Mugabe Sucks

Looks like a fair run-off election in Zimbabwe is less likely every day:

Farmers from Masvingo, Mashonaland East and Manicaland Provinces who worked on behalf of the opposition and were interviewed by telephone in the past week described a pattern of ruling-party gangs visiting under the cover of darkness to beat and evict them.

Villagers from Manicaland said they were roused from sleep around midnight one night this month by young marauders who had come to punish them for voting against Mr. Mugabe. They said the gangs pelted them with stones fired from slingshots and dragged some from their homes.

The next day, rather than protecting them, police officers ordered them to empty their small huts of their meager possessions, witnesses said. Then the young thugs returned to the small settlement just north of the city of Mutare, bashing down people’s homes with iron bars or setting them ablaze.

Yes, Some People Enjoy This

And not just for the humor.

Carman’s “A Witch’s Invitation”

Some of the lyrics:

One peaceful afternoon I picked up from my mailbox the strangest looking letter I’d ever seen, a chilling little envelope bordered with flying bats, and serpents whose eyes were tinted green. The letter was addressed to me so as I opened it I froze. What I read turned my complexion three shades of blue. It said, “My name is Issac Horowitz. I’m a male witch, a warlock and I feel I need to spend some time with you.”

You know, there are more homoerotic undertones here than in The Lord of the Rings. I’m sure it was unintentional though.

He had the house you’d expect, the old English cottage, a “Nightmare on Elm Street” special right to the core, the overgrown ivy, the gate that creaked when opened, somehow you’d expect Freddy to answer this door. The doorbell rang, a hollow gong, the knob twisted then opened, and Issac stood before me with a grin. His jet black hair and well trimmed beard flowed with his black silk clothes. My skin crawled as he said, “Please come on in.”

Actually, all the warlocks I know live in incredible well-kept single room flats in dense urban areas. Guess Carman met one of the rare suburban warlocks.

Then he led me to a high backed chair as he meticulously began to unfold his scenario with evil patience.

Bet that chair will bring a pretty penny on eBay.

I was given a giant leather bound book jammed with newspaper clipping, thus the reason for this witch’s invitation. With eagerness he pointed to each article with pride. He said, “I healed this woman through a Babylonian chant; See this man, I cured him while performing druid worship; I was paid to curse this man with AIDS by his aunt.”

Which really sounds familiar to the superstitions you run into in Africa about AIDS. Sigh…

And later. . .

I knew then how Moses felt, how when his rod turned to a serpent and the three Egyptian magicians did the same.

Man, I hate it when my rod turns to a serpent.

At the end:

Then Issac jumped up from his chair and screamed, “You must leave now!” I said, “I will, but one last obligation-Next time think twice before you rumble with a man of God!!! ”

That’s what Ted Haggard said.

h/t Lame-O Weblog

Good News, Bad News

The World Health Organization has announced that polio has been eradicated from Somalia. This was an incredibly difficult task, given Somalia’s endemic violence and instability. And it took a huge effort:

More than 10,000 Somali volunteers and health workers vaccinated more than 1.8 million children under the age of five by visiting every household in every settlement multiple times.

However, this has happened before. Polio was eradicated from Somalia back in 2002, only to be reintroduced from Nigeria. The fact that polio was reintroduced from a country on the other side of the continent calls attention to the interrelatedness of disease control efforts in different countries (diseases know no borders) and the tragedies that occur when vaccination efforts clash with local cultures or religions.

But despite its tenuous progress in terms of total eradication, the WHO’s $4 billion polio campaign has made great steps forward:

When WHO and partners began their anti-polio campaign in 1988, the worldwide case count was more than 350,000 annually. The disease’s incidence has since been slashed by more than 99 percent and remains endemic in four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan. Polio cases were also detected last year in Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger and Sudan.

So that’s the good (albeit cautiously so) news. The bad news for Somalia:

Somalia’s Government Teeters on Collapse

If you read that and asked “wait, Somalia has a government?” you’re not alone. But it does have a government of sorts:

By its own admission, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia is on life support. When it took power here in the capital 15 months ago, backed by thousands of Ethiopian troops, it was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war and suffering.

