The Long-Awaited Sheila Africa Blog Part 2

Rwanda
It’s all too easy to think of Rwanda only in terms of the 1994 Genocide but too narrow a focus on that country and that was one of the reasons I was glad to have it included in the trip. The main reason Rwanda was chosen was because it’s the first country to receive (RED) money from The Global Fund.

Dr. Feachem was able to announce in Kigali that $1.2 million had already flowed through from a total amount of $10 million received from (RED) by The Global Fund. Rwanda was chosen by The Global Fund to be the first (RED) recipient because they’ve been so galvanized around the issue of AIDS.

It is an extraordinary country with extraordinary people. Beautiful landscape with fertile and hilly terrain - land of a thousand hills. The people are still trying to recover from Africa’s worst genocide. 1 million people (10% of the population at the time) were killed and another 2 million were displaced as refugees outside the country. Hundreds of thousands of children have been orphaned and nearly 100,000 people are in jail facing charges of genocide.

With all the recent pain it’s even more extraordinary to find Annonciata Nyiratamba Cyubahiro who started AVEGA which brings together “Widows of Genocide,” women whose husbands were killed by genocide and those whose husbands await trial for genocide crimes. All over Rwanda you find these kinds of stories – of people somehow trying to overcome their fear and hatred to fix themselves – it’s almost unimaginable. We met with Nurse Florence – whom Bono dubbed “Florence Nightingale” – the nurse in the pediatric clinic in Kigali. It was a distressing sight to visit these beautiful, smiling sick children suffering from HIV and TB, sometimes 3 of them in a bed with their mums – the six in a bed reference that Bono called obscene. It was obscene; impossible to imagine anyone getting any sleep while they battled their illnesses. Still the kids smiled and played “shy” with us as with all African children I’ve met are so friendly and when you offer your hand out to them they always reach out to touch you.

It’s so nice to see these beautiful kids but so hard to see them suffering and I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a parent and not be able to get better care for your baby.

We left the clinic and headed to Nyamata Genocide Memorial to pay our respects at the site of the brutal killing sprees of the 1994 genocide. We stood in the center and listened to Eugenie tell us her harrowing story of surviving the massacre and how she lay for two days under the dead bodies of her family, friends, and neighbors. She had scars on her neck, head, and arms from her injuries and she limped because her right heel was missing. Her story was so brutal it’s hard to imagine how she can face her life with such dignity and to testify as she does. The genocide memorial was a huge testament to the massacre with crypts built to contain the remains of those killed. One of them contained the estimated remains of over 50,000 people – it was unspeakably sad.

We headed to Mayange Village in the afternoon. Mayange was established in 1995 as a resettlement site for genocide survivors and refugees. The village is part of a program called the Millennium Villages Project which was launched by the Earth Institute at Columbia University to show how the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved at a local level and scaled up country-wide. It’s run by an inspiring young American called Josh Ruxin who is co-chair of the UN Millennium Project Task Force on AIDS.

Since its formation and especially in the last five years, the settlement has experienced devastating drought with crippling consequences to health, food security and the environment. Despite these obstacles, the villagers have cultivated a farm in eighteen weeks. When we got there, the corn was twelve feet high- the people are starving and they’ve managed to cultivate a farm. It was mind-blowing and we all started to pick up the sense that there is a new mood in Africa, that whilst we’ve tended to do it a disservice in so many ways - from how we describe it to burdening it with either ‘bad aid’ given to corrupt leaders or attached to unacceptable conditions or micromanaging the AID spend from Washington, London or Geneva, we’ve sometimes burdened Africans instead of freeing them. With new and better ways of understanding how aid should be spent we’re seeing this sense of entrepreneurship in newly energized communities.
Africans are just like the rest of us – they don’t want to be on “welfare,” they want to make their own way and they just need a leg up. The pride in Mayange Village was palpable and the progress absolutely inspiring and that corn was beautiful, gleaming in the late afternoon sun.

One of the most inspiring people we met was Alfred Nkubili who owns Ndena Coffee washing Station and sells delicious premium Blue Bourbon coffee to Starbucks – our visit was enhanced by a cup of the delicious coffee as the sun went down over the beautiful rolling hilly landscape. It was a beautiful end to a haunting day.

Tanzania

We arrived in Tanzania on Saturday morning- we’ve got Larry Elliot from The Guardian UK, Lesley Wroughton from Reuters and a crew from NBC which will have Brian Williams, the news anchor joining our tour in Nigeria.

