Hello
Another day in Paradise – although you’d be hard put to know it if you had just landed here from Mars. What makes this heady mix of mud, and joy, and neglect, and wild abandon into Paradise is so hard to describe.
To those who do not know it, Mali is a place where people get by on less than a dollar a day. Everywhere you look there are reminders of that – people in tatters, children in broken plastic sandals jumping over mud puddles and skirting piles of trash, carts and horses too seem to be held together with baling twine, cars that are older than the earth itself hobble along the broken tarmac, listing like so many overloaded boats. Children fly kites made of trash bags or push toy trucks made out of tin cans.
Yet, today, our day was full of poetry and miracles. Everyone everywhere gave us their most precious gift of time – an hour with Plan Mali. Two hours with Malick Sene, the head of the country’s whole HIV program, when we just stopped by on a whim to visit – three hours with Steve Lutterbeck, old friend from Chicago, now head of PSI. We talked about the miracle of HIV testing that is happening here – Steve puts up tents (from REI) on street corners and the people just flock to them. He is testing thousands of people every month and he told us that he had been responsible for handing out several hundred thousand condoms. He is a giant of a man, laughing at himself, speaking French with a terrible accent, but so clearly devoted to this work. And calm, serene Malick Sene – a physician and clearly also a poet in addition to being in charge of all of HIV for Mali – talked about his view that lack of funding for HIV treatment s a crime against humanity, and then told a parable about killing people by remote control – the people being killed by AIDS inaction are often on the other side of the world from oneself – the victim is unseen, but the lack of action that leads to their death from HIV is no less important than if they were standing just an arm’s length away.
We returned home after another very long day (hot sun, torrential rain showers, difficult travel over dirt and broken tarmac roads) to find Julie and Lauren (student volunteers) crowing about their excursion to Ngomi with one of the TB Bolo peer educators who works with us- they walked more than an hour to get there and found one of our TB Bolo patients who had indeed received a ticket from a TB Bolo outreach worker more than two months ago, and had gone to the clinic, and received an xray and had been diagnosed with TB, and was already feeling better – where as just before he was diagnosed he was having trouble walking, he could now walk, and work, and breathe . . . Another save for GAIA, for Mali, for the world.
These are the changes we can make with our own hands. The hour is late, and Iran is burning, but if enough of us put our hands out, and our hearts into the task, and we continue doing what we can – it is never quite enough, but it is so much better than standing still.
Thank you for making it all possible. You are the energy that drives us, together, we can change the world.
Annie