My Children are Seven in Number
Not sure why but for some reason over lunch I got interested in old labor songs. This one was particularly bleak. Apparently, it is intended to be sung over “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean.” As our administration erodes labor and environmental protections for the inexplicable sake of bringing back coal mining, it pays to have a look back at how bad it really was.
Song: My Children are Seven in Number
Lyrics: Eleanor Kellogg(1)
Music: to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”
Year: c.1933
Genre:
Country: USA
My children are seven in number,
We have to sleep four in a bed;
I’m striking with my fellow workers.
To get them more clothes and more bread.
CHORUS:
Shoes, shoes, we’re striking for pairs of shoes,
Shoes, shoes, we’re striking for pairs of shoes.
Pellagra(3) is cramping my stomach,
My wife is sick with TB(4);
My babies are starving for sweet milk,
Oh, there as so much sickness for me.
Milk, milk, we’re striking for gallons of milk,
Milk, milk, we’re striking for gallons of milk.
I’m needing a shave and a haircut,
But barbers I cannot afford;
My wife cannot wash without soapsuds,
And she had to borrow a board.
This song was originally posted on protestsonglyrics.net
Soap, soap, we’re striking for bars of soap,
Soap, soap, we’re striking for bars of soap.
My house is a shack on the hillside,
Its doors are unpainted and bare;
I haven’t a screen to my windows,
And carbide cans do for a chair.
Homes, homes, we’re striking for better homes,
Homes, homes, we’re striking for better homes.
They shot Barney Graham(5) our leader,
His spirit abides with us still;
The spirit of strength for justice,
No bullets have power to kill.
This song was originally posted on protestsonglyrics.net
Barney, Barney, we’re thinking of you today,
Barney, Barney, we’re thinking of you today.
Oh, miners, go on with the union,
Oh, miners, go on with the fight;
For we’re in the struggle for justice,
And we’re in the struggle for right.
Justice, justice, we’re striking for justice for all,
Justice, justice, we’re striking for justice for all.
Kenya 2017 Election Violence: Some Data Analysis
I’m getting used to the new version of ArcGIS (which is a vast improvement!) and gave it a test run on some data from the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project) database, specifically on this years round of violence surrounding the Kenyan election. ACLED keeps real time data on violence and conflict around the globe, the latest entry in 2017 is Nov 24, just five days ago.
The first election occurred on August 8th, 2017. The opposition contested the results of the election, claiming problems in vote tallying by the IEBC, resulting in a nullification by the Supreme Court. A new election was called and was to be conducted within 60 days of the nullification. Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, claimed that the election again would not be fair, dropped out of the race and called for a national boycott. The election went ahead as place on October 26, 2017 and Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner.
There was violence at every stage of the process, both by rioters in support of the opposition and by the police and military who were known to fire live rounds into groups of demonstrators. Opposition supporters were known to set fire to Kikuyu businesses. Local Kikuyu gangs were reported to be going house to house rooting out people from tribal groups from the West and beating them in the street. Tribal groups in rural areas were reported to be fighting amongst one another. The police response has been heavy handed and disproportionate leading to a national crisis.
As of now, though not nearly as violent as the post election violence of 2007-08, the violence has not yet abated.
In the database, there were 420 events logged, including rioting, protests and violence against civilians by the state, police and local tribal militias. There are 306 recorded fatalities in the data base, but this number should be approached with some caution. There were likely more. The database is compiled from newspaper reports, which don’t count fatalities and don’t cover all events.
I made two maps (above), one for Nairobi, and the other for Kenya. They include all non Al-Shabaab events (a Somali Islamist group the Kenya Defense Force has been fighting for several years.) I also included a time series of both events and fatalities.
Some excerpts from the notes:
“Police raided houses of civilians in Kisumu, beating civilians and injuring dozens. Live bullets were used on some civilians, including a 14 year old boy. Of the 29 people injured, 26 had suffered gun shots.”
“One man was found dead in a sugar cane plantation one day after ethnic tensions between the Luo and Kalenjin communities got into an ethnic clash. The body had been hacked with a panga.”
“Rioters started throwing stones at the police in the morning, protesting against the elections to be held the next day. The police responded with teargas and water canons. The rioters were mostly from the Luo ethnic group and they took the opportunity to loot several stores, attack residents and to burn a store owned by an ethnic Kikuyu. One woman was raped.” *This was in Kawangware, not far from my apartment. I was eating at a local bbq place when this happened.
