Burness Global: Stories

Poznan Town Square (credit: Megan Dold)

As the sun began to set around 3 p.m. in Poznan, Poland, where I was attending the 2008 UNFCCC Climate Change Conference, I couldn’t help but wonder why this city was picked to host the huge event. I knew from an earlier Wikipedia search that it was the fifth largest city in Poland and one of the oldest; photographs showed off a beautiful old town square. But I had seen none of that while walking back and forth between my hotel and the enormous conference center. My experience was a place of gray skies and streets lined by gray, boxy buildings.

The conference organizers had prepared for the bleak weather, cheerfully handing out blue hats, scarves, and gloves, as well as jars of local honey, to the 9,000 attendees. Throngs of foreigners stood out around Poznan, all dressed alike with the same scarves and hats. Inside or out, they debated everything from emissions targets to deforestation terms to adaptation and mitigation schemes. All wanted their say, and as the conference continued, prospects for a global deal on emissions targets looked increasingly dismal.

That afternoon, while delegates were deep into their discussions, I decided to walk away from the conference center, in pursuit of the town square shown in the photographs. For a couple of blocks, the buildings looked the same, and I felt disoriented and lost.

But suddenly, [Read more →]

Wangari Maathai, 20 years ago (credit: Ellen Wilson)

“The earth was naked. For me, the mission was to try to cover it with green.”– Wangari Maathai

It is a day like any other, running around Washington, D.C., in a Honda Odyssey, taking children through their errands. This is the suburban life in the US: there’s a birthday party and a gift that needs to be bought. We drive to the toy store to get a Batman action figure for Tristram, and I hope my 6-year-old will not scream and cry about not having any of his own money left to get a toy. In the window, I glimpse a book that immediately takes me back years, to my days of trekking in the uplands north of Nairobi and down into the Rift Valley with four Green Belt Movement members. We went village to village to speak to women about planting trees across their treeless lands.

In Wangari’s Trees of Peace, this woman of inspiration and the movement she created has been memorialized in the form of a children’s book. It is a strange vision, and I wonder how an oversimplified story about Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai has been crafted to be sold to children who are also being sold plastic Legos and Playmobil sets and computer games and books on Star Wars and race cars and Barbie and Groovy Girls and Calico Critters.
[Read more →]

Margaret Musambi (credit: Dominic Chavez)

MUMIAS, Kenya — Margaret Musambi is one of those rare people who likes to expand her job responsibilities to have a greater impact on people’s lives. She is an extension agent for Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, based here in the western part of the country.

Musambi’s passion in the last few years has been to teach farmers the multiple uses of soybeans, emphasizing their nutritional benefits. She has shown farmers how to make soy milk, soy yogurt, soy cakes, soy sausages, even soy meatballs.

“Soy is wonderful,” she said one day recently, sitting with a group of farmers.

But one of her more creative projects has been to introduce soy to a group of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In Mumias, a town of about 30,000 people, she has begun to work with 50 members belonging to an HIV/AIDS support group.

Helped by a small grant from the US Agency for International Development, the group purchased 50-kilogram bags of soybeans. She told the group members, most of whom are taking anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS, that they should incorporate more soy into their diets. She also taught them how to make soy products, which the members now sell in local markets.

“These people are becoming so healthy,” Musambi said. “Their drugs are helping them, and the soybeans are as well. It’s true. You eat soy and it will cheer you up.”

Me hice la prueba de VIH (credit: Coimbra Sirica)

For me, the AIDS2008 conference in Mexico City this August opened in the lobby of a hotel in the Zona Rosa, where a French human rights activist — a young woman with short spiky hair — was trying unsuccessfully to communicate with a trans-gender sex worker from Mexico, a woman with shoulder-length dark hair and very big hands. I helped out for a bit, translating for them until the two had figured out where they might meet later that day to discuss how the French group could help advocate on behalf of the trans-gender group’s rights to HIV treatment and prevention services.

