Toward a Malaria-free World

Two cheers for recent malaria trials in Tanzania that show reductions in the incidence of childhood malaria. Just two cheers, though, because this vaccine, directed against parasites, is only half as effective as vaccines against viruses: about a fifty percent efficacy rate compared to ninety-plus percent.

Still, it’s the first time we’ve had a vaccine this effective against a disease caused by parasites and it is a promising push against malaria’s grim statistics. Around the world, malaria hits millions of people and kills nearly a million annually. Most of these are young children and pregnant women. In Tanzania alone, over twenty thousand people die of malaria every year. It’s the number one cause of death for children under the age of five.

Eradicating malaria once seemed well-nigh impossible. The vaccines we are familiar with (for measles, mumps, rubella, etc.), are directed against viruses that are simple organisms compared to parasites. Malaria is carried by a complicated mosquito-borne parasite that morphs into different forms in the human body so a vaccine has to be pretty adept to destroy it all. This ghastly-looking creature has already sucked blood out of someone with malaria so, if she bites you next, you might get malaria:

Twenty-five years ago, the big pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline put money into research on a malaria vaccine for adults with the idea of selling it to the Department of Defense for military personnel. They couldn’t produce a vaccine for adults but some of their scientists concluded that the results were promising for a vaccine directed at children.

But Glaxo was unwilling to put up money for further research since the market for a vaccine for children was not the well-funded US Defense Department but poor countries unable to pay high prices. Several years ago this came to the attention of the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation which donated the money to fund clinical trials for 15,000 children in Tanzania and six other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The result is an efficacy rate of fifty-seven percent in cases of severe malaria in children between the ages of five and seventeen months old.

More trials are needed over the next two years to find out how long this protection lasts. These trials will involve studying the efficacy of booster shots and continued monitoring to establish the extent of side effects. If all goes well, a vaccine for children could be in the field by 2015.

If that happens, there will be a scramble in Africa to find money to buy Glaxo’s malaria vaccine. Health budgets in sub-Saharan Africa are already strained and Glaxo will not subsidize this vaccine with profits from its lucrative drugs. So, international donors and health care systems in poor countries will have to find additional resources to buy this vaccine as part of a slow but steady world-wide campaign to keep pressing in on malaria’s deadly borders.

Building a Church in Morogoro

Here’s a little story from Morogoro town about an unusual way to build a church. A bit of context first – about eighty years ago Mennonites from North American came to northern Tanzania and built schools, hospitals, churches, and seminaries. North Americans funded and managed these small institutions for awhile but soon turned them over to Tanzanian Mennonites. The Mennonite churches thrived and now are widely known in Tanzania for supporting education and health care.

As young Tanzanian Mennonites in northern Tanzania grew into adulthood, they fanned out and settled in areas far from their homes. Because their churches supported education, many of them got university degrees and went to work in urban areas like Dar es Salaam and Dodoma. In their new environments, some of them banded together to start church communities like the ones that nurtured them in their childhood.

Morogoro, where we live, is a small town with few economic opportunities and relatively few Mennonites came here. But some time ago these few began to meet together for worship in a university classroom on Sunday morning and plan ways to build a church. Several years ago they were given the opportunity to acquire a small plot of land several kilometers from Morogoro’s town center.

That small plot of land turned out to be in a relatively impoverished area and it gave them pause to find themselves surrounded by greater poverty than most of them had personally experienced. After some reflection they decided to put their dream of a church building on hold and instead improve the lives of people around them. Their first step was to map out a radius of three kilometers around their plot of land and identify poor families in that area with the goal of providing medical, educational, and spiritual support.

They needed to put up buildings and get materials to meet this new goal. So, instead of building a church, they built a pre-school with three classrooms that meets five days a week. They built a computer lab that is connected to the Internet and they offer computer classes to young people in the area every weekend. They built a tailoring classroom and filled it with treadle sewing machines to teach young people how to sew. (Most clothes for men and women are made in tailor shops here so this is a good skill for someone who dreams of having their own small business someday). Since the city water supply is unreliable, they put up a huge water storage tank so that women and children in the community don’t have to trek far for precious water when the neighborhood pipes run dry.

But, during this time, they still didn’t have a church building so every Sunday the Mennonites in Morogoro squeezed into a preschool classroom for worship. They didn’t have housing for Pastor Michael so he and his family made their home in a small office on the church grounds.

Last year, with their programs for children and youth in place, the young church leaders marshaled their remaining resources and bought a small house near the church for the pastor. He and his family moved in right away even though it stills needs a lot of renovation.

During this time, people from the community took notice of the changes going on around them. Now, two hundred children and adults from the community come to their services. “Preach the gospel every day. Use words if you must,” goes a saying. That’s the kind of church this is.

This year, finally, the leaders in this young church resolved to work on their dream of a sanctuary large enough to hold the current congregation with room for many more – because they are definitely going to grow. Their community work now takes up a lot of their funds so this church building will be a real step of faith. The first step was to draw up a detailed budget for the sanctuary and put in the foundation. Mennonite churches in Dar es Salaam collected money for the roof that went up in January. With a roof over their heads now, they meet in that open space on Sunday morning. (It’s so open that chickens wander through during the services!) Their budget for the remaining work comes to $60,000 and it’s a pay-as-you go building. The walls are going up slowly now. They need many more walls, windows, doors, electrical work, a good floor and toilets just for the building, not to mention all the other items that a finished church needs.

It’s an inspiring young congregation. If you’d like to know more or contribute in some way, send me an email at hershberger.1@gmail.com and we can figure it out.

Here’s a photo of the front of the church. The building on the right behind the church holds the pre-school classrooms. The other building you see on the left holds the tailoring and computer classrooms and an office.

Educating Girls

Educating children is a major factor in raising standards of living around the world and returns for educating girls are especially significant. Women with a primary or secondary school education have lower maternal and infant mortality rates. Their incomes are higher which is good for their children because studies have shown that resources that women control are directed more to helping the family than are the resources that men control. When women are educated, they are more likely to invest in their own children’s health and education. Girls and women who have an education are more likely to stand up for themselves and take control of their lives and are less likely to have HIV/AIDS, for example.

In this context, it was touching to hear about girls from secondary schools in Muheza District in northeastern Tanzania appealing to the government to build a boarding school for them. They would rather be in boarding schools than live in their homes and villages, they said, because they were given little time to study at home and sometimes they faced pressure from male teachers in their day schools.

These are girls who have passed the exam to enter secondary school (grades 8 through 12), a remarkable feat considering that local primary schools often lack teachers and materials for entire areas of study. Primary school students sometimes are offered no instruction in math and other subjects for several years. Following the seventh grade then, they take a national test which covers all subjects, even the areas in which they have had no classroom instruction. The relative few who pass this test go on to secondary schools and it is girls in this category who are imploring the government to build another boarding school in their area.

It’s not hard to see why these bright girls want to leave their villages and homes to stay for months on end at remote secondary boarding schools renown for rules and discipline. We just want to study, they said, and it’s impossible to do that when family or relatives insist that we carry water, wash clothes, prepare food, and help in the family gardens from the time we get home until it is dark and the family is ready for bed. “I live with my aunt,” one said, “and she is very strict about house chores and makes sure I’m the one in charge at home after school.”

Moreover, in day schools, the line between the haves and the have-nots is stark. Sometimes the students are divided between those who can afford lunch and those who cannot. It’s not a “healthy situation,” one teacher said regretfully, “to see one student having something to eat while the others cannot.” So, they divide the students so that hungry students can’t see the others eating. In government-run boarding schools, there’s a better solution: everybody eats together in the cafeteria and the chores that students have to do allow them enough time to study every day.

