In Response...

So shortly after reading and posting that last article, I came across a recent interview on Democracy Now! with Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health and the author of several books addressing social justice and health care. I found the discussion pertinent to the other article and wanted to share. In this particular section he talks about the system they developed in Haiti and how it in many ways provides better care than what is offered in the United States...

And the system that we built up in the ’80s, really confronting another disease, tuberculosis, relied very heavily on community health workers, who we trained and, more to the point, we paid. You know, we thought, you know, do we expropriate the labor of the poor, or do we actually pay them, like someone like I would get paid a fortune to do consulting work like this. And we said no, no, no, it’s clear they have to be our employees and coworkers. So it worked great. And it worked great for tuberculosis. It worked great for other chronic diseases. And when AIDS came along, what we did was to say, well, clearly, we need to take the same system, which is free diagnosis and free care to the patient, because this is a public health problem, and they have a community health worker, you know, visiting them.
Entire Interview

The Wealthiest Country in the World?

On my daily rounds of BBC news, this item caught my eye. I wish that I was surprised, but I am not.

Medical charity helping US poor

By Jonathan Beale BBC News, Tennessee

Stan Brock is like a 21st-Century Florence Nightingale.

RAM's vintage plane was used to drop troops on D-Day

He started a charity - Remote Area Medical (RAM) - more than 20 years ago to bring relief to those cut off from healthcare.

Originally it was to help poor tribes in the former British colony of Guyana, South America.

That is where he lived after leaving Preston, Lancashire, more than half a century ago - he still is a British citizen.

But now Stan spends most of his time bringing relief to the richest country in the world. Full article

The Real Story

The food riots taking place around the world bring up some important points that few are looking at. Putting the blame on higher fuel prices, drought, and low food production, few news sources are looking at the impact of global trade and the bullies of global trade. Both of these articles take a closer look at the history behind the food riots in Haiti. Important things to know before we flip the TV channel...

From the BBC...

This valley used to produce nearly enough rice to feed the entire country, but back in the 1980s the International Monetary Fund and World Bank demanded that Haiti drop import tariffs in return for loans.

Haiti was soon flooded with cheap and heavily subsidised US food.

"We can't compete with imported rice," Maye says.

It is estimated that the US rice crop costs $1.8bn (£900m) to grow, but its farmers get subsidies of $1.3bn (£650m), and there was no way that Haiti could cope with competition like that. entire article

This is from a Human Rights Lawyer at Loyola University:

The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that “Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself.” Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages -- the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers. This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force. Whole article

This is also a shout out to my friend Kate who is spending her last days in Haiti, thanks for keeping us posted - besos!

A Long Times Silence

Apologies to all for the long silence. Part of me has been waiting for something to write about, and it hasn't come. Most of my mental energies have been devoted to writing a thesis and figuring next year out. So I will write and see what comes to my mind.

I have been thinking a lot lately about happiness, or contentedness. Happiness seems to be considered a higher state of being here in the United States, the thing that advertisement companies bank on, literally. We are sold everything from food to cars with a pretty smile, the standard emblem of happiness. The obsession with happiness has even been capitalized on by the pharmaceutical companies who send a message that any unhappiness can be cured with a little pill as long as you don't mind the headaches, constipation, and dizziness that might come with it. I have noticed this obsession with happiness most in myself. When asking questions about the future, or current actions I measure their value in terms of potential happiness that I might experience.

This pattern has led me to question two things. One, is happiness really what i want, or have i just been suckered by everything around me? And second, what is it that will make me feel content? For some reason this word fits better for me than Happy. But really, what is it? Will it be working for a cause i believe in? Is it being a part of some sort of community? Or is it finding a way of fitting into the world. This also brings up the issue of why I am so focused on my own personal individual satisfaction, it shows how deeply runs the individual, self-entitlement that also runs rampant in this country. So here are a lot of big questions and no answers. I have felt moments of being right in the world, not in the I am right you are wrong sense, but in a I am alright in the world right now sense, doing the right things, being the person i want to be and enjoying those around me. This is what I think I am hoping for on a more permanent basis. It is more than just having a lack of pain, another thing consumerism tries to sell us, it is something constructive that i think requires a certain amount of challenge, not physical pain necessarily, but discomfort.

International Day of Women

Hey all, I know it has been a while, but I wanted to send a shout out to all the women out there. Some people are against celebrating these days and months when the rest of the year is still devoted to the white ones who are men, but I will take what i can get for now. Please peruse some of the blog poetry from the Global Voices competition. GV is one of my favorite blog logs - I recommend visiting it for a more global view on the blogging world. Please don't forget to celebrate all the women in your lives, mothers, sisters, writing group friends, co-workers, nieces, aunts, grandmothers...all of them!