(AP) KAMPALA, Uganda – Every week, Charity Kiconco drives hundreds of miles down some of the world’s worst roads on a motorbike, bringing drugs and counseling to hundreds of AIDS patients.
What the 26-year-old Kiconco lacks in medical training, she makes up for in commitment.
“It’s a hard job. It’s exhausting both physically and mentally,” she said. “But then you see the difference you make to someone’s life and it’s worth it somehow.”
Deploying workers like Kiconco trained in key tasks but without the range of qualifications of a nurse or doctor is one way of addressing a global health care shortage that is hitting African and other developing nations hardest.
Experts gathered in Uganda this week to discuss the problem also considered asking rich countries — which often benefit from the migration of health care workers — to compensate poorer nations for the staff they recruit and to pay to train health workers in the developing world.
The long-term goal, though, was galvanizing the funding and political will to radically expand the education and training of health workers in the developed and developing world.
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 4 million more health workers are needed worldwide to improve health systems and achieve international health and development goals. The gap is felt keenly in Africa, which carries 25 percent of the global disease burden yet has only 3 percent of the world’s health workers and 1 percent of its economic resources.
“What’s the use in having medicines if we don’t have health workers to take it to the patients and ensure it’s taken correctly?” asked Miriam Were, the head of the African Medical and Research Foundation.
Were previously worked as a teacher in Kenya but switched to medicine when she saw how many of her students missed classes due to preventable illnesses like diarrhea and malaria.
More typically, though, the movement is not from teaching to medicine, but out of Africa. For overworked and underpaid workers in developing countries, migration is often an appealing option.
The Global Health Workforce Alliance — organizers of this week’s conference in Uganda — says a physician in sub-Saharan Africa or Asia might earn only $100 per month, but could earn $14,000 monthly in some developed countries. One in four doctors trained in sub-Saharan Africa works in a developing country.
“There are more Ethiopian doctors on the east coast of America than there are in Ethiopia,” Were said.
According to figures published in the British medical journal The Lancet, the U.S. has 9.37 nurses per 1,000 people and Uganda has just 0.55. But even the United States is facing a shortage, according to organizers of the Uganda conference, needing 800,000 nurses and 200,000 doctors.
“Better working conditions at home would be a massive factor in mitigating migration but these countries don’t have money,” said Dr. Francis Omaswa, executive director of the Global Health Workforce Alliance. Rich countries should invest in training, he said, “so that we have a big enough pool of health workers to share between all of us.”
Interim measures such as the training and use of community volunteers are being tried in many sub-Saharan and Asian countries.
Working in Uganda for a national charity called The AIDS Support Organization, Kiconco drives to drug distribution centers in rural areas and works with volunteers to mobilize patients to pick up their medication — rather than having to make home deliveries.
Volunteers, themselves HIV-positive, have been trained in basic counseling and are provided with bikes. Competitive salaries, loan programs and training programs as well as a relaxed and informal working environment keep morale high.
“You would need to at least double my salary before I would think about leaving because this place has such a good working environment,” said Emmanuel Odeke, a doctor with the organization.
New York, March 6, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the recent arrest and two-week imprisonment of three journalists from Muslim-oriented newspapers on criminal defamation charges in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Editor Ezedin Mohamed and Publisher Maria Kadim of Al Kidus and Editor Ibrahim Mohamed of Selefia were arrested on February 16 and held for nearly two weeks. All three were released on February 29 on a bail of 20,000 Birr (US$2,127) each, Ezedin Mohamed said.
The editors and publisher were arrested for reprinting a letter that was purportedly written by Elias Redwan, the vice president of the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council, according to the two editors and local news reports. Reprinted from the Web site Ethiopianmuslims, the letter criticized the minister of education’s proposed policy to ban school prayers at public education institutions.
Redman said the letter had not actually been written by him; he filed a complaint with the Addis Ababa police that said the two newspapers had damaged the council’s relations with the government, according to local journalists.