“Police forces attacked supporters of the opposition that went to the Lucky Summer neighbourhood to check on a ritual of beheading of a sheep that was taking place (suspectedly by the Mungiki sect). The police shot at the civilians. The police confirmed that it shot a man and that the group performing the ritual had sought protection.”
“As a revenge to the previous event, the Kikuyu joined forces and attacked the Luo. The ethnic tensions and violence led to one severely injured person. Residents claims three were killed and dozens, including three school children, were injured.”
Terror in the Mid-East: It’s never been worse
We are entering into one of the most chaotic chapters of modern history, though the geographic space of this chaos is smaller than it has ever been. While most countries are experiencing less terror, Mid-Eastern terrorist have never been busier or more successful.
I downloaded data from the Global Terrorism Database, which comprises more then 125,000 individual acts of terror and found that, since 2010, the number of weekly terror events when from somewhere around 10 to more than 40, and the trend doesn’t look like it’s ending anytime soon.
Moreover, while terror events are becoming more frequent, they are becoming more and more unpredictable.
While the world was shocked over Charlie Hebdoe, the troubling scale up in the number of terror events seems to have mostly gone unnoticed. Terrorists strike Islamic countries far more than they do France, and kill more than just cartoonists and policemen.
It is unproductive to view all terror groups and even acts of terror as being the same. Terror has turned into a morass of competing groups, with differing political aims and the loose nature of Al Qaeda has led to an outsourcing of terror by any local thug with a gun.
It is also unproductive to view Mid-East terror as simply restricted to the angry victims of drone attacks. Islamic terrorism has a deep history with roots going back decades, a history which seems to be widely ignored. It is also important to note that ISIS’ membership consists of a frighteningly large number of Westerners and a careful watch of their videos reveals that English, rather than Arabic, is a common language among its followers.
Where will this go? No one knows, but Charlie Hebdoe will be just a blip on the pattern on terror.
Links I liked January 23, 2015
Some public/global health things that caught my eye today:
1. A visit to the most sickest town in America, a coal mining town in Virginia. Dear Republicans, pay for health care now and abandon “clean coal” or pay more later. It’s up to you. (The Atlantic)
2. How paid sick leave could boost American productivity. (CEPR)
3. Dealing with antibiotic resistance is going to take more than just technology. We can’t sit by and watch everything burn around us while we wait for new drugs to come down the pipe…. because they aren’t coming. (Project Syndicate)
4. I want to deny vaccine deniers. Generally speaking, I don’t like people who are willing to sacrifice kids for politics. Vaccine deniers stick together and increase risks for everyone. (WP) and this one, which puts it all into a nice picture for you. (WP)
5. Diseases without borders: ignoring the problem of piss poor health care in developing countries won’t help us from Jim Kim of the World Bank. (Project Syndicate)
Does the environment cause poverty?
African countries are blessed with ample cropland and resources, but suffer from crippling and unforgivable levels of poverty, have some of the shortest lifespans on the planet and the highest rates of infant mortality in the world. Meanwhile, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Singapore are wholly the opposite, yet mostly lacking in everything that Africa has. Clearly, the picture is more complicated than merely having access to a natural resources.
However, within countries, the picture might be different. African countries are complex and diverse places. Poverty is often confined to the most unproductive regions, areas with poor soils, poor rainfalls or dangerous terrains.
I was just working with some socio-economic data from one of our field sites, and noticed some interesting patterns (note the map up top). In Kwale, a small area along the Coast, socio-economic levels vary widely, but neighbors tend to be like neighbors and patterns of socio-economic clustering emerge.
Note that the poorest of the poor are concentrated to an area in the middle, which I know to be extremely dry, difficult to get to, difficult to farm and generally tough to live in.
I tried to see if socio-economic status (as measured through a composite material wealth index a la Filmer and Pritchett but using multiple correspondence analysis rather than PCA) was related to any environmental variables that I might have data for.
I fit a generalized additive model using the continuous measure of of wealth from the MCA as an outcome. Knowing that very few things in nature or human societies are linear, I also applied smoothing to the predictors to relax these assumptions. The results can be seen in the plot at the bottom.
A few interesting things came out. While it is hard to tell much about the poorest of the poor, we can tell something about the most wealthy. The richest in this poor area, tend to live in areas with the richest vegetation (possibly representing water), a high altitude (low temperature), high relief (no standing water) and in locations distant from a wildlife reserve (far from annoying and dangerous wildlife).
