

Having grown up in northeastern America, it’s something I may never get used to: in this corner of the earth, it only rains during part of the year. Summer and winter translate into wet and dry. When it’s dry, it’s bone dry, crackling, dusty, brittle dry. Green stands out like wealthy crook amid boundless poverty. The dust is the first thing you feel in the air when you awake in the morning. It lines the corners of your shelves, your windowsills, your life, a full-fledged invasion. Your skin, the earth, your lungs seek droplets of moisture and savor each tiny allowance.

I moved to Namibia in early June and didn’t see rain until November. I was on my way to Botswana when the rain began. I stopped the car, stood barefoot in the middle of the empty highway and tilted my face skyward.

In Botswana, the currency is comprised of pula, meaning rain, each composed of 100 thebes – raindrops.

I haven’t been here nearly as long but the last two weeks, the pressure has been building. It’s something inexplicable, the feeling that the rain is coming. Until yesterday there wasn’t a cloud in the crisp blue sky but we are animals and if we listen with the core of our being, we can feel the rain coming.

And there it was: as I walked out of the office yesterday, one sole raindrop tumbled from the sky onto my face.

This afternoon I awoke from a nap to a grey backdrop that had pushed out Lilongwe’s habitual blue in under an hour. Within minutes the facade cracked and the heavens came tumbling town.

When it rains for the first time, the sensation is intense. The smell comes before the sound of the beating of the earth, before the screen of pellets wavers before your eyes. It’s a rich smell with all that has been hiding in the earth rising to greet the long awaited water. It is dramatic transformation before your eyes.

The rain ebbs and flows, lightening and then strengthening again as thunder swoops though, but the smell stays strong, occupies the air with force, declaring its presence so surely that there can be no doubt that the rains have come.

Under contruction

It was a trap, I was sure. Lure unsuspecting traffic into the round-about and then, with no warning, block all the exits. Ah, construction.

Still being relatively new in town, with my two known routes to work blocked, I wandered out of the traffic circle in a new direction. Down the block, around the corner, and through a maze of driveways: past the BP station, around the cafe, under the bridge, past the other BP station and around the corner to the office, not totally sure I could repeat in reverse. But now it’s been like that for a few days and I’m starting to get the hang of the new bends in my road - and the dirt tracks, slightly off-road.

The icing on the cake was last night when the city’s central water main broke. While I have no idea as to what actually happened, I can guess it might have had something to do with the road maintenance drilling. To my great surprise, the water came back on only a few hours later — not at all like Congo!

It’s been like this since I arrived, constant road maintenance, particularly in City Centre near my office. I suppose I should thank the road crews since it’s forced me to learn the back way around to the supermarket. But mostly, I notice that maintenance is happening. Sure enough, there aren’t many potholes in the roads around town and the tarmac is fairly even.

For now, I’m looking forward to the next few years of smooth cruising.

Congo’s plagues revisit

While it’s a beautiful clear Sunday in Lilongwe, things back in Congo aren’t quite as sunny. What was initially reported as an unidentified disease outbreak in my old home province of Kasai Occidental is now confirmed to be Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. Friends in the province report 170 confirmed deaths and about twice as many infections. Realistically speaking from my former life in hemorrhagic fever health communications, Ebola is a self-limiting bug, striking in remote places and killing most of its victims before they have a chance to pass it on to too many others. That being said, it still leaves a morbid wake in its path.

On the political side, Fred reports that Laurent Nkunda in eastern Congo is still standing strong against integrating his private militia into the national army. The rebel leader’s latest move in the Kivus has been to destroy both the power supply and cell towers in the area, a new low even for Congolese trouble-makers. (Though their mobile service is probably still better than the mangy service Celtel provides around these parts).

In better news, UNICEF reports that child mortality in Malawi is on the decline; welcome news for a country that generally ranks somewhere near the bottom of the Human Development Index. The decline is attributed to a variety of child-targeted public health interventions including increased immunisation rates, better nutrition and clean water. It is the most basic changes that can have the most impact in this corner of the globe.

Paradise found?

Having just spent a short but entertaining stint in Costa Rica, I have to say, I’m a bit in awe of the place. Granted that even as Africa goes, Cong’s a bit the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. But Costa Rica is downright pleasant.

Some of the more fascinating bits were

• Traffic lights! Everywhere!
• Kids riding bikes and skateboards (as opposed to playing with balls constructed from old plastic bags)
• Bee-yew-ti-ful roads
• Potable water right out of the tap
• Notable absence of pushy hawkers
• Ice in beer - this one I’m not such a fan of

Even apart from novelties such as traffic lights, the country’s tourism industry is booming with 51% of the country forested, up from only 25% a few decades back. There’s a strong national health care system in place (ranked one step above the US’s on the World Health Organization’s global list), funded partially due to the absence of a national military.

Which is not to say that the thing don’t happen slowly or ineffectively. It takes about 2 years to have a phone line installed in your house, the electricity blips on and off regularly, and the government just released 3 Colombians who were arrested for plotting the assassination of the Minister of Justice as a warning against prosecuting drug runners. Bribes are still somewhat of a necessity when dealing with bureaucracy. But all in all, it’s not a bad place to set your hat.

I’m now back on U.S soil and enjoying the northern hemisphere summer. Here’s a small clue as to what I’ve been up to:

Blackout season

Imagine this: you arrive home from a rough day of drinking beer by the pool, only to discover that due to yet another power outage, you will be hiking the 8 flights of stairs to your apartment. Not for the first time, you wonder what made you decide to live in a building with no backup generator.

We’ve had ‘power fluctuations’ courtesy of SNEL (the municipal power company) nearly every day for the past two or three months and it’s been getting old. REGIDESO (the municipal water company) has not been much better.

So last week’s cartoon in the paper (translation: It’s his fault! No, it’s his!) got a bitter laugh from all who had enough light to read by.

Which brings me to my favourite Congo joke:
What did Congolese do for light before kerosene lamps?
Electricity!

Bits and pieces

While there’s been plenty of skittish talk around Kinshasa and sightings of Bemba’s guards with their red bandanas but yesterday’s midnight ultimatum has passed and so far, there’s no fighting in the streets.

Apparently the risk was enough to prompt some organisations to impose a curfew last night and others to limit circulation yesterday. In fact, folks around town were concerned enough that hardly anyone showed up at the cholera control meeting to discuss the cases that have been sneaking over to this side of the river from Brazzaville.

Meanwhile the Phantom Minister still holds office.

A cool drink of water

When you’ve got a disease outbreak on your hands, it’s a fine line between communicating prevention messages to the masses and avoiding mass hysteria. So when cholera broke out on the Brazzaville side of the Congo River, the government wisely decided to keep things a bit under wraps until after the Africa Youth Championship football match.

Meanwhile, an NGO that had recently launched a home water treatment project was busy disseminating a few communication messages on preventing water-borne disease. Sounds like a great idea, right?

Apparently the Ministry of Water and Energy didn’t think so. The communication messaging hit home a bit more than anyone had expected and the Brazzavillians began to refuse their water bills, claiming they should not have to pay for dirty water.

The Ministry, used to creative problem solving, quickly identified the culprit of said debacle: the NGO — and proceeded with a threat to shut the project down.

Keep in mind that this is the government that spent more sending the president and his entourage to the UN last year than the British government’s foreign assistance programme for the country. This is also the same government that stole USDA-surplus food which was intended to support another NGO’s humanitarian activities. Cheeky, eh?

Is it any wonder that our neighbour on the other side of the river ranked third (DRC is of course ranked first) on the list of the world’s hardest countries in which to do business?