Chance encounters at the biannual international conference can be very funny — and immensely sad — and they often speak to the great difficulties surrounding AIDS. There is no scientific meeting that matches it for embracing the most marginalized of people.  Their representatives are in evidence, often in flamboyant glory. Yet most everyone has in common that they’ve lost people they love at some point in their lives. None of my gay friends from the 1980s is alive. (Except a dear cousin, who describes himself as uptight and Catholic, and says he thanks his parents regularly for repressing him so thoroughly they may have saved his life.)

The conference plays out in other venues as well — sometimes far from the big halls and hotel lobbies. One morning I accompanied a group of reporters to one of Mexico’s largest prisons, the Reclusório del Oriente, which holds 11,000 inmates. [Read more →]

President Kibaki

Kenyan businessmen and women, and political friends of the new power-sharing coalition government, filled the large ballroom of Nairobi’s Grand Regency Hotel. Reporters and camera crews bustled about, fighting over position. Black, gold, and brown drapes adorned the edges of the room, along with signs and banners of organizations taking part in the announcement.

This was the launch of the first major national partnership to provide small-scale Kenyan farmers with $50 million USD in low-interest loans. But the excitement in the room was over something else: the attendance of President Mwai Kibaki and the new Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The two leaders were attending the event as a show of unity and commitment to the country and its farmers–the backbone of the Kenyan economy.

Everyone in the room was in support of this program for farmers, but what people were really waiting to see was the interaction between Kibaki and Odinga, following the violent outcome of the December 2007 elections. The two men had run against each other for president, and the disputed results led to weeks of turmoil that killed more than 1,100 people and laid bare the country’s deep divisions.

Loud “presidential” music blared through the public announcement system, announcing the arrival of both men and their entourages, followed by an elaborate musical program with songs and dances for the royal audience. Then Odinga took the podium first. [Read more →]

Kenya Cows (credit: Dominic Chavez)

NAIROBI – The pace of life here is as it always has been–lots of traffic jams, crowded downtown sidewalks, tens of thousands of people selling things by the roadside. Tourists also have returned in high numbers this summer. It is easy to forget that just seven months ago the waves of post-election violence raised serious questions about the country’s future.

But the impacts linger, just out of view. This morning, I was interviewing Machira Gichohi, managing director of the Kenya Dairy Board, and he brought up how the violence affected the dairy industry.

Much of the violence, he noted, was concentrated in the Rift Valley, which produces roughly half of the country’s milk. During the month-long upheaval, “farmers’ animals were stolen, infrastructure was destroyed, and people just scattered.”

In December 2007, just before the violent outbreak, the country was producing 1.2 million liters of milk per day. But during the violence–January and February–output dropped by half, to 600,000 liters per day. Now, Gichohi said, it had rebounded to 850,000 liters daily.

It is the cold season here, and dairy cows are producing less milk than during warmer times. So it seemed that the dairy industry was making a fairly swift rebound, and that in a few months it was conceivable to approach the pre-violence numbers.

But Gichohi said it wouldn’t be so easy.

“It will take us one to two years to get back to where it was,” he said. “As our prime minister said in London, ‘Kenyans have gone to hell and we don’t want to go back.’ That’s how we feel. We hope those crazy days don’t come back.”

Mariam Yussif (credit: John Donnelly)

ACCRA, Ghana – Over the last decade, support groups for HIV-positive people have flourished around Africa. The best of these groups offer so much: a safe place to talk about the range of issues they face; endless empathy; even connections that can lead to jobs. But rarely have I seen such a need for a group as during a recent visit here, with the Yaddah Dah Allah Muslim Women Association, whose members are HIV positive.

The 35 women share a secret — their HIV status — almost entirely just among themselves. Husbands don’t know. Families haven’t heard. Friends haven’t been told. The reason is simple: Many fear that if they revealed their status, husbands and members of the extended family would kick them out of their homes or worse — even though in almost all cases husbands infected them.

“In the Muslim community, we don’t want to disclose our status to each other,” said Mariam Yussif, the founder of the group. “People would rather kill themselves than bring it out.”

