Book Commentary about Africa
Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis – set in Africa.
I have spent the last four years watching people die. Nothing in my adult life prepared me for the carnage of HIV/AIDS. The pandemic of HIV/AIDS feels like it will go on forever. No one is untouched. Everyone has a heartbreaking story to tell. Virtually every country in East and southern Africa is a nation of mourners. I have to say that the ongoing plight of Africa forces me to perpetual rage. It’s all so unnecessary, so crazy that hundred of millions of people should be this abandoned. However, the people speak with a spunk and resilience that is positively supernatural.
The damage is dreadful. One of the critical reasons for Africa’s inability to respond adequately to the pandemic can be explained to user fees in health care (people can’t afford to pay for treatment) and user fees in education (school a fee, which helps to explain why so many orphans are out of school). A defining mantra – if the body has no food to consume, the HIV/AIDS virus consumes the body.
What makes this all so important is the need for radically new policies if Africans are to be given the opportunity to rescue their continent. It may seem hard to believe, but between 1970 and 2002, Africa acquired $294 billion in debt. Much of the debt was assumed by military dictators who profited beyond the dreams of avarice, and left for the people of their countries, the crushing burden of payment. What is needed, as everyone understands, is a plan, again country by country, sector by sector, to address the shortage of professionals that will work in Africa – teachers, health care and social workers.
Today, the heaviest burden of a decade of frenzied borrowing is falling not on the military or on those with the foreign bank accounts or on those who conceived the years of waste, but on the poor who are having to do without necessities … on women who do not have enough food to maintain their health, on the infants whose minds and bodies are not growing properly … and on the children who are being denied their only opportunity ever to go to school. The increase in foreign aid is purely conjectural. We have Kilimanjaro to climb before we meet the needs of Africa.
Convention of the Rights of the Child – Make primary education compulsory and available free to all… The numbers of children excluded range somewhere between 105 and 120 million worldwide, 44 million in Africa, about 60% of them girls. Orphaned children who so much want to learn and who need the sense of self-worth that education could bring are denied all of it because the costs of schooling are prohibitive.
President Kibaki of Kenya lifted the school fees in 2003 and a staggering enrolment of 1.3 million children occurred (5.9 million to 7.2 million). Ultimately, lost to the world will be hundreds of thousands of creative, gifted, often brilliant spirits.
I have spent the last four years watching people die. Nothing in my adult life prepared me for the carnage of HIV/AIDS. The pandemic of HIV/AIDS feels like it will go on forever. No one is untouched. Everyone has a heartbreaking story to tell. Virtually every country in East and southern Africa is a nation of mourners. I have to say that the ongoing plight of Africa forces me to perpetual rage. It’s all so unnecessary, so crazy that hundred of millions of people should be this abandoned. However, the people speak with a spunk and resilience that is positively supernatural.
The damage is dreadful. One of the critical reasons for Africa’s inability to respond adequately to the pandemic can be explained to user fees in health care (people can’t afford to pay for treatment) and user fees in education (school a fee, which helps to explain why so many orphans are out of school). A defining mantra – if the body has no food to consume, the HIV/AIDS virus consumes the body.
What makes this all so important is the need for radically new policies if Africans are to be given the opportunity to rescue their continent. It may seem hard to believe, but between 1970 and 2002, Africa acquired $294 billion in debt. Much of the debt was assumed by military dictators who profited beyond the dreams of avarice, and left for the people of their countries, the crushing burden of payment. What is needed, as everyone understands, is a plan, again country by country, sector by sector, to address the shortage of professionals that will work in Africa – teachers, health care and social workers.
Today, the heaviest burden of a decade of frenzied borrowing is falling not on the military or on those with the foreign bank accounts or on those who conceived the years of waste, but on the poor who are having to do without necessities … on women who do not have enough food to maintain their health, on the infants whose minds and bodies are not growing properly … and on the children who are being denied their only opportunity ever to go to school. The increase in foreign aid is purely conjectural. We have Kilimanjaro to climb before we meet the needs of Africa.
Convention of the Rights of the Child – Make primary education compulsory and available free to all… The numbers of children excluded range somewhere between 105 and 120 million worldwide, 44 million in Africa, about 60% of them girls. Orphaned children who so much want to learn and who need the sense of self-worth that education could bring are denied all of it because the costs of schooling are prohibitive.
President Kibaki of Kenya lifted the school fees in 2003 and a staggering enrolment of 1.3 million children occurred (5.9 million to 7.2 million). Ultimately, lost to the world will be hundreds of thousands of creative, gifted, often brilliant spirits.
posted by McLeanstoAfrica | 11:16 PM
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