I’m not sure the wildlife reserve is meaningful (unless the reserve was an area undesirable for human habitation to begin with), but the others might be and represent a trend seen in other Sub-Saharan contexts. Areas without malarious swamps and ample farm land tend to do the best. Central Province, one of the most developed areas of Kenya, would be an example.
But the question has to be, does a harsh environment doom people to poverty, or do people self shuffle into and compete for access to more favorable areas? Is environmentally determined poverty (or wealth) an accident of birth, or the result of competitive selection?
Alright, back to work. Oh wait, this is my work. Well….
Results of GAM model of SES in Kwale. Y axis is the continuous measure of socio-economic status.
Links I liked, November 18, 2014
I liked so many things I read today that, rather than clutter social media, I’ll make note of them right here:
“Falling” by William McPherson – By far, the most depressing thing I have read in a while. McPherson is a Pulitzer winning writer and former editor at the Washington Post who chose a life of curiosity and is now paying the ultimate price. It’s awful that the brightest people have to be punished for thoroughly embracing life. So many people I know are going to go this way, it is possible that I might, too.
In India, Growth Breeds Waste NYT – Documenting India’s mounting problem of what to do with its waste. Europe went through their urbanization pains centuries ago. Unfortunately, developing countries are rising to the challenge fast enough. The problem, of course, is that elites are sheltered from the problems of waste and weak and corrupt government structures disallow people from demanding that their countries clean up. International environmentalists need to focus less on screaming about corporate polluting (though it is important) and need to start making demands for more boring things, like managing waste on a local level.
Stop calling me ‘the Ebola nurse’ – Kaci Hickox – This lady was a hero. She never had ebola, but was still illegally interned for having it because a few Americans don’t understand science. Anybody who supported her detainment should just stop speaking to me now. It was shocking how readily Americans were willing to lock people up simply because they were scared and even more shocking where the calls for her “arrest” came from. I give up. People like Hickox put their money where their mouths are. She did what most humans wouldn’t do and she was vilified for it. Unforgivable.
Ten Things that Anthropologists Can Do to Fight the West African Ebola Epidemic I think it should be required that every field research project include an anthropologist.
Q Fever Is Underestimated in the United States: A Comparison of Fatal Q Fever Cases from Two National Reporting Systems People are dying of Q, but much of it isn’t recorded.
Today is Jonas Salk’s 100th birthday
100 years ago today, Jonas Salk was born. As the creator of the inactivated polio vaccine, he not only changed the course of human history, he also ushered changed the field of public health forever. We can count the polio vaccines and the elimination of smallpox as probably the two great success of public health.
In its mildest form, polio causes a mild bout of diarrhea. In its worst form, the virus migrates to the spine, impedes development and causes debilitating long term paralysis. My grandfather was struck with the disease and had one of his legs stunted and weakened (though he managed to serve in WWII anyway as a Marine). A carpenter who worked for me a while back died due to long term respiratory complications from a childhood polio infection.
Polio is mostly foreign to anyone born in my generation. We were nearly all vaccinated, and the high levels of vaccination have destroyed opportunities for the virus to persist in the environment, protecting everyone, even those who don’t get the vaccine.
Unfortunately, though Salk’s achievements were great, medical care and attention to polio was hardly equitable and tainted by the racism of the time.
During the 1930s the systematic neglect of Black polio victims had become publicly visible and politically embarrassing. Most conspicuously, the polio rehabilitation center in Warm Springs, Ga, which Roosevelt, himself a polio survivor, had founded, accepted only White patients. This policy, reflecting the ubiquitous norm of race-segregated health facilities, was sustained by a persuasive scientific argument about polio itself. Blacks, medical experts insisted, were not susceptible to this disease, and therefore research and treatment efforts that focused on Black patients were neither medically necessary nor fiscally justified.[1]
It is likely true that African Americans experienced a lower burden of disease than white children. We now know that polio’s worst effect arise from the lack of acquired immunity to the disease. Repeated infections from infancy, most importantly during the first six months, when babies still have maternal antibodies to fight for them. Improvements to sanitation delayed exposure to the virus, so that children were not immune and thus more susceptible to the disease’s worst effects.
In short, polio is a disease of development, not underdevelopment. The horrible racism of the pre-civil rights medical system can’t be denied, but the observed disparities in disease incidence might have not been imagined given the disparities in sanitation and access to clean water.