So their escape valve opens only when they meet — the third Thursday of every month. [Read more →]

Rice field (credit: Jeff Haskins)

About an hour drive from Kampala, in a place called Namulonge, you’ll find Hadji Wanonda, a Ugandan farmer, who grows locally adapted and resilient varieties of rice on his one-acre plot of land.

For years, Hadji planted cassava, maize and a few other crops for his family to eat. Now with improved rice varieties provided to him by local agricultural research institute, Hadji can make up to US$800 in a three month period selling his harvest in the local markets. This represents a massive increase in income for him and, more recently, Hadji has been able to employ men and women in his community to help out with farm work.

Hadji’s story is part of a larger effort to boost African rice production and ensure self-sufficiency for the sake of Africa’s food security. The demand for rice in sub-Saharan Africa is double the rate of population growth; consumption is growing faster than that of any other major food staple. But instead of finding ways to substantially increase local production, countries have depended on more costly imports.

Hadji uses rice varieties called “Nerica,” a resilient, high-yielding cross of African and Asian rice. Breeders of Nerica rice won the World Food Prize in 2004. Nerica is not restricted to growing in paddies, thus enabling African farmers to grow rice in places that no one before thought possible with no irrigation. If this kind of public research and development could be applied more widely, Africa could be more self-sufficient and depend a little less on others for its food supply.

Rosa, Before (credit: Dominic Chavez)

I have traveled around the developing world since I was barely out of my teens. I’ve been in more places forgotten than remembered. But people often stay with me. Rosa does.

I met her last fall in a rundown quarter of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She was 16, with black unruly hair that ran in all directions, and she wore a pout –- partly because a man I was writing about was telling her how disappointed she had made him. The man, Nasir al-Amin, had been spending his vacations for the past five years helping put children through school in Addis. I am in the process of writing a book on how Americans are trying to help children in Africa, and Nasir is a key person in the book.

For Nasir, Rosa was special. He had known her for four years. She had lost both her parents to AIDS. And Nasir was putting Rosa through school, along with 57 other Ethiopian kids. But the other 57 were doing well in school; Rosa was not. She had dropped out of a photography school, and for two days last fall Nasir tried to get her back on track.

Rosa had health problems — an irregular heart beat, and depression, it seemed — and Nasir gave her money to see a doctor and enroll in school. But after seeing her in late September, Rosa never showed for a meeting to give him receipts and a report on how it went. For several months afterward, Nasir thought all was lost. He sent out emissaries to find her, but he heard nothing. Nasir feared she had turned to sex work.

Six months later, I returned to Addis, and went looking for Rosa.
[Read more →]

Farmer and children (credit: Bee Wuethrich)

It is the rainy season, and there is no rain. We take the road toward Monkey Bay, and pass a pick-up truck, people wave wildly. The driver stops the car; it is Justice and Eddie who have jumped out of the pick-up, and who run toward us. “Forgive me if I am tired today,” Justice says as he settles into the back seat. “I returned this morning at 3:00 a.m. from a funeral in my home village.” His cousin’s daughter, four years old, dead of malaria.

We drive. Through Mangochi, past the Hotchkiss gun, across the Shire River bridge, and wind up the hills west of Lake Malawi, long and dusty. Dustier still the dirt road that branches off, abandoning thoughts of trade with Mozambique to cross a plateau crisp with brown dry leaves and shriveled ears of maize.

It is nearing harvest time, the hungry season, when last year’s stores of food are running out, cash is short, and it is not yet time to bring in the harvest. It is like being on an ocean with nothing to drink, these endless fields of drought-plagued maize.

According to recent newspaper reports, people are beginning to eat seed processed for planting—fumigated with chemicals to protect it from insects. And they are selling the fertilizer purchased with vouchers to raise cash to buy food.

“I bought my mother a sack of maize for 2000 kwacha,” a man tells me. “It is a 100 percent increase in price.”

Then, look at this. [Read more →]