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.

DRUGS!

My first meal in Uganda. From left: pineapple, coleslaw, green beans, white rice, beef & vegtable stew. Note the quantity.

Entebbe is a little bit Canberra and a little bit Miami. It resembles the former city in that it has a higher concentration of government ministries, research institutes and NGOs than one would expect for a city its size (90,000 residents). Amin used to reside here, and for that very reason the current President, Museveni, lives in Kampala.

For Entebbe’s similarities with Miami, see the following report from the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime:

“Two decades of armed conflict and lawlessness have severely damaged Uganda’s law enforcement infrastructure, which is urgently required to cope with the growing problems of drug abuse and illicit trafficking. Limited information is available on the drug control situation in Uganda. However, recent seizures show that illicit trafficking is on the increase in the country as well as the drug abuse problem. The Ugandan government has voiced concern over increasing reported drug abuse. Cannabis, heroin and methaqualone are the most available and consumed drugs.

Uganda receives abundant rainfall, has fertile soils and equatorial climate. This climate favours the growth of cannabis in almost all parts of the country. Illicit cultivation of the plant is, however, prominent in remote areas of southern, western, central, Eastern and North-Western regions. The exact acreage of cannabis cultivation is not known. There has been an increase in cultivation of cannabis in Uganda mainly for export.

Entebbe International Airport is being used as a transit route for Heroin and Mandrax from the Far East en route to South Africa. A review of drug seizures in 1998 and 1999 indicates an increase in the trafficking of heroin to east African countries from Pakistan, Thailand and India. Increased seizures of heroin with Nigerian connections bound for Uganda through Ethiopia have been noted. Due to the large amount of the substance seized, one is inclined to conclude that Uganda is in this context used as a major country of transit.

Traditionally, Entebbe International Airport (the sole airport) has been the centre of most trafficking. However, bus routes now lead to Rwanda and Tanzania in addition to the traditional bus routes to Kenya. Uganda also acts as a transit route for cargo destined for Rwanda and Burundi. The Uganda Revenue Authority also reports that post parcels are being used for trafficking especially heroin.”

SEX!

My bed.

De-toothing

“De-toothing, whereby a woman will analogously extract a man’s teeth one by one, until he is left with nothing, describes the behaviour of women who use their sexuality and the promise of sexual contact in the future as a bargaining tool to extract money and materials from men. It is one of the most evident dynamics on campus where transactional sexual behaviour is particularly aggressive as:

poor girls coming to campus for the first time from the village see the campus girls walking around with good hair, nice clothes, mobile phones and even cars. They want to get those things too and the easiest way is to get a rich older man and de-tooth him.

There is a very strong element of peer group pressure, which exacerbates the concern with materialism and more importantly maintaining the visibility of success through being seen to own luxury items.

‘Keeping Up Appearances’: Sex and Religion amongst University Students in Uganda.
J. Sadgrove / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 116-144 123

“Only you can stop inter-generational sex!”

Take-home message from a public service ad currently playing on local television. The ad features four people on screen in separate squares, Brady Bunch style. The first is a dirty old man looking to get his rocks off. The second is a university aged girl fondling her cell phone, complaining about keeping up with the Joneses. And the last two are a concerned man and woman who want to know what they can do to stop sugar daddies from transmitting HIV to the next generation.

The Ludacris version:

Yeah, shes a money magnet, smell a dollar bill in ya clothes.
Gold digger signs from her head to her toes
You hear me sayin no don't mess with the stress
She's out to get ya dough nuttin more nuttin less
Shes lookin' for a prize, man you killin me
Actin like you don't see the dollar signs in her eyes
She wants her nails done, and her hair, too
Plus a diamond necklace, thats all on you
You still can't see it, yeah you a sucka
If you do it homeboy man i couldn't be it
Hypnotised by her good looks?
Yup maybe, but a victim for a good crook? Nope not me!
Consider yourself warned so you can stay.
Or you can stick to my rhyme and get the heck away!
Either way, go.. figure, shes a gold.. digger.
Gettin' close as your bank roll grows bigger

THE WEST IS THE BEST

Not too long ago Paul Wolfowitz, mastermind of the Colonization of Mesopotamia, President of The Earth’s Bank, Shining Knight of the Neo-Conservative Code of Honor (“America as Lord and Savior”), traveled to Africa. He gave many speeches, smiled many smiles, shook many hands and even climbed down occasionally from his white SUV to walk on the dry dirt. It was tiring work. The thousands of new African faces each day seemed to sap the energy out of Paul. On the final day of the trip he found himself in the middle of a drought-ridden region in East Africa. He was suffering, fatigued and dehydrated under the merciless tropical sun. He was far enough from Darfur to be safe, of course, but close enough to have disturbed his black and white dreams the night before. He had been tormented by a statement that he’d made not too long ago:

It's a very bad thing when people exterminate other people, and people persecute minorities. It doesn't mean you can prevent every such incident in the world, but it's also a mistake to dismiss that sort of concern as merely humanitarian and not related to real interest.

Even in his weakened state, Paul saw the real interest as clear as desert day. His aides had informed him at the morning briefing that it stood at 4.3%. Mere humanitarianism, on the other hand, seemed freshly and deeply complicated, as if he had discovered after all these years that he’d been adopted, that he was not in biological fact the son of Polish Jews but rather just another American Mutt with no special story to tell, only as human as anyone else. Paul began to lose faith in everything he’d been taught about Africa. He scoured the stainless steel corridors in his mind for something, anything, to help him understand. As a freshman at Cornell he’d read Jean Pictet’s “The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross”:

The wellspring of the principle of humanity is in the essence of social morality which can be summed up in a single sentence, Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. This fundamental precept can be found, in almost identical form, in all the great religions, Brahminism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Islam, Judaism and Taoism. It is also the golden rule of the positivists, who do not commit themselves to any religion but only to the data of experience, in the name of reason alone. It is indeed not at all necessary to resort to affective or transcendental concepts to recognize the advantage for men to work together to improve their lot.

Suddenly, out in the sand, Paul saw a young woman carrying water in a large plastic container balanced on the blue cloth coiled like a snake around her head. He imagined her seven miles down the king’s highway where she’d dipped into an ancient lake. He imagined her husband working in the gold mines and he imagined her children slowly going insane as they waited and waited for the rains. Then he imagined the janjaweed on the edge of town swooping down to take the young woman away like the Nazis took his grandmother. Paul began to sway under the weight of his visions. By this time a local man had approached, recognizing Paul from the Internet. As Paul fell to the earth the man asked:

“Why are you persecuting me?”

Paul smiled faintly, his eyes mere slits into his slippery soul. He stared at the bare black feet in front of his face, and then he looked up at the man and responded, in sing-songy scratchiness:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we'll do the rest