A Different Way of Thinking

                In last week’s post, I discussed how education and awareness of HIV/AIDS are important in preventing the spread of the disease in Botswana.  At the time, educating people about the terrible effects of HIV/AIDS and how to stop its spread didn’t really seem that hard.  You put up posters, have doctors and other authorities inform people about it, and give people access to condoms, and they’ll get the idea.  After this week’s reading, however, my perspective on education has changed completely.

            How exactly do you run an information campaign against a disease you can’t see?  In what language do you print billboards and pamphlets for distribution among a people- English?  Setswana?  Both?  What kind of images do you place on these materials?  Do images of pregnant women on billboards encouraging testing for HIV before pregnancy encourage safe sex practices, or do they, as Bagele Chilisa suggests in her article “Educational Research Within Postcolonial Africa:  A Critique of HIV/AIDS Research in Botswana,” create gender divides and caste blame on the pregnant mothers for infecting their children with HIV because they were not aware of their positive status? 

            Chilisa’s article seems to suggest a sort of “Western conspiracy” in which the campaign against HIV/AIDS is led by the Western/White world  to penetrate all aspects of African economic, political, and cultural life.  The idea, she says, is to wipe out the indigenous culture and replace it with a Western-style homogeneity that keeps colonial power structures in place.  My response to this is that this position is that it seems far-fetched, but then again, as an American citizen who isn’t able to read the minds of the Western leaders in power, maybe I’m wrong.  For now, however, I would say give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re doing their best to help.  Maybe they’re not going about it quite right, but at least they’re trying.

            I do agree, however, that the campaign against HIV/AIDS in Botswana does need to be better adapted to its context.  In Suzette Heald’s article, “It’s Never as Easy as ABC:  Understandings of AIDS in Botswana,” she argues that too much focus is put on teaching the biomedical aspect of HIV, without taking people’s personal experiences into account.  It tries to force people to think of disease in a way that they’re not accustomed to do so. 

            We as Americans value straight-forward logic.  A causes B, and this explains C.  Rationality is our expertise.  African thinking, on the other hand, according to Chilisa’s article, is more circular and more in tune about people’s relationships to spirits, the environment, and other people.  Asking people to believe that a microorganism is causing so much suffering because it’s the logical cause seems obvious to Americans, but it might not seem as believable to a Motswana who is used to explaining illness in terms of having done something wrong and being punished for it by ancestors.

            I definitely want to emphasize that this isn’t ignorance or a lack of intellect on the part of Batswana.  It’s simply a different way of thinking, one that Westerners are not accustomed to.  It forces us to question our definition of knowledge.  Is the Western definition of what we know to be fact really universal?  Do we really have the right understandings, or are we the ones who need to step back and re-evaluate? 

I’d also like to talk about the exclusion of traditional healers, diviners (dingaka), and spirit churches from the HIV/AIDS campaign.  Right now, they’re excluded because they’re seen as backwards, not modern, and superstitious.  I ask if that is really the case.  Even if they’re not scientifically measurable, sometimes the simple act of believing in a treatment can have huge health benefits.  A scientific example is the placebo effect:  in studies, even when people were given sugar pills but told they were given the real medicine, some of the subjects still saw results similar to those experienced by subjects taking the medicine.  Faith healing in the U.S. is another example.  Whether you believe that it’s healing by a divine power, or healing through the power of believing yourself to be healed, one cannot deny that belief is a powerful thing. 

Is it really right to brush aside thousands of years of traditional beliefs in charms, taboos, and spiritual practices just because science can’t prove they work?  Instead of vainly assuming that the scientific, Western way is the only way, maybe HIV/AIDS information campaigns should try to work hand-in-hand with traditional dingaka in order to make their message more relatable and believable to Batswana than the “A- Abstain, B- Be Faithful, C- Condomize” campaign that’s occurring right now.

One form of communication isn’t better or more intelligent than the other.  It’s simply a different way of thinking.

"Fear of a name increases fear of a thing itself."- Albus Dumbledore

                This week for class, we were asked to read a book called Saturday is for Funerals written by Unity Dow and Max Essex.  The book takes an in-depth look at the HIV/AIDS crisis in Botswana from a factual, scientific perspective (told by Essex) and from the personal stories of those impacted by it (told by Dow). 