“CPJ condemns the criminal prosecution for defamation of these journalists,” said CPJ’s executive director Joel Simon. “Use of the criminal law is designed to muzzle critical journalism—those who believe they have been libeled can pursue a case in civil court. We call on the authorities to drop the prosecution immediately and return all equipment seized from the newspapers.”
The police confiscated computers and printers from both newspaper offices; none of the equipment has yet been returned, the editors told CPJ.
This is not the first time these publications have been arbitrarily targeted by the government. A day after the Muslim holiday of Eid Al-Adha, on December 21, police arrested and detained Ezedin Mohamed for six days without charge, he said.
According to local reports, the police have not finished their investigation into the current case and it has not been decided yet whether the court case will recommence. The editors say they are facing serious financial challenges due to what they say was an exorbitant bail price and the confiscated equipment. Al Kidus was able to continue publishing over the last few weeks while Selefia has not been able to produce an issue but hope to this week.
CPJ is a New York-based, independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide. For more information, visit www.cpj.org.
It’s not easy to be a musician in most of the Third World, said legendary Ethiopian composer and musician Mulatu Astatke, who is a 2007-08 Radcliffe Fellow. Music is not typically taught in elementary schools, and in later life, opportunities for musicians are limited by poverty.
In Ethiopia “we have beautiful music, beautiful dance, and in general we have a beautiful culture — but little chance to develop,” said Mulatu (Ethiopians are generally referred to by their first names) in a Feb. 27 presentation.
The slight, soft-spoken composer was at Radcliffe’s 34 Concord Ave. Colloquium Room to give an audience of 70 a primer on Ethiopian contributions to world music — and on his own contributions as a transnational composer. (Mulatu originated a jazz fusion form known as Ethio-jazz. He recently composed music for the soundtrack of director Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 “Broken Flowers.”)
Early on, Mulatu wanted to be an engineer. But he went to high school in North Wales, where a rich arts curriculum allowed him to uncover his talent for music. “I found my calling there,” he said.
Then came more music schooling in London, before Mulatu moved to Boston, where in the late 1950s he was the first African student at the Berklee College of Music — “the only place in that time,” he said, to study jazz.
After further training in New York City, and more than a decade in the West, Mulatu moved back to Ethiopia, where he survived decades of civil war and the vagaries of changing political regimes. Mulatu taught for a living, though he was pressured out of one university job for promoting “imperialist music.” He also pioneered a groundbreaking radio music show in Addis Ababa and traveled frequently into the countryside to perform.
Today, the 67-year-old composer considers part of his musical mission to revive and improve upon the traditional instruments of his country. Modern groups are recording music based on Ethiopian rhythms and musical themes, said Mulatu, but none is reawakening the potential of traditional instruments.
For one, he pioneered the idea of increasing the number of strings on the krar, a bowl-shaped six-string lyre traditionally made of wood, cloth, and beads. He upgraded the instrument — now commonly amplified — to eight strings, then to 12.
If traditional instruments are limited, young players will turn to more versatile Western instruments — and lose a sense of their own culture, said Mulatu. There are ways to alter and improve the old, he said, without compromising the tonal qualities that underlie Ethiopian music.
The composer’s own signature instrument is the vibraphone, a set of graduated aluminum percussion bars that resemble a marimba or a xylophone. In Mulatu’s hands, said Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “the vibraphone becomes the dawal” — the resonant “bell stones” that call the faithful to prayer at Ethiopian churches. (Shelemay, also a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is Harvard’s G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and a professor of African and African American studies.)
After his Western training in music, Mulatu made a study of the complex layering of regional Ethiopian music traditions. It’s “a very diverse and a very [musically] rich country,” said Radcliffe Fellow Steven Kaplan, a professor of African studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the presentation, he praised Mulatu for delving into lesser-known musical traditions among tribes in southern Ethiopia.