But now its leaders say that unless they get more help — international peacekeepers, weapons, training and money to pay their soldiers, among other things — this transitional government will fall just like the 13 governments that came before it.

Less than a third of the promised African Union soldiers have arrived, the United Nations has shied away from sending peacekeepers and even the Ethiopians are taking a back seat, often leaving the government’s defense to teenage Somalis with clackety guns who are overwhelmed.

Connection, Redux

I just ran my page through Gizoogle, which “transizlates” pages from standard English into jive. Here are some wonderful, culturally-appropriate excerpts from my previous post:

I work at a store . I’m a mutha fuckin 2-time felon.. Many, mizzle thugz come through mah checkout each dizzle though tha dominant group is Southern, middle-class, middle-age white bitchez. So when someone different comes through mah line, I often takes interest puttin tha smack down.

And then he was gizzy. If I Hadn’t had gangsta customa in line I probably would’ve asked wizzle brought him ta America, n especially ta Searcy in tha mutha fuckin club. There jizzle aren’t many (black) South Africans in mah ghetto (I kizzy a few white ones) n I’m always curious ta hizzle tha piznath that brought thugz fizzle so far away . Hollaz to the East Side. I enjoyed tha brief shawty connection of shared knowledge of a place, even in Small Tizzay USA with my hoes on my side, and my strap on my back. Maybe He’ll come B-to-tha-izzack through.

For the record, Gizoogle also translated Amy Richards’ book into Manifesta: Young Bitchez, Feminism, n tha Future.

Connection

I work at a store. Many, many people come through my checkout each day, though the dominant group is Southern, middle-class, middle-age white women. So when someone different comes through my line, I often take interest.

Two nights ago a black man with an accent came through my line. The accent was strong and from Anglophone Africa (and I’ve met a few people from Ghana in my town), so I asked “Do you mind if I ask where you’re from?”

“Over there in neighborhood X,” he said, referring to a place right down the road.

“Ah, ok.”

“But before that, South Africa.”

“A beautiful country. Where are you from in South Africa?”

Pauses for a second, thinking I’m probably just asking to be polite and won’t know wherever he names. “Have you heard of a place called Soweto?”

“Yeah, I’ve been there.” His eyes light up with amusement.

“Oh really? Where you living there?”

As I hand him his change, “No, I was just working as a volunteer for a few weeks.”

“Great, where at in Soweto?”

As I hand him his receipt, “Well, mostly outside of Soweto, but I was at Baragwanath Hospital several times.”

“I lived right by the power station near there, do you know it?”

“No, sorry.”

And then he was gone. If I hadn’t had another customer in line I probably would’ve asked what brought him to America, and especially to Searcy. There just aren’t many (black) South Africans in my town (I know a few white ones) and I’m always curious to hear the path that brought people from so far away. I enjoyed the brief little connection of shared knowledge of a place, even in Small Town, USA. Maybe he’ll come back through.

Confession Time

I’m a feminist. I think women deserve equal political and social rights, equal access to the same jobs as men if they want them, and equal pay for the work they do. If that doesn’t sound extraordinary, then maybe you’re a feminist too.

This is a video of men being asked on the street what they think of feminists. It’s rather sad, but watch it for the best two answers–the last two. One guy uses the Bible to justify men being the head of women, and his wife’s reaction is absolutely priceless.

As with many types of injustice, it really took traveling outside my own country, especially in Africa, to realize the problems we have here. The interpersonal, social, and economic conditions for women abroad are often much lower than even in the American South, but that certainly doesn’t mean things are perfect here.

I think overall the name’s gotten a bad rap, so I go out of my way to describe myself as a feminist, which usually raises interesting questions. So, do you know a feminist? If so, thank s/he for being who they are.

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If You Don’t Like to Think About AIDS, Don’t Read This.

Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece recently entitled “Save the Darfur Puppy.” I think he was going for getting a reaction with the title, and it worked, at least with me. You’ve probably notice that the media loves stories about endangered species–always cute, cuddly ones, never rodents–because people are moved by these stories. On the other hand, a crisis like the genocide in Darfur is unlikely to get airplay commensurate with its magnitude. And likewise with AIDS, which despite being of tragic scale–two or three flaming World Trade Centers full of people dying every day–rarely hits the news, in part because it’s the same old, depressing story, every day.

So, when I saw that Truthdig had an interview called “Stop Ignoring AIDS and Africa,” I gravitated light-wards. The piece is an interview of Stephanie Nolen, the author of a new book called “28: Stories of AIDS in Africa” which tells one narrative of a (real, actual, living and breathing) human being with HIV in Africa for every one million of the estimated 28 million living with the virus. I certainly plan on reading this book, but here’s what really caught my eye–this picture:

And its caption:

Bongos, an 8-year-old HIV-positive boy, waits in a hallway at the Sparrow Rainbow Village medical clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa, in November 2005.

This really hits home, because I volunteered at Sparrow back in 2005. They do incredible work, and my few weeks there were extremely moving. Sparrow is an orphanage and adult hospice–a “village”–where those with HIV are cared for. The corridor in the background is the central part of Sparrow’s administrative center, which connects some of the hospital rooms (for the sickest patients), a kitchen, administrative offices, and even a makeshift morgue. Because most of the patients there receive some level of antiretroviral treatment Sparrow is really, sadly, one of the best places to be in Johannesburg if you’re a kid with HIV.

Here are some compelling quotes from Nolen’s interview on Truthdig:

You show people a picture of one sad-looking puppy and everyone runs for their wallet, and you tell them that 30,000 children die a day of diseases that can be prevented for less than a buck and nobody gives a rat’s ass. I don’t know what it is, what that says about us as a species, but I certainly know from a long time reporting about HIV in Africa that it’s true.

On narrating an issue where the statistics are numbing:

Their lives could not look more different in some ways than the lives of an American or a Canadian. But when you sit down in the little counselor’s booth in Malawi or Lusaka and they say to you, “You have AIDS, you’re going to die,” that doesn’t feel different than it would if you were in America. And it’s getting people to realize that those people had all—sure, they’re Africans—but they had all those same expectations around their lives. They want to graduate from high school, they want to start a little business, they want to, you know, persuade that really cute girl they’ve been eyeing for a long time to go out with them. It isn’t any different. You’ve really got to go, go really micro to make people understand that story, to get them past the numbers.

On finding stories of progress:

You know, I think we get very often this perception of it being a grim story where not very much changes…We also don’t hear that huge progress has been made in responding. There were, for example, when I started reporting on this full-time, there were fewer than 100,000 people on treatments and today there are 1.5 million in Africa. And everybody said, “You can’t do it, there’s no way you can treat in Africa.” Well, that’s a 13-fold increase in four years, and those people have better survival rates on treatment than most Americans on treatment do. So lots of victories.

On money and broken promises and the real roadblock to widespread treatment programs (trained health care professionals):

And there’s a lot more money available than there was….They need about $6.8 billion to meet those proposals, and they have, you know, like, $1.85 in change. Constantly, countries promise money and don’t deliver or don’t promise anything like what’s needed to respond. So we need money. I think, even more than money, these days we’re realizing that there are some more intractable problems that are going to need more creative solutions. So you can use that money to fly in boxes and boxes of pills. You can’t fly in nurses, doctors, pharmacists. I mean, you can fly in a few, but not enough to meet the needs of a whole, continent-wide healthcare program, right?

On the underlying economic inequalities that drive the epidemic:

You know, I meet lots of young women who’ve been given information about HIV but who are selling sex down at truck stops because their parents have died, they’re raising their siblings and that’s the only option that they have. So, you know, they say, “Fine, we’ve been told about HIV in the safe-sex textbooks, but HIV might kill me in five years or 10 years and we’re all going to starve to death next week if I don’t do this.” So, you can address some of the obvious things around prevention, but unless you change the factors that drive people into risky behavior, then you haven’t achieved very much.

