It's Time to Feed the Animals
I just spent some extraordinary time with an extraordinary person - Dr.
Moses Sinkala - who is the director of the Lusaka Urban Health
Management District in Zambia. We talked about a wide spectrum of topics
that included love and health care and global economics and African
politics and the not-so-micro economics of Lusaka these days...and the
US program for AIDS relief that just expanded to Kenya, of China's
rising dominion over global economics, of priorities a physician must
face...we covered a lot.
Moses is uniquely situated in the center of a
growing entity that might be known as globally-supported health care
relief. He manages thousands of health care workers in an area of our
globe that is faced with immense morbidity resulting from poverty, from
HIV, from TB, from dirty water, from malaria, and I daresay, from the
aftereffects of previously accepted views that permitted boundless
exploitation.
In having conversations with Dr. Sinkala, I was
refreshed. Instead of forcing myself to think about the coagulation
cascade of proteins that governs whether we humans bleed or clot, I was
stimulated by thinking about what factors led to the demise of Zimbabwe
over the last ten years. Instead of effortful, unwanted studies, I was
conversing about sustainable economic drivers in Zambia. Is it textiles?
Tourism? Farming? What else?
Have we reached a firm grasp on the rung of
economic hope proposed in Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty? Do we
have the momentum to continue on, as Bangladesh has done? As India has
done? What is China's role in Africa and the world going to be twenty
years from now? What has the demand in China done to invigorate the
copper industry in Zambia? Is Africa the center of the planet, as one
could conclude when looking at a flat map of our round world?
Why did Mugabe's administration lead to such a
rapid economic decline? What sort of investment will it take to get
clean water into Kanyama? What are the strategic advatnages to having a
PEPFAR ((US) President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Releif) program in
Kenya? What was it like under the final stages of the Kaunda regime,
when queues for sugar or corn meal or cooking oil were so long, and
often without fruition? And does his AIDS activism now, in light of his
son's death, overtake the shadow of the end of his administration?
What was done right after hurricane Katrina, such that we don't have
malaria, and we don't have cholera, despite the circumstances that would
be harbingers of public health nightmares? What decades-old investments
were made then, from which we are benefiting now, and how do we apply
those and operationalize those in other locales?
Do we, as a human race, have the will to turn the tide on poverty? Do
governments understand that their duties no longer serve only a
circumscribed location? Are we all under the auspices of a single
treaty?
