I just finished "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" with 2 hours of 2002 left to go. My head is spinning because I read so much of it in the last three hours. I identify with much of it, but it all seemed so self-indulgent of Pirsig. I know he sought to improve himself first, but he had been focused on that for so long - man, at least use your powers of insanity for good :)
People in the States often see pictures, read words about the conditions here in the 3rd world. They feel helpless.
Well, I'm here and I often feel helpless. Diamantino has malaria, which many (if not most) people here have, but when malaria decides to wake up and get its host sick, that's when problems start. So D's absence these past few days have been because of this.
It wasn't that I was floored when he said he was sick -- it's pretty natural to assume that if someone doesn't adhere to any semblance of routine, malaria is to blame.
But I feel handcuffed. I take my Lariam once per week, and I don't get sick. By the end of my service, I'll most likely have contracted malaria without having gotten sick and I will receive a regimen of drugs to flush it from my system.
For people here, they have to buy chloroquine treatments (to which some strains of malaria here are resistant) or go to a few clinics that hand them out for free (I believe; but that's just the impression I've gotten from some people). Truth be told, switching this treatment to Lariam (mephloquine) wouldn't be an improvement. Eventually, malaria would be resistent to meph. Essentially, several different treatments need to be simultaneously used that don't selectively pressure one strain or another - formation of new malarial lines is inevitable, but can be handled more easily than total immunity to one treatment.
Economically, this isn't feasible right now. Until the other drugs come down in price, people can't afford them. And I can't afford to "lend" people my medication. Not in any way whatsoever. But here I sit, malaria-free, while others around me suffer. And I'm supposed to educate them about AIDS? I'm supposed to tell them what a horrible disease it is and how they need to avoid one of their remaining pleasures in life - unprotected sex - so that they can avoid the risk of contracting a virus that somewhere down the line, could kill them? When being bitten by a mosquito could do the same thing?
Yeah, it's easy for a Westerner, backed by millions of dollars of health care to come into Moz and preach caution about contracting AIDS.
This is not to say that HIV/AIDS is not a tremendous and horrible problem. This is not to say there aren't millions of people who also think it's a devastating virus that could change their lives forever.
But we can prevent malaria through drug treatments primarily and very secondarily through behavior (you have to be ridiculously paranoid to protect yourself adequately). HIV/AIDS is prevented primarily through behavior and very secondarily through drug therapy.
Both education and drugs can be provided, but does education begging different behavior necessarily exact this change? If I had $30,000 to spend, would I spend it on educating against HIV/AIDS contraction, or on drug cocktails to combat malaria?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but it seems clear that one of my major roadblocks (and that of many before me) will be that people want to live as normal a life that they can muster, and encroaching on their sex life only reminds them more comprehensively how imperiled their lives are.
Groups here have seen the failures of scare tactics in HIV/AIDS education and have started voicing new messages of ensuring your future by using a condom. These groups have people envisioning their longterm goals and then visualizing the path to get there - which includes an HIV-free life.
Compounding even this solution is a lack of longterm goals on the part of many Mozambicans who have become accustomed to trying to figure out where dinner will come from (while I decide what dinner will be...) Additionally, AIDS victims are kept out of the communities' views so this heightens the fear that many Westerners have of the disease.
My #1 goal this upcoming year is to really touch people and get them to realize for themselves the problem of HIV/AIDS.
Peace
John