            I enjoyed the book, and recommend it to others who have an interest in learning about HIV/AIDS.  Dow’s part contains absolutely heart wrenching scenes of Batswana people’s lives ripped apart by HIV/AIDS, while Essex’s part accurately explains the details behind HIV/AIDS without losing readers in the process.

            What struck me the most while reading the book was how people fear this disease so much that they won’t even name it.  People infected with HIV try to hide their illness by calling it something else.  When someone dies of AIDS, their family members blame other diseases or don’t name it at all.  Even in hospitals and clinics, where you’d think that people would be most open in talking about the disease, it’s called “the radio disease” or “the disease without a name.”  In Saturday is for Funerals, one AIDS victim’s cause of death is listed on his hospital chart as “Lost to follow up.”

            Call me a nerd, but the first thing that popped into my head was Voldemort.  For non-Harry Potter fans out there, Voldemort is the evil wizard Harry fights against throughout the series of books.  People are so scared of him that most of them don’t call him by his name, but instead to call him “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”  It’s the whole idea that when there’s something scary lurking in the shadows, we prefer to call it by a less-threatening name so it doesn’t seem as terrifying. 

            What this really is is a form of denial.  By not recognizing illnesses and deaths as the result of HIV/AIDS, the people in Saturday is for Funerals try to pin their suffering on diseases that can be cured, such as tuberculosis.  Curable diseases can be dealt with.  It’s when you have to face the cold hard truth that you’re infected with a lifelong disease that will eventually kill you because there is no cure that things get really terrifying.  You watch as it kills your friends and family members, and then it comes for you.  I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to learn that you’re HIV positive.  

            However, as scary as this disease is, there are ways to treat it and live years after infection occurs.  The government of Botswana is making antiretroviral treatment available to anyone with HIV to keep it from turning into AIDS, and is encouraging everyone to get tested regularly.  The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (www.unaids.org) reported that Botswana has reduced the mother-to-child transmission rate to less than four percent, and the number of AIDS deaths has been decreased by 50 percent.  Education about the disease and how to avoid it, such as by using condoms and not having multiple concurrent partners, plays a crucial role in helping the infection rate go down. 

            The first part of education is awareness.  People must admit there is a problem before they can take steps to solve it.  As FDR said in his inaugural speech, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  Although there is no cure for HIV/AIDS yet, the people of Botswana, and of the world, can take an important step toward stopping its spread by knowing how it’s transmitted and its consequences.  The only way to overcome something is to look it straight in the face.

http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/

If you have more questions about HIV/AIDS, check out this website for more information!

No Easy Answers

One of the points brought up in the “Rethinking the Measure of Growth” article published in The New York Times on July 18, 2010 by Wayne Arnold is the potential consequences of countries in Asia trying to attain an American standard of living.  Is this the goal they should try to reach for in terms of economic development, and if they are able to, should they?  My own personal answer to this question is no. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that everyone shouldn’t have some right to property ownership. Everyone should have the chance to work hard, make something of themselves, and enjoy the material fruits of their labor as a result.

The problem is the fact that the “American standard of living” many countries want to emulate has become synonymous with materialism and overconsumption.  Everyone wants to live the good life- live in a large home, drive two or three cars, earn enough money to buy whatever whims strike our fancy, and eat whatever food we want whenever we want.  However, where has this lifestyle taken us?  The pollution from cars is damaging the environment, our national economy and the real estate market are just now slowly recovering from a terrible recession, and to top it off, according to a USA Today article published Jan. 1, 2010, about one-third of Americans are obese (http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2010-01-13-obesity-rates_N.htm).

The “American” way of life isn’t good for Americans.  From the strict point of view of resources, there are simply not enough resources on the planet for every single person to live the way Americans are living now.  Water, petroleum, and even land itself, are finite resources, meaning that we all have to share them as part of the world community.  America needs to take the lead in advocating a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle to show developing countries that a large GDP and material possessions aren’t the only things that matter.  Although the resources on this planet are limited, there are enough to go around.  We just need to get better at sharing.