In addition, the students said that girls’ boarding schools, where women fill more administrative roles, offer protection against predatory teachers. Sometimes male teachers in their local schools harass them, the girls said, and they were afraid to report it because the teacher would face no consequences and might flunk them. One girl was afraid to report a teacher “who often punishes her for making the slightest mistake after a failed attempt to score with her.” The irony of this is that a female student who becomes pregnant is automatically expelled from Tanzania’s schools.

Good for these girls. With the help of sympathetic teachers they got their story into the national papers here, no small feat given that they are rural girls in a remote area. Their region has only one boarding school for girls which is a pittance compared to what is needed.

I once visited the dormitory of a girls’ boarding school in Tanzania. The room was large and filled with bunk beds with a narrow space between them. The only personal space for each girl was the area on top of her single bunk bed. For most of them, I’m sure, it was the most personal space they had ever had in their fifteen years of living. It almost broke my heart to see how carefully each of them arranged that precious space. Each bed was neatly made and on top of each thin bedspread were keepsakes and mementos: a letter, a card, a book, a few hand-sewn crafts, a notepad and pen. That’s another reason a girl might want to go to a boarding school; a chance to have even a very small piece of a room of her own.

Vervets and Visitors

Several times a week a troop of Vervet monkeys tree-trek through our place. Long before we see them, we hear them traveling toward us through the long line of coconut palms that terminates in our front yard. As they move along, the swaying palm branches make swishing noises with an occasional thunk when a monkey makes a long jump. Sometimes they move around our house and head up the hill but our yard has some delectable plants right now and they've been hanging around for a picnic followed by much frolicking on the lawn.

This weekend, Dave put a camera in the back yard on a tripod, turned it on and then walked back in the house. The monkeys fled when he went out but they soon came back and resumed their monkey business around the camera. Then Dave sat still as a stone on the ledge around the house and shot some more video as they romped about. Monkeys love to play but they don’t have toys so they make toys out of each other, jumping on their comrades, wrestling each other, rolling around, treating the baby monkeys like little dolls. Dave put his short video on-line so take a look.

And here is one tired little monkey flopped out in a tree:

Several weeks ago, Greg, one of Erica and Nathan’s friends from DC came out to see them in Mzumbe and we got to spend some time with him, too. He was fun to be around and always up for some new adventure. One day he decided to go up one of our coconut trees and get some coconuts. He got about a third of the way up when, to my great relief, he decided to abandon the project. At that point, the gardener, who was watching, came over and practically walked up the tree, threw down some coconuts, came right back down, took out his machete and whacked them open for us to eat right there. I’d never had green coconuts before but they are way better than the ripe brown ones. Here’s Tiso the gardener making his rapid ascent up the coconut tree:

And Judy Hartzler and Joanna Suter came to see us in early February, bringing precious magazines and a boatload of chocolate! Thank you again! It was fun to have them here and they picked up some of Morogoro’s finest kanga and kitenge fabrics to take back to Ohio to make MCC comforters. One afternoon we went out to Mzumbe Secondary School and Erica showed us around. Here’s Greg, Judy, Nathan, and Erica outside one of the classrooms:

And here are Joanna and Judy standing in front of our house just before they left for a week in Zanzibar:

Kwa heri ya kuonana! (Good-by until we meet again)

The Zamani

I’m trying to re-learn Swahili. Once, I knew it well but now it’s rusty. My intentions are good, but it’s hard to stay disciplined and study it regularly. The hardest thing to nail down is noun classes. Every noun in Swahili belongs to one of fifteen noun classes and all modifiers, including plurals, change according to their class. For example, kitabu (book) and kiti (chair) are in the KI/VI class so their singular and plural forms are kitabu/vitabu and kiti/viti.

Last week I noticed that the word for time (wakati) is in the noun class of long thin objects like walls or forks. Is there a universal, intuitive sense of time as long and thin? Maybe so. One of the ways that we depict it is as a timeline – long and thin. Poets and writers refer to it as a cord or thread, swiftly passing by.

