– UPDATE: I apologise for the fuzzy thinking done at 2am in the morning caught up in the emotionality of Jeff Sachs. I will try to not to repeat this again..–
– UPDATE: The New York Times recently weighed in on the plight of AIDS survivors. Dead or Alive, Aids ruins lives.–
In recent times I have watched two films which were pseudo sci fi medical thrillers: The Invasion, the Nicole Kidman Body Snatchers remake, and I Am Legend, the Will Smith (and, interestingly, at one point in its 6 year production history produced by my personal hero Mr. Arnold Schwarzennegerdidigetthespellingright) I Am Legend remake. In both a highly contagious disease quickly fans out and infects nearly everybody overnight. In both a cure is discovered and the world is quickly saved thereafter.
Not so AIDS (HIV/AIDS). In the daily rush of college life it is hard to put down our books and pens and our own life and stop to think about the Invasion happening out there as we speak: we have been vaguely aware of the disease but we don’t know anybody personally and we certainly have not lost a family member to it. Contrast our experience with that described in Sachs’ The End of Poverty:
“It is still midmorning in Malawi when we arrive at a small village, Nthandire, about an hour outside of Lilongwe, the capital… In this subsistence maize-growing region of an improverished landlocked country in southern Africa, households eke out survival from an unforgiving terrain. This year has been a lot more difficult than usual because the rains have failed, probably the result of an El Nino cycle…. If the village were filled with able-bodied men who could have built small-scale water harvesting units on rooftops and in the fields to collect what little rain had fallen in the preceding months, the situation would not be as dire as it is this morning. But as we arrive in the village, we see no able-bodied young men at all. In fact, older women and dozens of children greet us, but there is not a young man or woman of working age in sight. Where, we ask, are the workers? Out in the fields? The aid worker who has led us to the village shakes his head sadly and says no. They are nearly all dead.“
“a few years earlier, I had been contacted by the vice president of Malawi, Justin Mulawesi, a remarkably fine individual… (who himself) has lost several family members to AIDS… He has led a team of global experts to design a national AIDS strategy that could begin to meet this horrific challenge… Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and best conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population, and gave an enormously thoughtful response to the challenges of managing a new system of drug delivery, patient counseling and education, community outreach, and the financial flows that would accompany the process of training doctors. On that basis, Malawi made proposals to the international commmunity to help Malawians try to reach about a third of the total infected population (about three hundred thousand people) with anti-AIDS drug treatment within a five-year scale-up period. The first proposal was deemed “too ambitious and too costly.” The next draft was cut back to a mere hundred thousand. This was again too much and the donors prevailed on Malawi to cut another 60 percent. This atrophied plan was submitted to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Incredibly, the donors that run that fund saw fit to cut back once again. After a long struggle, Malawi received funding to save just twenty-five thousand at the end of five years – a death warrant from the international community for the people of this country.”
It is too much for me or any one of us to bear. Economics has no answer to such a pressing question. Our brightest minds today bore themselves with answering questions like why real estate agents are like drug dealers, or why men have nipples, when they could really truly make a difference to more people somewhere else. Our Nobel Prizewinners concern themselves with saving the planet for our grandchildren, when “our” really means “our – excluding those who can’t afford or live long enough to have grandchildren, cause you guys had it coming”. In a sense, they ought to have it coming. How did Europe survive the Black Death without aid? Of course, the AIDS Epidemic may not be comparable to that and I will not try. Does most of the aid given to these countries actually go to the intended recipients? And whatever happened to that ridiculous theory of Sen’s that no democracy has ever gone and could ever go hungry? (Malawians are exceedingly malnourished as well.) And what if AIDS was cured overnight? What if these millions upon millions of Africans started being able to feed themselves? Rampant unemployment, crime, out-of-control population growth, environmental disasters, political mayhem – too many Africans in a global and local system institutionalised upon the assumption that few Africans ever make it out of their own contained hell on earth.
I am angry that I don’t know what I can do to help, I am angry that I might be seen as shirking my responsibility to pursue my education and self-interests if I do help, and I am angry that global problem solving has not been any where as focused and as organised as it should be. And I am confused because on one hand, I think I have some right to self enjoyment, to enjoy what I have worked for, but on the other hand I know I could only have done so because of the opportunities I was lucky enough to be born into. 6 billion people in the world, 3 billion living under $2 a day. It is the “luck of the womb”, the toss of the coin, that makes us what we are. What right do we have any more than the other 50%? I will look for answers this semester, and maybe I won’t find any. But that will be alright. The process will be enlightening enough.