We’re in Tanzania to see some initiatives dealing with malaria. There are some exciting things happening here and our visits are to include A–Z Factory in Arusha which has teamed up with Japan’s Sumitomo Chemical to become the first factory in Africa to use new technology that makes long-lasting bed nets treated with insecticide. Initiatives like this bring the end of malaria closer and while you can’t kill every mosquito in Africa, you can put up bed nets which cost only $5 to save children’s lives. These treated nets are really exciting because the net not only keeps the mosquito away from you; it also kills the bug on contact and it’s been found that if there are enough nets in a village, the mosquitos leave.

In the afternoon we went to a farm to see Artemesinin being grown by the Warusha tribe who are farmers and relatives of the Masai. Artemesinin is a plant from China which cures malaria. The village and Tanzanian countryside were so beautiful. The kids were excited to see the digital photos we took of them. It was a really delightful, sunny, optimistic day.

The next morning a small group of us got up at 5:30am to see the sunrise at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. We drove for half an hour in a groggy state when somebody more awake than the rest of us pointed out that the dense cloud cover in the sky would probably prevent a sunrise show. We decided to persevere and boy did it pay off – just in the nick of time the cloud covering the mountain lifted and we had the most fantastic light show as we stood in a field of sunflowers – a magical moment and worth the dawn wake-up call.

That afternoon we flew to Nigeria to Abuja for the Nigerian Finance Ministers’ Conference and where Brian Williams would join us to do his nightly newscast from the trip. His crew is incredibly impressive getting footage back every day from Africa when I can’t get a blog together because of telecommunications limitations in Africa and also because my poor laptop is finally in its last days and requires a lot of manoeuvers to get it going. At one stage in Tanzania, there were 5 helpful colleagues standing around egging it on. Phil Joanou, the film director who’s with us cooing to it encouragingly. Finally, Chris Anderson from TED got it working. When asked how he did it, he explained nonchalantly as if it were the most obvious thing in the world – “I just pushed Control & Delete five times, then held the power button down for five seconds, released it and pressed it again for one second. I am a luddite and do not understand these things and am very happy that Chirs was here when we were.

After a brief refueling in Kinshasa for an hour we arrived in Abuja just in time to get changed for the dinner hosted by the Nigerian Finance Minister who’s a staunch anti-corruptionist and has invited Bono to address the African Finance Ministers.

Bono left early next morning with Brian Williams and Gordon Brown, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (who was in Abuja for the Finance Ministers’ Summit) to visit a school funded by DFID. The school has just nine rooms for 700 students and there’s no school on rainy days because of holes in the roof. Bono chatted to some children whose parents couldn’t afford the school fees for them.

We departed late morning for Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world. 70% of people here are illiterate. We’re going to visit a cotton farming village called Darfara. The drive from Bamako is hot and dusty and everything is terracotta color, the road, the mud houses, but the people wear very bright colors. When we get to the farm lots of the girls are wearing pretty dresses and one of the boys around 10 years of age has a shirt with the logos of Eminem, Nelly, and 50 Cent…. it’s a surreal and charming juxtaposition of two completely different worlds.

On our way back to Bamako, there’s a sense of industriousness from the houses and along the road women are cooking, children are skipping on the streets, there’s a little burro going crazy running around in circles – doesn’t look like madness, just excitement. The atmosphere is more energized than earlier when the sun was incredibly hot. We all remark at the end of the day that this feels like a happy place, despite its crushing poverty. As evidenced from one visit to the farm and cotton factory earlier, people are busy, engaged, and entrepreneurial.

That night we go to a tiny bar called the Piroge for dinner on the banks of the Niger. There was a band playing traditional Malian music. Five of the band were playing an instrument called the Djelin’goni, I think it’s the parent of the banjo – the music was some of the best I’ve ever heard. It was a magical night.

We flew to Ghana the next day – Ghana is our final country on the trip; the only country on this tour that was part of the trip with Paul O’Neill in May 2002. One of the highlights of the entire Africa trip was our visit to the Youth and Women Foundation Microfinance group in Makola market where women are now running successful businesses where before their funding, they were immobilized by poverty. They talked to about how the loans have enabled them to look after themselves and their families, send their kids to school and even save money for rainy days. It was such a fitting end to our trip as it was the clearest example of Africa’s new mood of entrepreneurship and empowerment.

Sheila Roche