IST is going well and I’m having a great time and for once, really feel like I’m learning at lot from my sessions. Today we had several hours of HIV courses and local language vocabulary as well as possible methods to raise AIDS awareness back at our sites.
My most influential class I ever had in college was economic development where every day we would study a different factor contributing to the poverty cycle and analyze its affects. I remember the day we spent on AIDS, but now having lived in Africa for several months (which I still can’t really believe), I can actually see how AIDS is in fact contributing to cyclical poverty. Part of my job as a volunteer is to try to help Americans understand the culture where I’m living, daily life, interesting beliefs/traditions, etc. Thus I’m going to start writing about some of the issues I’ve been forced to deal with everyday while living here in hopes of explaining why Mali is in fact one of the five economically poorest countries in the world. Today, thanks to my morning sessions, I’m writing about AIDS and their role in perpetuating the poverty cycle in Mali.
-68% of people in the world suffering from AIDS live in Sub-Saharan West Africa, 90% of infants with AIDS live in Sub-Saharan West Africa
-As men and women are infected with the disease, they become less productive in both their physical ability to produce on the small scale as well as their life expectancy and the loss of production associated with a shorter lifespan.
-Myths exist in Mali that mosquitoes are the only way to contract AIDS. Another popular myth is that Americans are always pushing for condom use because they’ve put AIDS in the condoms thus gains financially as people have to buy our medicine.
-Education is the best means to fight AIDS but teachers are often victims, leaving their students without teachers. Additionally, as parents get AIDS, children (especially young women) are pulled out of school so as to take care of the other children and house hold responsibilities. Often, these young girls are forced into prostitution to contribute financially, which of course only exacerbates the spread of AIDS.
-Mali is a Muslim country and most families are polygamist, so when if a man contracts the disease, he is likely to spread it to each of his four wives (four is generally the most wives one man will have).
-As countries develop, their roads and infrastructure develop internationally; however truck stops are a huge source of AIDS spread and with more international traffic, countries like Mali, who have relatively low levels of AIDS become inundated with a disease they don’t have the ability to contain.
-Mali provides everyone with AIDS with medicine, however it is hard to be tested and harder to have access to hospitals or local doctors in which they can receive the required meds daily or weekly.
-Governments are forced to spend an enormous amount of resources on caring for orphans and treating the disease itself that they don’t have the ability to test everyone, thus allowing for decreased production from workers, and again you can see the cycle…children having to leave school uneducated about how AIDS is actually contracted, etc.
-Sex is also an extremely culturally sensitive topic. For example, in Mali you are not to talk about a woman if she is pregnant because it insinuates that she has had sex, thus sex education is almost nonexistent in the schools. Along similar lines but another topic for another day, 90% of Malian women are forced to have genital mutilation.
-Another Malian specific problem is that it is the woman’s responsibility to provide protection via condoms, birth control, etc. However, many women don’t have any source of income in which to purchase these or the education to know that they have options.
This is definitely the hardest part of development work. So much of what we learn is on a large scale and absolutely impossible to see a silver lining. The only way I can maintain my sanity is to try to focus on one person or one day and try to make a difference in one life. We talked today about how important options are and that we have to focus on giving people information they wouldn’t have otherwise. We can’t make a person make the decision we want, but we can let them know all the information. It’s so hard to take that stance because you can see people making the wrong choice in your village even after you’ve done your best to lead them in the direction you want them to take yet there is nothing you can do. In these circumstances you just have to keep talking and hope that someone else is listening.
Hope you all got something out of this email, I know it helps me just writing things down, so this email has at least helped me articulate some things that have been on my mind recently. If you want any details about anything in particular about life in Mali or Africa, let me know and I’ll try to give you a firsthand account. I know many people have questions about my opinion on why Africa never seems to be able to develop and I’m learning more everyday about the causes that seem to inhibit development here.
Love,
Cait
