Blast from the past

Kenya continues to surprise and perplex me.

My friend Phoebe just found this in her mailbox - her Christmas package to me from December 2007.

I left my village Dec 22, and never went back, so never received any gifts people might have sent me. My host family had told me there were some packages waiting for me, but the post office was raided during the riots and I assumed my gifts had just found their way into some looter's apartment.

So how did this one

a) survive getting there

b) not get looted

c) get sent back??! In my experience the Kenyan postal service does not shell out for return to sender

d) take over a year and a half for this whole process to happen, yet still make it back?

And all this when the gift involved electronics!

This would have been a really interesting study if it had been trackable.

Pirates

I would like to dedicate this blog post to my good friend McKay, the original discoverer of the pirate bar in Adyar.

I recently had a conversation with a journalist friend about the Somali pirate trend, admitting that despite the seriousness of the situation I couldn't help but snicker every time I saw the term "pirate" splashed across a headline. And I think the media plays it up too - "Pirates take captain hostage and demand ransom," "Somali pirates strike again, hijacking 4 ships." I know I know, that really is what happened, but don't you think they dramatize it a bit?

And wouldn't you? Nobody dressed up as a burglar or a carjacker for Halloween when they were a kid, but a pirate...

Anyway, another participant in the conversation passed this article on to me, justifying any sympathy I may have had for the real-life version of my eye-patch wearing, parrot-toting fantasy.  Pirates 1, Italian mafia 0.  And as always, Africa gets the shit end of the rest of the world's stick.

CDF in the news

I don’t work on this project, but 10 points if this article helps you understand the term “economic governance.” If you weren’t confused about what my organization does before, you probably are now.

Speaking of governance, I’m pretty excited to have ordered a copy of It's Our Turn to Eat, which is only available in the UK and apparently is too hot for Kenya. I wonder if it’ll make it through Indian postal screening, because you know, Kenya is the only country with a corruption problem.

An apple a day…

I just had my first experience with the Indian healthcare system. It should be a credit to India that I’ve been here 8 months and this is the first time I’ve had to see a doctor. That or to Kenya, for immunizing me against every tropical disease imaginable.

India is acclaimed for the high quality and, more importantly, dirt-cheap nature of its healthcare services. It is so dirt-cheap, in fact, that health insurance covers hospitalization only, no basic services – which seems fair, since the typical price for a doctor’s consultation is around $10 (half that of just the co-pay in the US!). In Chennai, if you are a foreigner, no one will recommend to you any institution other than Apollo Medical Center, the world-renowned ultra-modern private hospital. There were rumors that Apollo was a little pricier than the typical clinic, but hey, this is “high quality and dirt-cheap healthcare” India. So when I developed a mild but stubborn skin rash from SE Asia, I decided to go check it out.

The dermatologist was friendly and professional, and shrugged off my concern about the price of tests with a “don’t worry, nothing is expensive in India.” Then came his recommended course of action for my rash:

3 blood tests
2 inflammation-reducing creams
Avoid groundnuts
Avoid bottled beverages
Avoid cheese
Avoid processed foods
Avoid strawberries and strawberry products
Avoid beer
1 anti-allergy tablet
1 prescription soap to use in the shower
…and a partridge in a pear tree.

I guess I don’t have to worry about underdiagnosis.

The bill for all of this hoopla came to about $60 – nothing outrageous, but at the end of the day it was 3x what it would have been if I was working in the US. It does not make me excited about the prospect of seeing a doctor for an *actual* medical condition.

And for the record, I bought one of the creams and the soap, ignored the rest of the diagnosis, and the skin rash was gone in 4 days.

Dartmouth’s new prez

Dartmouth just announced its new president, set to take over for good old Jimmy Wright on July 1. He’s like, way young (49), way accomplished (MacArthur Genius Grant) and way global-poverty-focused (Partners in Health co-founder, WHO HIV/AIDS Dept director). Woot.

Of course there is no transparency on who the other nominees were, so I have no idea if this was the best choice. But in absolute terms, a young-minority-notentirelyacademic-globallyconscious choice for a traditionallyrunbyoldwhiteguys-antichange-indangerofinfluencebyneoconservativealums school sounds pretty good to me.

When the law and order guys disrupt law and order

This week when I picked up the newspaper each morning, I have to admit that it was all I could do to keep from laughing at the tragic headlines. “Lawyers, police clash at Madras High Court.” “150 lawyers protest Madras High Court violence, arrested.” Lawyers and police are taking turns smashing cars, setting buildings on fire, and throwing stones at each other. Am I the only one who finds this ironic? The two groups of people we rely on to maintain law and order in society, the two that are supposed to maintain checks and balances and ensure peace is kept and justice is served, have resorted to skirmishing like drug-addicted youth gangs. These are the guys who have to deal with violent members of society every day and clean up the messes they make, one group stopping people from rioting and throwing stones and setting buildings on fire, the other prosecuting or defending those who commit such raucous acts. And here they are doing it themselves, as their chosen method of protest? Seriously?

On top of it all, the whole reason for this clash in the first place, raising the awareness of which which could be the only possible explanation for such childish misbehavior, has been completely diluted in this mess. If you’re lucky you might get a tiny tagline at the bottom of an article about burning effigies and flooded hospitals that provides a half-hearted explanation of “where it all started” – something about a lawyer or two unfairly arrested, a politician failing to support the Sri Lankan Tamils, or some caste discrimination issue at the root of the conflict. These might be worthy causes to support and publicize. But by 50 lawyers standing around, courtroom suits and all, hurling stones and burning police stations? By cops and police administrators bashing windshields of private vehicles? Really, people.

More coverage of the tomfoolery available here.

Prop 8, Karnataka and gay Nepal MPs

Like any good mainstream Californian, I’ve always felt strongly about sexual rights, but recently I’ve felt a lot more passionate about the issue as a basic human right. Maybe it’s the passing of Prop 8, maybe it’s the rampant homophobia I hadn’t been exposed to before. It was one thing in my predominantly Christian village in Kenya, where I expected people to be less educated or open-minded. It’s another in an urban center in India, a nation exploding with diaspora and Western influence. To see young people scoff at traditions like arranged marriage like they’re arcane vestiges of their parents’ generation, but hold tight to their anti-gay prejudices without questioning their origins, is something I can’t get used to despite knowing full well that this is not a phenomenon of the east.

This came to be even more front and center this morning when I read a press release about some recent events in Karnataka, the next state over. This brought back to mind so many images of the issues we worked against in the HIV fight in Kenya – stigmatization, misrepresentation of facts, deliberate deception… but for all my whining about corruption in Kenya, I never saw these types of actions carried out by the police. They were carried out by non-state players, churches, Western-backed NGOs, but never by the very government agency working to prevent misinformation and promote awareness. This reaches a whole new level of atrocity.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Recently a panel was held here (in Chennai, capital of the country’s most conservative state) featuring Sunil Pant, a member of Nepal’s parliament who is Asia’s first openly gay MP. Milk is coming out this week, although sadly not in India. The No on 8 campaign is finally waking up and taking some legal action, albeit a month late. And the realization that this is a battle that’s far from over, not just a “matter of time” as I had previously thought, has pushed me into a far higher level of awareness and incited my inclinations towards activism. As much as the comparison offends some communities, I do think of this as our generation’s version of the 1960s civil rights movement, and am starting to consider getting more proactively involved (hmm, next career move? stay tuned). If a few events like these can spur a straight, middle class white girl who’s experienced relatively negligible discrimination in her life to action, imagine what they can do for the rest of the population.