The composer once brought musicians from four different tribes together in an Addis Ababa television studio and orchestrated a cross-tribal fusion performance. Clips from that filming were among the several musical and video interludes played or shown during the Radcliffe event.
To the Western ear and eye, the wind instruments were captivating. They included long trumpetlike wooden horns called malakat and end-blown flutes that each produce one pitch and together a complex melody.
The ideal way “to explore multiple forms” of music, said Mulatu, is through jazz.
Performance opportunities like the one in Addis Ababa also give obscure musicians (many of them farmers) artistic exposure beyond their villages, he said. “These people have been deprived of being heard in the world, or even their own country.”
Performance is also one way of bringing Ethiopian music into the modern age, and to “give identity to modern Ethiopian music,” said Mulatu. “I’ve been writing music here to come up with that identity.” He described the Radcliffe experience — with its opportunities for reflection, collaboration, and composition — as “one of the best years of my life.”
Mulatu is writing music for an electronic opera, and the first section of it will premiere in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre April 14. “The Yared Opera” will blend the old and the new, and incorporate traditional chant texts in Ge’ez, the Ethiopian liturgical language.
Part of the opera score was sneak-previewed on DVD for the Radcliffe audience. It’s based in part on the chant of St. Yared, the founder of Ethiopian church music thought to date back to the sixth century. Mulatu hopes future performances will feature live musicians in concert with the electronic version, and staged at the rock churches of Lalibela, a holy city in northern Ethiopia.
While at Radcliffe, Mulatu is also working on an oral history project with Kaplan and Shelemay. The two scholars have recorded 11 sessions with him so far, including the Feb. 27 presentation. Kaplan and Shelemay sat on either side of him, and alternated asking questions.
The oral history sessions, including DVDs and recordings, will be added to a new collection on Ethiopian musicians in the United States that Shelemay is assembling for the Library of Congress. She called Mulatu an “ambassador” for Ethiopian artistic tradition.
The premiere of the first section of Mulatu Astatke’s ‘The Yared Opera’ is part of a free performance of his works by the Either/Orchestra at 8 p.m. April 14 in the Sanders Theatre. The concert is the final note of an April 13-14 Ethiopian Cultural Creativity Conference at Harvard, which features scholarly presentations on the visual, musical, and literary artistic contributions of the Ethiopian diaspora.
For details, visit http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/ethiopia.html.
Residents in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, say the city is on the brink of starvation and economic collapse, following what they describe as a massive looting spree of the city’s main Bakara market by government forces loyal to the country’s interim President Abdullahi Yusuf.
Somalia’s interim Prime Minister Nur Adde Hassan Hussein surprised many Somalis on Monday by publicly admitting that government troops took part in the wholesale looting of Bakara market in recent days.
The prime minister apologized for the soldiers’ misconduct and promised that they would be punished.
According to Mogadishu resident Mahmud Hassan and several other reliable VOA sources in Mogadishu, punishing the soldiers would require the cooperation of President Yusuf. Hassan and the others say it was soldiers from the president’s Darod clan who looted and destroyed the market, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in the city with no source of income and no place to buy basic goods.
“Bakara market has been looted by Abdullahi Yusuf’s clan from Puntland. There is no commerce. There is no business,” he said. “The largest market in Somalia is closed. Now, food is sold in back alleys and inflation is over 300 percent. I would not be surprised if you see a human catastrophe in Mogadishu within the next two weeks if things continue like this.”
Since an Ethiopia Woyanne-led military campaign ousted Somali Islamists from power in Mogadishu 14 months ago, Islamist-led groups waging a violent anti-government insurgency in the capital have been accused of using Bakara market’s crowded streets and narrow alleys to launch attacks against Ethiopian and government troops and to hide from them among civilians.
The government has conducted numerous security sweeps through Bakara market and elsewhere in Mogadishu, triggering battles that have killed thousands of people and have caused more than one million others to flee their homes.
Government troops taking part in security operations have been frequently accused of looting goods and private property. But aid workers in the capital tell VOA that it has never before taken place on such a huge scale.
