HAPPY UNITED NATIONS DAY!

Time to celebrate. Break out your blue helmet, translate everything you say into Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish, and politely ask the USA to pay its bills.

United Nations Day, proclaimed in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, is held annually on 24 October, the anniversary of the coming into force of the UN Charter on 24 October 1945.

A few days ago I had dinner at Entebbe's Chinese restaurant with an American PhD student from the London School of Tropical Medicine and a Brit working for the tuberculosis dept at WHO (a UN org). He informed us (although we should have guessed) that the U.S. routinely neglects to pay its membership dues to be a part of the UN. One could make a strong argument that the UN is the most powerful war-prevention organization in the world. And we don't support it. Not only do we not support it, we actively campaign against it. Why should we have to listen to what the rest of the world has to say?

Next I propose that we take on the International Red Cross. They hurt our military efficiency by working to cure terrorists that we have partially blown away. Furthermore, the organization's full name is International Red Cross and Red Crescent. The crescent, of course, is a symbol for "terrorist vacation spot."

The UVRI neighborhood

Yankee soldier
He wanna shoot some skag
He met it in cambodia
But now he cant afford a bag

Yankee dollar talk
To the dictators of the world
In fact its giving orders
An they cant afford to miss a word

Im so bored with the u...s...a...
But what can I do?

Yankee detectives
Are always on the tv
cos killers in america
Work seven days a week

Never mind the stars and stripes
Lets print the watergate tapes
Ill salute the new wave
And I hope nobody escapes

Im so bored with the u...s...a...
But what can I do?

Move up starsky
For the c.i.a.
Suck on kojak
For the usa

-The Clash

Lake Victoria from the lab

THE MOSQUITO HUNT

Mud bricks for building homes drying in the sun. Where Entebbe meets Lake Victoria dozens of men labor in the swamp, digging up clay to mold into these bricks. The resultant holes fill with water and become perfect breeding places for Culicine and Anopheles mosquitoes, including Anopheles gambiae, the most efficient malaria vector on Earth.

Fred finds A. gambiae larvae.

Larvae are scooped out of breeding habitat with plates. One reason that malaria is so difficult to control is that A. gambie breeds in small, temporary puddles that can from in tire tracks or animal footprints.

VIOLENCE!

Ferocious Goats!

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." (Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 51)

Today is Columbus Day in America:

http://www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/columbus_western.html

It isn’t uncommon to hear an Italian say that Mussolini deserves credit for building roads, bridges and other infrastructure. Yesterday a young Ugandan said something similar to me about Idi Amin. “Amin tried to put more power in the peasants’ hands…so long as they made no attempt to take any from him.” Can Amin’s eviction of the nation’s Indian-Ugandan population - an effort to put control of the economy into black Ugandans’ hands – be seen as an effort to reduce structural violence?

Structural violence , a term coined by Johan Galtung and by liberation theologians during the 1960s, describes social structures—economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural—that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching their full potential. In its general usage, the word violence often conveys a physical image; however, according to Galtung, it is the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or…the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible”. Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding “ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience” [59]. Because they seem so ordinary in our ways of understanding the world, they appear almost invisible. Disparate access to resources, political power, education, health care, and legal standing are just a few examples. The idea of structural violence is linked very closely to social injustice and the social machinery of oppression. – Farmer et al “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine” 2006

Watch your back!!! J. Sachs has beef with Farmer’s depiction of the global economy as a zero-sum game:

…[Farmer] goes on to suggest, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that structural violence is the key barrier to the escape from poverty. In essence, he occasionally comes close to espousing a neo-Marxist theory, according to which extreme poverty persists mainly because of exploitation by the rich and powerful. For example, he favorably quotes two liberation theologians who argue that poverty today "is mainly the result of a contradictory development, in which the rich become steadily richer, and the poor become steadily poorer."

That is not correct for two reasons. First, Haiti aside, the rich are not, in general, getting richer and the poor, poorer. The Haitian experience does not shed much light on the massive reduction of poverty in Asia in the past quarter century, particularly in China and India. Nor does it properly apply even to Haiti's next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic, which underwent notable declines in child mortality and illiteracy in the past generation, and a similar decline in the proportion of households with incomes too low to meet basic needs.

Second, and just as important, there are many structural causes of extreme poverty that are not related to "contradictory development" or to "structural violence." A number of other factors can present steep barriers to economic development: an ecology that readily spreads disease (for example, the presence of particular mosquito vectors and climate conditions conducive to high rates of malaria transmission); physical isolation (communities living in mountains or rainforests); adverse biophysical conditions for food production (such as vulnerability to drought and poor soils). But Farmer's overriding message--that the poor are not to blame for their poverty--is emphatically correct, even though his specific diagnosis of "structural violence" appears too limited to offer a truly global perspective on poverty.

What kind of violence is it when pitiless monkeys stalk you on the walk to work each morning?

ROCK & ROLL!

The Uganda Virus Research Institute

There is no rock & roll in Uganda.

Imagine it: an entire nation that is neither ready nor willing to rock.

28 million heads that do not bang.

A country that prefers country. (Kenny Rogers was the first voice I heard on the radio here).

What are the social implications and metaphysical consequences of this absence? How does one know when it is time to ramble on? What color haze is all in one's brain? Why don't we d-do it in the what?

Fred looking for larvae

Now to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger" it's time to:

MEET THE SQUAD - the UVRI Dept of Entomology

1. Louis Mukwaya – Dept Chair
Age: 60-70
Approx Height/Weight: 5’8’’, 200 lbs
Exp with UVRI: at least 20 years
Notes: Eccentric and jolly. Shows front few top teeth when he laughs. Not concerned with administration – interested only in what mosquitoes do. Did pioneering work on several mosquitoes that spread Yellow Fever.

2. Fred – Senior Entomologist
Age: 40-50
Exp with UVRI: 25 yrs
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 130 lbs
Notes: Knows his mosquitoes. Favorite music: Michael Jackson.

3. Jonathan Kayondo – Molecular Biologist
Age: early 30s
Exp with UVRI: 2 yrs prior to doctoral work at Notre Dame, 1 yr since completion
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 160 lbs
Notes: The Next Generation. Primary research interest: population genetics of malaria vectors. He has been my primary contact here, a gracious host, showing me the ropes not only at UVRI but Entebbe as well.

4. Julius – Junior Entomologist
Age: early 20s
Exp with UVRI: 5 yrs
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 140 lbs
Notes: proud Catholic

5. Catherine – Junior Entomologist
Age: early 20s
Exp with UVRI: ?
Approx height/weight: 5’6’’, 120 lbs
Notes: shy

6. Eric – Intern
Age: early 20s
Exp with UVRI: two weeks
Approx Height/Weight: 5’6’’, 140 lbs
Notes: Recent graduate of Makerere University (major: biotech). Dreamed of playing chess internationally. Converted to 7^th Day Adventism while attending 7^th Day Adventist high school.

7. Me
Age: 25
Exp with UVRI: two weeks
Approx height/weight: 6’1’’, 185 lbs (increasing daily)
Notes: Spends too much time on computer. Doesn’t know one mosquito from another. Spreads papers all over desk. Eats snacks in office. Good listener (skill honed while watching TV). Nervously side-steps inquires about his religious beliefs.