The Best Album of 2006

The Best (& Bravest) Album of 2006 may be the recently released "Taking the Long Way" by the Dixie Chicks. In 2003 just prior to the Iraq War, lead singer Natalie Maines said the following at a London concert,"Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

The response back home was immediate. Country music stations boycotted their music, former fans burned their CDs, death threats arrived, and Natalie eventually had to move from her native Texas. Country music has thrived on themes of patriotism, lonely soldiers, and American pride since 9/11. Some would say this has been done honestly and earnestly; some would say ideologically. The story of the Dixie Chicks is illustrative then of how one of country's own disagreed, was labelled a traitor, and now, has emerged defiant and stunning as the War continues and our President struggles.

Returning to the Garden

As may have been hinted at, I am back on US terra semi-firma. Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) have said that the hardest thing about their program is not the going or the staying, but the returning. Hard to compare my 3 months to their 2+ years, but I have an inkling of what they mean.

More specifically geographically, I am outside my hometown of Savannah, Georgia. Savannah has been called the most beautiful city in North America. It is also famed for being the star of the nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It's history is long (for an American city) and its beauty, natural and designed, is unparalleled compared to any other city in the US (except perhaps for San Francisco). What does this have to do with Global Issues? Well, see the Bruce Feiler article from the NYT I blogged on from a while back for one type of answer.
Photo: The fountain in Forsyth Park, Savannah, Georgia. (Photo by Chris Jeffords).

The Making of a Better Person

Spending time in the poor countries of our world may make one a better person, but I am not sure it necessarily makes you a happier one. There are simply innumerable ways to lose varying levels of innocence here at a rapid rate (e.g. experiencing death, poverty, injustice, repression firsthand) which can lead to guilt, disillusionment, bewilderment, and, at the end of the pot-holed road, despair. Resilience then becomes such a vital characteristic to possess and grow in this land.

A strange counter to this weariness of wordly souls may be the following phenomena: It could be that it is the relativeness of poverty, not the absolute level, that determines a person's health and social outlook. Will then a middle-class non-black Westerner (called mzungu in Luganda) suddenly thrust into a position of relative wealth and power in Africa reap the physical and psychic benefits of an increase in social position? Or (as has been reported at some of the seedier bars of Africa) will this unearned status elevation lead to a life of gluttony and corruption with the requisite associated unhealthy behaviors? Case studies requested.

Big Pharma, Cynicism, and Truth

The 3rd International Film Festival of Uganda is ongoing in Kampala right now. I was fortunate enough to see The Constant Gardener this past weekend (for free!). A good movie about a corrupt pharmaceutical company (Big Pharma) running a dangerous drug trial on coerced Africans. Fiction, right? Can we just praise and dismiss this as an emotive, skilled, but ultimately cynical act of story-telling by a liberal, bleeding heart filmaker?

I actually hate conspiracy theories, but I'll be damned if I didn't read the following in the Washington Post the very next day: Pfizer faulted over drug trials in Nigeria. Pfizer happens to be the world's largest drug company if you're keeping track of such things. And, I'll be damned if I didn't meet a bunch of representatives from a contract-research organization (CRO) yesterday searching out sites in Africa for clinical trials of new tuberculosis drugs. It is almost enough to turn a pragmatic idealist into a paranoid cynic.

Photo: Kibera, an urban slum in Nairobi, Kenya where many scenes from The Constant Gardener took place. It is home to ~1 million persons living in rather depressing conditions. Taken 2001.

The Cultural Contradictions of International Research

Research in the developing world is quicksand, firewalls, and floods occasionally punctuated by light skies and cool winds. One thorny issue, suppressed to varying levels of depth in researchers' psyches, is the problem of ethics. Ethics not just in the sense of does Drug A's potential benefit outweigh its potential risk, but the foggier and subtler ethics involving cultural difference, the motivations, explicit and buried, of researchers and their collaborators, and the fundamental, overt power discrepancies between the North and the South.

Some folks talk of the 3 M's of global health: Missionaries, Mercenaries, and Misfits (a fourth M has also been proposed--Meddlers). Useful caricatures to a certain extent, but we certainly live in a more ambigious reality where many who work in RLS (resource-limited settings) have a mix of these characteristics--some of which may be in conflict. And the evolution/devolution from one M to another is a constant source of intrigue, talk, and concern.