President Yusuf has not commented on the accusations against his soldiers and it is far from clear whether he had any knowledge of their actions in Bakara market. But the reports have nonetheless convinced many Somalis in Mogadishu that the president is following a plan to destroy the clan that currently dominates in the capital, the Hawiye, and give power to his Darod clan.
A prominent Hawiye political leader, Mohamed Uluso, insists that troops loyal to Somalia’s transitional federal government are now largely made up of Darod soldiers from Puntland, who take orders directly from President Yusuf.
“The view is that the destruction of Bakara market will complete the submission and surrender of the Hawiye to the personal rule of President Yusuf,” he said.
(ynetnews) – The Immigrant Absorption Ministry and the Ethiopian National Project have launched a joint project aimed at fighting domestic violence and enhancing the Ethiopian community’s standing in Israeli society.
The project was introduced by the ministry and the ENP Tuesday, and is expected to address several key issues which are considered the thorn in the Ethiopian immigrants’ integration’s side.
The project wishes to explore questions such as the Israeli society’s real approach to Ethiopian immigrants; is there discrimination against Ethiopians when applying for positions in the public and private sector; is the multitude of associations dedicated to the immigrants’ absorption in society helping or harming the process, etc.
The Immigrant Absorption Ministry also hopes the project will be able to tackle questions such as the community’s representation in the media as a contributing factor to its integration, or lack thereof; the various ways in which to spring young community leadership; raising community awareness and activism; and above all –raising community awareness to domestic violence and the ways of dealing with it.
The Ethiopian sector in considered weaker than other immigrant sectors in Israeli society. Many in the community feel the cultural change is damaging its fabric and subsequently damaging to the domestic equilibrium customary in it.
The past five years have seen a concerning rise in domestic violence cases within Ethiopian families, as 10 Ethiopian women were murdered by their husbands.
In addition to helping the community fight the problem from within, the project will also train an initial 10 Ethiopian social workers, who will be stationed in 10 communities, as well as train several of the community’s spiritual leaders to act as mediators in cases of domestic disputes.
In large numbers, Ethiopians from Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. united to support Barack Obama for President on March 4th. Overall, Ethiopian-Americans and Americans from DC and beyond—including German visitors who are inspired by Obama’s message of change—gathered together at the Renaissance Hotel to watch the results of the March 4th Primaries.
All in attendance realize that they are at the cusp of a historical moment. It has been a long time indeed since a presidential candidate inspired so many to do so much. Those who came to support Barack Obama did so in spite of the torrential downpour of rain that inundated Washington DC on this particular night. Fekadu Mariam and Lullit Marcos braved the bad weather to support Barack Obama and contribute their part to ensure his election. What they—along with the rest of the supporters—realize is that democracy demands action. It is not enough to talk about the election at the water cooler or over coffee.
Becoming a citizen of the United States of America is a blessing, a blessing that many people in Ethiopia and countries throughout the world yearn for. Thus, there is a special responsibility that comes with being a citizen; one of those responsibilities entail being involved as active citizens by voting. Our nation—the United States of America —is noble and extraordinary; as citizens; we enjoy freedoms that are not imagined by the majority of the global denizen. It is our duty to be involved in the political process. A muted voice is not heard; if the Ethiopian community does not speak through the ballot, their voices and their interests will not be heard. Democracy does not heed the nattering of idle complaints; however democracy listens to the fierce urgency of motivated voters.
On this night, a multitude of Ethiopians did not take for granted their responsibilities as citizens. The large and diverse gathering of Barack Obama supporters showed up in significant numbers and raised significant contributions for the Obama campaign. In the coming months, Ethiopians will have a chance to make a real difference in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The Ethiopian community can have a significant impact in these states; all should follow the lead of Eyasu Theodros in being active participants in our vibrant democracy.
Ethiopians — and all Americans — email [email protected] for ways to actively support Barack Obama’s campaign for President.
