Another important and excellent article about Africa from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. It is worth reading in its entirety in my opinion for anyone with an interest in Africa.
Uvealblues
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TAKE an American student and an American teacher who have never been near Africa before, lead them on a crazed “win a trip” journey through five particularly wretched countries, and what do you get?
Well, a few mishaps. There was that angry mob in Mauritania — who would have thought our cameras would upset people that much? And that bull elephant in Niger was equally inhospitable, although the giraffes seemed amiable as they approached to gawk at the strange white humans.
We encountered plenty of heartbreak, like the baby we met in Niger who was going blind from lack of vitamin A. In some places, we felt the gnawing disquiet of insecurity. The rise of banditry and a Qaeda network in West Africa forced us to take an armed escort across one particularly lawless stretch of “highway.”
Yet my travel buddies and I also found something far more significant on our journey
: hope.
(..)
With Shawn, we drove south across the Mauritanian desert to Senegal, and then flew the following day to Niger — one of the poorest and most forlorn countries in the world. In the remote town of Dogon Doutchi, near the Nigerian border, we saw with heartbreaking clarity what doctors call severe acute malnutrition.
A 2-year-old child, Alou Muhammad, was lying nearly comatose on a cot in the local hospital, his ribs protruding, receiving fluid from an IV drip. Alou’s left eye had Bitot’s spots — signs of vitamin A deficiency that lead to blindness.
At least 250,000 children go blind each year for lack of vitamin A, according to the W.H.O., and half of them die within a year of going blind.
(The cost of a vitamin A tablet is 2 cents and the kids need them every four to six months! uvealblues)
This was Saumya’s report:
"The local hospital was unlike anything I had ever seen. No hand sanitizer dispenser. No faces covered with scrub masks. No supply closet. No physicians streaming down the hallway in stark white coats.
"Alou was in pain, screaming 'Mama!' between sobs. I have seen malnourished children, but this was the first time I could count each rib."
(I have seen many such hospitals in Africa--uvealblues)
(..)
When I (Nicholas Kristof)
first backpacked through West Africa as a law student in 1982, what I found most wrenching were the ubiquitous blind beggars, victims of a disease called river blindness, spread by the bites of black flies. The flies carry parasites that grow into worms whose offspring eat away at the optic nerve and cause blindness, debilitating itching and excruciating pain.
“This was more painful than childbirth,” Fatouma Oumarou, a 70-year-old woman who had gone blind from the ailment, told us when we visited her village. At the peak of the disease, she recalled, much of the land in the area was left fallow because farmers did not dare work the area. In a nearby village, Moli, in a wildlife refuge, people told us that lions had killed a 15-year-old in the fields, but added, “We are more afraid of the black flies than of the lions.”
Yet these days river blindness is gone from this region, thanks partly to
heroic work by Jimmy Carter, and to vast contributions of medicine by Merck. I asked villagers if they had ever heard of Jimmy Carter, and they shook their heads doubtfully — but his post-presidency work on global health had transformed their lives.
(Merck definitely deserves credit for this initiative--uvealblues)
Here is a link to one of the videos from Kristof's article:
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Here is further discussion on Kristof's column:
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