And, a bit further afield, but still in Africa, on Darfur and the war in Uganda:

And, you know, it’s also interesting to talk about Darfur because, yeah, there are probably 300, 350,000 dead there and a lot of people displaced, but it is in fact a far smaller conflict than the war in northern Uganda which has been going on for 21 years. You have four times as many people displaced in northern Uganda. You have four times as many people dead. Well, when did we last hear about that one, right? I mean, Darfur is suddenly sexy because George Clooney goes there and, meanwhile, the war in northern Uganda that relies almost entirely on child soldiers … you don’t hear about that one.

On Bush’s PEPFAR program (providing treatment for AIDS in Africa):

Well, you know, I’ve done a lot of call-in radio lately where people call up and are yelling about the Bush administration letting people die, and here they are, spending all these billions of dollars in Iraq. Why don’t they do something in Africa? So I say to people, “Well, guess what? Actually the $15-billion, five-year program to intervene for AIDS in Africa, that the Bush administration dreamed up, has been the single greatest response to the pandemic ever.” And then there’s kind of silence on the end of the phone, you know?

And its problems:

…They’re saying a group that’s going to get U.S. funds to distribute condoms or put AIDS programs in schools or care for sick people, has to sign a piece of paper condemning sex work. And that’s like crazy moral language that just has no place in a place where people are selling sex to eat.

I like Stephanie Nolen. And I like Truthdig.

(If you’d like to learn more about or donate to Sparrow, please do so!)

Nigeria…

ThruthDig has an excellent piece on the recent “elections” in Nigeria and what they may or may not mean. More thoughts coming soon.

McCain’s Agnosticism Kills

I now officially loathe John McCain. When asked simple questions about whether condoms protect users from sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, McCain simply “didn’t know.” In other words, he’s so afraid of offending his “moral conservative” base that he professes to be agnostic about the most basic of scientific facts, and ends up supporting policies that kill.

A transcript borrowed from The Caucus blog:

Reporter: “Should U.S. taxpayer money go to places like Africa to fund contraception to prevent AIDS?”

McCain: “…Let me think about it a little bit because I never got a question about it before. I don’t know if I would use taxpayers’ money for it.”

Reporter: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”

McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”

Reporter: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Reporter: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

Reporter: “But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?”

McCain: (Twelve-second pause) “Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before.”

Mr. Senator, this is absurd. I’m nauseous. Actually, this reminds me of the President of Gambia. He had a vision from his ancestors telling him about a magical cure for HIV. And because of his ignorance, people are going to die.

And it reminds me of Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa. In 2000, while under pressure from activists to begin providing life-sustaining antiretroviral treatment for HIV using public funds, Mbeki found the easy way out. He publicly questioned whether HIV causes AIDS, and suggested people should opt for good nutrition alone, with no other treatment. Mbeki’s dithering was eventually overcome, but the delay in providing public treatment for HIV in South Africa cost lots of lives, and those lives aren’t just statistics. In 2004 I watched several kids die of HIV in Johannesburg–kids who might have been on treatment by then if Mbeki hadn’t publicly encouraged ignorance and backpedaling.

And with McCain, it’s worse. Really, who do you expect to be more scientifically informed, and more likely to use financial resources to promote condoms, a former revolutionary and current president of a country in Africa? Or a United States Senator, who is a leading politician in a country with massive resources?

And how did McCain respond? He laughed. He hedged. He refused to acknowledge that condoms in any way prevent the spread of HIV or STDs. He probably would deny they prevent pregnancy as well!

This is no laughing matter. McCain will get some negative publicity, but his conservative base will say “look, he’s really anti-condom, so we like him,” imagining that not sending condoms to Africa is actually going to make people celibate and turn them to God.

May McCain be cursed with a stingy bout of gonorrhea and ongoing neural degradation (if he can afford it, since he’s obviously already lacking) from syphilis.