So, that little language lesson got me thinking about other Swahili words involving time. John Mbiti’s classic African Religions and Philosophy explained a traditional (and now defunct ) concept in East Africa that divided time into a near past and a far past. People who died in living memory were considered to be in “the near past.” As long as anyone alive remembered them, these loved ones stayed “near.” When no one alive remembered them anymore, they became part of the far past or the Zamani. People who are always remembered (like Abraham Lincoln, for example) were always “near” and never moved into the far past. But most people eventually pass into a time when no one on earth remembers them and they become part of the Zamani, that storehouse of memory of those who are beyond memory. These people are honored as “the ancestors” because of their humanity and the collective gifts they gave to their children, many generations down the timeline.

This concept of time is long gone in today’s East Africa but it seems natural that this is the place that developed a concept of past time that encompassed every person who ever lived. This is, after all, the region of the world where we find the first known historical presence of human beings. The fact that there is a respect for the unknown ancestors here and a sense of being part of some long thin line of time seems all of a piece with what we know of our origins as human beings on this pale blue dot in the universe. The Zamani concept connects us to everyone who has gone before, those who are near and those already in the great Zamani. My parents are no longer living but I like to think of them as “near” and, when I am gone, I hope that those who knew and loved me will think of me as “near,” too.

So, here’s a brief ode of gratitude for those unknown multitudes of people who worked diligently all over this earth for thousands of years, patiently improving each crop of maize from season to season, selecting the best rice seeds for next year’s planting, learning how to spin and weave fibers and coaxing colors from myriad plants to dye them with, figuring out how to build simple irrigation devices, learning to use the stars to navigate the seas, developing geometrical skills and thereby figuring out accurately, over 2,500 years ago, that the earth was round with a circumference of about 25,000 miles.*

The awareness, in this part of the world, of the nameless and seldom-heralded people who lived before us and bequeathed to us so much may have prompted what we in the West think of as Africa’s respect for all ancestors everywhere. And the motives that inspired our ancestors from time immemorial to work diligently to create this enormous bequest of improvements that make our lives better every day were likely similar to ones that motivate us, their descendants, today: wanting to create a better life for our children and future generations, striving to build a world more just, equitable, fair.

* The fact that the earth was about 25,000 miles around has been known around the world for at least several thousand years. People in the Americas also figured that out and accurately identified the cause of lunar eclipses (only a circular object casts a circular shadow) long before Columbus washed up on their shores. We have the American fabulist Washington Irving to thank for creating the myth (in the 1820s!) that Columbus’ contemporaries thought the earth was flat. Columbus thought the earth was only about 6,000 miles in circumference because that is what his Bible indicated. So, he erroneously concluded that, heading west from Europe, Asia was no more than several thousand miles away and he could go all the way there, across the Atlantic Ocean, without perishing. But the scientists were right and he was wrong. The earth was, in fact, not 6,000, but 25,000 miles around and Asia was ten thousand miles away. It was not possible then to carry fresh water in sailing vessels across more than ten thousand miles of ocean – the distance from Europe to Asia. Had the Americas not been there to save him, Columbus would surely have perished at sea – lost in the Doldrums, anonymous forever in the Zamani.

How Big is Africa?

Very big.

Scroll down to the political map of Africa on the right hand side of the page. The distance between the most western point of Senegal and the most eastern point of Somalia in the Horn of Africa is over 4,000 miles, about the distance from New York City to Berlin, Germany. From Tunis to Capetown is more than 5,000 miles, the distance from New York City to Santiago, Chile. Very big.

Here’s another way of thinking about it: you could fit four continental United States into Africa and still have room left over.

Or, you could fit the United States, China, Europe, the British Isles, and India into the continent of Africa.

