I think that along with the printing press, steam engine, and transistor, future anthropologists are going to have to add washing machines to the list of innovations that enabled modern productivity. To avoid paying $5 per t-shirt to Conrad and Paris, I decided to do my laundry in my bathtub.
Washing eight shirts is literally an hour-plus job. Complicating matters is the lack of ventilation that doesn't involve diesel smog or clothing donation to the neighbors, coupled with the recent rainy weather that is great for Kenyan people, animals, and crops, but bad for people washing their clothes in the bathtub who aren't into accessorizing with mold.
I did finally find a hair dryer though - of course it was bolted into a drawer in the desk - so that helped speed the drying process a bit.
Today we went to a Nairobi district hospital that specializes in treating patients with HIV to understand how they reach and treat their patients. The government has a fairly widespread HIV treatment network, which we may be able to utilize for nutrient distribution.
Hospital is actually a generous term, as would the terms "road leading to it", "offices", and "examination rooms". I wasn't taking pictures, but there were some taken that I will be able to upload tomorrow. The experience was shocking - walking into the "board room" where we had our meeting, the odor instantly made me feel like I was walking into the lion house at Brookfield Zoo. From our conversations, there were two things that stood out:
- There's been a recent trend of women in the slums getting jobs and dropping their kids off at informal "day care" which is really just the shanty of another woman. Apparently this is rapidly becoming a crisis because the so-called caretakers do not feed or provide decent hygeine for the kids. Compounding that is the fact that they will pack something like 50 kids into a 15 x 15 foot shack. I have a feeling that number is a bit exaggerated, but I'm sure it's just as horrific.
- Denial is still a major part of the problem with HIV management. Beyond the stigma attached to having HIV (and even being tested), most of the really poor Kenyan's still very much hold to old traditions and beliefs like witchcraft, herbal cures, and other nostrums. We heard the story about one child who was afflicted with AIDS and brought to the clinic by his mother. They wanted to test him for HIV and treat his worsening malnutrition, but the father refused to give permission for the test or treatment. Given that Kenya is still very much a patriarcal society (some of the more shocking statistics I've come across in our research so far are those on domestic violence, e.g. something like 70%+ women think their husbands are justified in beating them if they burn dinner), the test and treatment were never carried out and the boy died last week.
Even that is daunting though - Kenya is remarkable in that nationwide, about 90% - 95% of children (ages 6 - 15) are attending school, and adult literacy rates are in the 80% ballpark.
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3 comments:
CK, I've always wondered why the poor in Africa (unlike the poor in many other nations, except where it allows them to receive more government welfare) continue to have large number of children they cannot care for, which also prohibit them from climbing the economic ladder out of poverty. I suspect that we can't understand this well through the lense of Western ideology and moral framework.
Is it possible that in a land and culture where humans have always lived at the mercy of nature (scarce resources, draughts, limited food production, dangerous wildlife) that high mortality rate is accepted more naturally? Having more children increases the chance that one will survive to carry on their name and sustain the tribe. Might this also explain why they don't share the Westerner's regard for well groomed roads, buildings, etc. - if your psyche says that nature is all powerful and you live at its mercy, aren't road and buildings just temporal?
I have often wondered if the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid for Africa over the past 50 years has produced so little change in the standard of living for the masses (not those in charge of the government, who apparent did quite well) because we don't channel the aid in a way that aligns naturally with the people's values and predispositions.
About a year ago, I saw a guest on CNBC who was arguing that the UN should stop all aid for Africa because all it has done is create societies and governments engineered to maximize, both legally and illegally, one's individual benefit from the aid rather than ones that pursue activities that lead to self sustainability. Her argument is that the unintended consequence has been to create a culture of dependency and corruption. Surprisingly, this commentator was a female Afro-American who had spent years studying the history of African aid.
I don't know the answers but these seem to be questions worth asking.
Hi Chris - I think you're definitely hitting on an element of the problem. I've had the same thought myself, and being here has reinforced it in some ways. It's really sad, but there just isn't the same attitude and expectation towards life as there is in the developed world. However, I think the situation in the West was no different in earlier centuries, so the situation doesn't preclude advancement.
I also share the concern about creating a culture of expectation around aid handouts, which is why I've previously had no interest in getting involved in what we consider to be modern day "development aid" (I even wrote a column about it in college, arguing that aid is necessary to help people in the short-run, but long-term, the only solution is creating a self-sustaining economy... we shouldn't be investing in roads if we're not simultaneously investing in generating private demand for roads).
I do however think that the world is finally waking up to the realization that handouts only make the situation worse, much as the US realized with it's social welfare programs.
I think there is a lot of hope in social entrepreneurialism, but we've so badly perverted the cultures and markets in developing nations, the task is bigger now than it was 50 years ago.
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