This leads to the question of the role traditional lifestyles and practices should play in a world where modernization often means conforming to Western practices.  Ben Wisner’s “Questioning Development? Growth? Destruction? Sustainability?” concludes by saying that part of the pattern of development that is emerging throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia includes dismissing indigenous knowledge and undermining local livelihoods.

This is basically exactly what’s going on in Botswana.  In The New York Times article “For Some Bushmen, a Homeland Worth the Fight,” published Nov. 4, 2010 by Barry Bearak, Bearak takes a look at the plight of the Bushmen in Botswana.  They’re being persuaded (or some would say being given little or no choice) to leave their traditional homelands to live in a “civilized” (aka modernized) village so that a wildlife refuge can be created on the land.  Incidentally, take a look at the Central Kalahari Game Reserve’s website (http://www.game-reserve.com/botswana_central-kalahari.html) – does anyone else find their description of the Bushmen just plain demeaning? 

This raises the question, however, of whether it is right to steamroll over the rights of a minority in order to benefit the majority of the country.  If diamonds are found on the game reserve and tourists do flock to the game reserve to see the animals and participate in the “Bushmen walk,” (which seems exploitational to say the least)  it might benefit the entire country by increasing Botswana’s wealth and leading to more economic development, but the Bushmen are the ones bearing the cost.  Despite receiving schools, clinics, and food rations on the resettlement lands, Bushmen also have to deal with unemployment, frustration, and the hopelessness of not being able to do anything about their situation.  This brings to mind the similar scenario of American settlers pushing Native Americans off their land and onto reservations in the name of economic development and modernizing progress. 

The whole issue questions the meaning of democracy.  Is democracy a type of government where strict majority rule determines what happens to a country?  On the other hand, does having a democracy mean that minorities are able to implement change and have their voices heard amid the clamor of the majority roar? 

We as Americans consider our country the world’s best example of democracy, yet we can’t say we have the best track record for acknowledging minorities throughout the years.  America is still working hard to perfect the five ideals for democracy Robert Dahl mentions in his writing, “On Democracy,” and according to him, no country will probably ever achieve them completely.   

Botswana must find a way to answer the question of whether it is right to destroy the livelihood of a small group for the benefit of an entire nation.   In the end, that’s a question every democracy has to answer in one form or another, and unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

Pura Vida!

Hello everyone!  I thought before I get down to the serious discussion, I should say something about myself and why I'm writing this blog.  Well, where to start....

I'm a sophomore at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI, and I'm studying journalism.  I was accepted into a class called HON 4200, Sec 504 - The African Democracy Project:  Botswana.  For six weeks, we're going to be learning about the culture of Botswana and the meaning of democracy, then travel to Botswana for two weeks to study the HIV/AIDS problem there and sustainability practices.  Finally, after we return, we're going to do service learning in Detroit to try to find solutions to problems in Detroit that are similar to those found in Botswana.

I'm so excited to participate in this class.  I love learning about other cultures, and as far as new experiences, I'm open to anything!  I'm here to try anything at least once.  After all, how many people get the chance to travel to Africa for two weeks?  We have a once-in-a-lifetime experience here, and I'm ready to get all I can out of it.  I've never traveled outside the United States or Canada before, so this is definitely an adventure I'm looking forward to!

I know I still have a lot to learn, and with the help of this blog, readings, and class discussions, hopefully I can figure out more about democracy, AIDS, and sustainability as we go along.  Bear with me, and together we'll start the journey.

A few more random facts about me....
- I love reading good books.  Recommend one to me, and we'll get along just fine.
- I'm Catholic, but I'm totally open to religious discussion.  I've been learning this year about the Hindu and Islamic faiths, but I still have questions I'd like answered about all different belief systems.  If both parties are respectful of each other, spiritual discussions can be the best kind of conversations.
- My favorite colors are blue and green.
- My iPod is literally a mix-mash of everything on the planet.  You name it, I've got it.  Country, rock, rap, Irish traditional, French music, hip/hop, pop, classical....yup.
- Whatever I do in my career, it has to be something different every day.  Desk jobs and I don't get along well.  Ideally, I'd love to do some kind of writing job that involves travelling and meeting new people.
- The name of this entry is a traditional greeting in Costa Rica that I just learned last night.  Literally translated, it means "pure life" or "full of life," but people use it to greet each other.