Here’s a map from Boston University's African Studies Center that fits in the United States, China, Europe, and Alaska with room to spare:

East Africa is big, too. It includes Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. The United States, east of the Mississippi River, could fit into East Africa with only Florida sticking out.

Tanzania itself is big. You could fit Ohio and Pennsylvania into Tanzania and still have room for Texas.

On the other hand, Morogoro is small. You could fit Morogoro into Harrisonburg, Virginia, or Lancaster, PA, and still have plenty of room left over for shoofly pies and the entire Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival every spring.

Happy New Year, 2012

Out with the old and in with the new! We’ve been here the last half of 2011 and it’s been a good year. The best part came at the end when our immediate family was all here for Christmas. Jess came from Blacksburg, Virginia, on December 13 and stayed two weeks. That was great. I really miss extended family and friends a lot so, thanks, Jess, for getting on that plane even though you had to leave Jake and Emma at the kennel!

Back home in the states, Christmas goes hand-in-hand with bare trees, wintry cold, snow on the horizon and bundling up to go outside but here it’s summer year-round and Christmas pops up when it’s hot with tropical foliage everywhere. Some trees and plants have striking red and green foliage right now and that looks pretty “Christmas- y.”

Oddly enough, the wintry trappings of Christmas that developed in northern climes have been transported here with depictions of a bundled-up Santa pulled along by those ridiculous reindeer and fake Christmas trees with sparkling lights whose intent, originally, was to ward off the wintry dark!

But the generous spirit of Christmas transcends climes and borders and that was brought home to us when a Muslim friend turned up at our door with a little evergreen tree branch that he cut from somewhere way up the mountain just for his Christian friends. Nathan cut it down to size for a table centerpiece. Several weeks ago I got a locally-made crèche with African figures to add to my little “global” crèche collection so that went under the little tree-branch.

We had planned to spend Christmas weekend on the coast in Bagamoyo north of Dar es Salaam but torrential rains washed out bridges and roads in that area. About five thousand people who live in low-lying areas of Dar lost their homes. With more heavy rain expected in the next few days, it’s not likely they will be able to return. The Tanzanian government is promising to help them find other housing, even offering them land far outside the city if they are willing to relocate. I expect the town planners in Dar would be happy to move people out of the crowded city and a flood might look like an opportunity for them – but probably not for the people who are displaced.

We went out west to Iringa when Jess was here. Iringa is high and surrounded by rocky outcrops and mountains. One afternoon we hiked up to some rocks above the town and that’s where we took the picture at the top. There’s a craft shop in Iringa run by the Lutheran church that sells ice cream, chocolate pastries and cakes so we spent considerable time there! We also discovered an Italian Consolatta convent in town that makes wonderful pasta, pesto, ravioli, caponata, jams, and other delights that you can’t generally buy here. We came out of there carrying boxes of good stuff! There’s a Consolatta monastery west of Iringa that makes cheese (wow!!) but it was too far away, alas.

We also spent several days at Ruaha National Park. I really love Tanzania’s game parks. Without them, a lot of these animals would be wiped out by now and Tanzania does a good job of protecting these rare creatures while using money generated from park visitors to help surrounding communities. The night sky in the parks is breathtaking. You get the feeling of being alone on the top of the world surrounded by the widest sky imaginable and the stars just burst out at you from the horizon to top. When we lived in Babati many years ago, there was no electricity at night and I would sit in the backyard and gaze at the Southern Cross and the entire brilliant southern night sky and feel at one with the cosmos. Thirty years later, in every town of Tanzania, it’s too lit up at night to do that.

We saw elephants, hippos, giraffes, gazelles, zebras, water buck, impalas and other animals at Ruaha. Here are a few pictures:

Ruaha allegedly has 10,000 elephants and here are a few of them.

The lions were all focused on their own lives and activities -- paid us no mind. Note the little cub on the left.

And the "Little Prince" baobab trees were all leafed out and everywhere -- forests of baobabs. Loved it!