Presently, we are fighting a battle to insure that all kids in Sub-Saharan Africa are vaccinated. However, there still exist pockets where the medical system so dysfunctional and the politics so chaotic, that vaccination rates are low and disease continues to flourish. In places like Afghanistan and Northern Nigeria, the hope of polio elimination is almost non-existent
1. Rogers N: Race and the Politics of Polio: Warm Springs, Tuskegee, and the March of Dimes. American Journal of Public Health 2007, 97(5):784.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the language of NGOs
I just finished reading “Decolonizing the Mind,” a short book from perhaps Kenya’s greatest living writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Ngugi is an interesting figure. Born into a peasant Kikuyu family in the fabricated colonial village of Kamiriithu in Central Province, he managed to take advantage of new educational opportunities during the colonial period and attended Makere University in Uganda and eventually Leeds in the UK. He returned to Kenya and eventually became Chairman of University of Nairobi’s Literature Department.
Though highly critical of colonialism, having been in the heart of the worst of Kenya’s experience with it, he was even more critical of Kenya’s post-colonial trajectory. He started a political theater in his hometown and was eventually jailed under the dictator Daniel Arap Moi.
In “Decolonizing the Mind,” Thiongo seeks to dissociate Kenya’s literature from that of the colonialists. He seeks to create a new African literature, by and for Africans. He would eventually abandon writing in English, choosing instead to write works in his native Gikuyu. Despite Thiongo’s call for an African literature, his European pedigree can’t be denied. He is Brechtian in both rhetoric and action. Hs politics are wholly Marxist and it can even be noted that his medium itself (the novel) is decidedly un-African. Moreover, despite his clear hostility to Europe and the United States, it is interesting the he would be jailed by his own countrymen and then would receive asylum and employment from the US.
I found his ideas of language, however, quite interesting. The colonialists, like the Americans, worked to debase indigenous cultural practices to further an imperialist agenda. Locals were weakened through the apparent dominance of English as a language for communication and business, and the language itself was presented in such a way that social hierarchies were reinforced.
This phenomenon continues to this day. Children are taught from an early age, to greet white people on the street with a scripted “How are you?” “I’m fine, and you?” The formal distance between the stilted Kenyan English spoken in Palirament and the guttural Sheng spoken on the streets of Nairobi is hardly an accident. English the language of oppression, control and government exploitation, and Sheng the language of resistance.
Given my recent experiences at Governmental and NGO meetings, however, what strikes me is how language continues to be used as a tool of control, but hat this vocabulary has been internalized by Kenyans themselves. I grit my teeth now when I head the term “capacity building,” which basically implies that people lack the capacity to help themselves without the good graces of NGOs and governmental organizations. It implies that people are helpless without the assistance of formal authoritarian structures. This is, of course, untrue (though one has to allow for the possibility that people often do things that run counter to their long term self-interest).
People may argue that the term is innocuous, but in my experience “capacity building” is often used in place of “training.” To me, words matter, and where “capacity building” carries with it the implications that there is an inherent defect to be rectified, training implies that the capability exists, but the knowledge not yet there. To put this in perspective, I don’t think that anyone would call any of my academic degrees to have been an exercise in “capacity building.” I can’t help but think that white people are trained, while black people are “capacity built.”
Worse yet is “gender empowerment,” which implies that women weren’t sufficiently capable of managing their own affairs prior to the arrival of some dubious microloan project. Again, in my experience, women all of the world are sufficiently empowered. It’s the men who need to be de-powered. The term is condescending and fails to appropriately recognize the inherent capabilities of individuals while at the same time avoids challenging the paternalistic structures which created economic disparities reprehensible practices like FGM, the buying and selling of women and the inability for women to hold men accountable for violence. In essence, the term blames the victim.
Both “capacity building” and “gender empowerment” reinforce the weakness of the individual and offer that the poor of Africa’s only hope lie in international organizations and their own authoritarian though wholly inept governments. It’s worth noting that the strategy is very similar to that of Christianity, which requires followers to believe themselves powerless and to blame for whatever awful fate has befallen them.
Sadly, both of these terms have worked themselves so deeply into the consciousness of people in SSA, that questioning their validity is futile, which is exactly the nightmare that Thiong’o writes of in “Decolonizing the Mind”. Pointing out that “training” is a more appropriate term than “capacity building” to locals will be met with black stares.
Who pays for development?
I was just reading this on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog:
First, identify the most important issues. One of the main problems of the MDGs, as noted in countless analyses, was their failure to bring the major structural issues to the table. I know of no one who thinks that aid is the most important contribution that wealthier countries can make to development, but the vague terms of MDG eight allowed politicians to get away with aid promises (which in some cases they didn’t keep) rather than setting a bold agenda for transformational change in global financial governance, dealing with illicit financial flows, for example, taking bold steps towards international tax reform, and introducing fairer mechanisms for working out debt repayments.
Well, yeah, very true, but again this type of reporting skirts the issue of where those illicit flows are coming from and who took out the loans. The problem with the MDGs was that it failed to put any pressure on leaders of developing countries to stop being parasites. Worse yet, they didn’t allow for the provision and protection of basic individual rights to free expression, judicial rights and economic freedom, instead opting for a few vague and unverifiable targets which failed to address structural problems WITHIN developing countries.
In Kenya, at least, the government is bleeding the populace dry. Evidence from countries such as Botswana and Korea has shown that countries who want to develop can. The biggest obstacle (among all the other obstacles) to development is a lack of political will to do it.
To its credit, the article goes on to point out that domestic ag subsidies in wealthy countries are distorting the world market and preventing developing countries from being competitive on the world market. Eliminating these subsidies will be a real challenge, at least in the US. First, subsidies control price and market volatilities. The US electorate would go bonkers if the price of food went up and down like the price of corn does in developing countries. Second, Americans simply like subsidies and enjoy protecting agricultural interests at all levels. The right likes to pander to farmers for the rural vote while the left is somewhat bummed out because their favorite organic farms don’t have access to them. Though the left loves to pay lip service to ending ag subsidies, I can’t imagine they’d be all that sad if they were offered to their local hippie farmers. That’s speculation for another day, however, and I’m no expert on ag matters.
I hate to be pessimistic about development, but the barriers to progress are hobbled by forces both within and without developing countries and no one seems to be tackling the right issues to improve matters.
The need to look for more than just malaria
I was just reading a comment in the new Journal of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene “After Malaria is controlled, what next?”
Fortunately for all of our jobs, there is little to worry about. Malaria, as a complex environmental/political/economic public health problem, won’t be controlled anytime soon. As there’s no indication that many sub-Saharan countries will effectively ameliorate their political problems and also no sign that, despite the “Rising Africa” narrative, African countries will develop in such a way that economic rewards will trickle down to the poorest of the poor, malaria transmission will continue unabated. This is a horribly unfortunate outcome for the people, particularly small children, who have to live with malaria in their daily lives.
In all of the places it occurs, malaria is merely a symptom of a greater political and economic failure.
Indeed, we really know less about the causes of suffering and death in the tropics than many believe. Even vital statistics of birth and death are unrecorded in many areas of the world, much less the accurate causes of disease and death. Some diagnoses, such as malaria, dengue fever, and typhoid fever, are often ascribed to patients’ illnesses without laboratory confirmation. Under the shadow of the umbrella of these diagnoses, other diseases are lurking. I have found significant incidences of spotted fever and typhus group rickettsioses and ehrlichiosis among series of diagnostic samples of patients suspected to have malaria, typhoid, and dengue in tropical geographic locations, where these rickettsial and ehrlichial diseases were previously not even considered by physicians to exist.4–8 Control of malaria or dengue would reveal the presence and magnitude of other currently hidden diseases and stimulate studies to identify the etiologic agents.
This is the problem with our public health fascination with malaria. We are missing all of the other pathogens and conditions which case untold suffering in the poorest and most isolated communities. It can’t be the case that malaria acts in a box. In fact, it could be the case, that multiple pathogens coordinate their efforts to extract as many human biological and behavioral resources as possible to obtain maximum opportunities for reproduction and sustenance. A public health system only designed to look for and treat a limited window of diseases misses the opportunity to disrupt what is probably a vast ecological complex.
First, we have a problem of poor diagnostics. Facilities traditionally treat most fevers presumptively as malaria, dispensing drugs appropriate to that condition. However, conditions like dengue fever exhibit similar symptoms. While is it extremely likely that dengue is all over the African continent, particularly in urban areas, there is little ability to identify true dengue cases in the public health sector, and thus, in addition to mistreating patients, the extent of the disease burden is unknown. We cannot tackle large public health issues without proper data.
Second, we have the problem of all of the “known unknowns,” that is, we know for a fact that there’s more out there than we have data for but we also know (or at least I do) that there is a greater disease ecology out there. We know that many pathogens interact with one another for their mutual advantage or to haplessly effect significantly worse outcomes. The awful synergy of HIV and TB is just one example.
OK, I’m going to go and deal with my own pathogenic tenant which I think I’ve identified as an enteric pathogen of the genus Pseudomonas, which might have taken hold opportunistically through an influenza infection. This is complete speculation, however. Data quality issues prevent a reliable diagnosis!
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