There’s not much to report for today. I slashed for ~1 hour in the morning, and I think I’m getting better at it. Matthews, the chief slasher, had to redo my area only once! Still, I had to quit after my hands got too raw, even while wearing some heavy cotton gloves. (The other workers, of course, wear no gloves.)
Most of the day was spent working on organizing the village’s electronic records of recipes for the children’s meals. Food is obviously a major endeavor here. Each child gets three meals plus two snacks throughout the day. All of the recipes have scalable amounts, for between 80 and 200 servings (although the average is probably 100 for any given meal). Paul, who inherited the kitchen supervisor position (among about 3 other jobs he does), enlisted my help for organizing and printing out a notebook of recipes for easy reference. It didn’t seem like that important of a job, but when I was done the head kitchen worker, Nation (cool name, eh?), was VERY appreciative. Apparently their current system of looking up recipes is a complete mess.
I found out today that one of the children in the village has mumps. Apparently it’s been going around in one of the cottages here, despite Eileen’s (the nurse) best efforts to quarantine sick children. I haven’t learned much about mumps yet, but I bet there’s a time when the child is mostly asymptomatic but still infectious. One theory in situations like this is to intentionally expose the other children to the disease so that they all get sick (and thus acquire immunity), but I think that would be a nightmare for the mothers and workers here, to say nothing of possible complications of the disease. Plus, I’ve learned that one of the children actually does have HIV (I don’t know who it is, but I’m told he or she is doing fine with medication). Purposefully exposing that child to any disease would not be a good idea.
This brings up another thought about one of my earlier comments about poverty in this country. I stated that Malawi was probably having serious problems because of corruption in the government, and this is largely true. Foreign aid does not go where it should in most cases, and the people suffer as a result. There is, however, a second major cause of economic hardship here, and that of course is HIV/AIDS. I read in a book on AIDS and Malawi last night that the explosion of AIDS here has not hit all socioeconomic levels equally. And contrary to what one might guess, it is the people of higher education and training who are more at risk. Once I think about this, however, it does make sense. Those with more training will have jobs in the cities and have more opportunity for access to prostitution or have multiple partners who might be infected. The end result is that Malawi has selectively lost a huge number of highly skilled and trained workers. Given the rapidly evolving landscape of the international business world, this is especially bad for the economic future of the country.
International health policy also had a profound impact on the spread of HIV, or at least on the inability to contain it. Much of the foreign aid to Malawi came from organizations that decided it was an invasion of privacy to test someone for HIV without their consent. If Malawi wanted to continue receiving aid, it would have to abide by this standard. But since having HIV carries a heavy stigma, hardly anyone wanted to be tested. Thus, HIV spread silently for years, and health workers couldn’t do much of anything to stop it. When no other explanation could be given for a patient’s illness, it was presumed to be AIDS, but no proof could be obtained.
Enough on this for now. It’s a highly complex issue, and one that I am just beginning to understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment