Attacking Malaria by Saving Lives With $2 Bednets

Malaria kills over a million people a year, yes one million! Last month, I walked out of my hotel and saw my local friend Steven lying under a palm tree, wracked in sweat and shaking violently. I didn’t have to ask him what the problem was; it was obvious he was in the midst of a malaria attack. Watching someone in the throes of an attack is a gruesome experience. Fortunately for Steven, I was able to help, but millions of others are not so lucky. After the one-celled malaria plasmodia have entered the body through the probiscus of a female mosquito, they travel to the victim’s liver, where they burrow themselves into liver cells. Over the course of a week, these parasites eat and multiply until they burst out of the cells and enter the bloodstream. Soon, the victim is gripped by anxiety, as though the body knows its immune system has been attacked. A sever fever and violent shivering are the body’s attempts to increase body temperature, in an attempt to kill off the parasites with heat. A sudden onset of chills quickly morphs into an intense sensation of bitter cold, even more traumatic for Africans that have never felt a cold winter’s chill before. They shake so hard and are so cold they often beg to be covered or smothered. Those without anyone to care for them or wrap them in blankets or coats simply collapse onto the ground, where they lie in a half-conscious state of convulsion. Hours later, when these painful, rhythmic waves of cold and pain have passed, the victim enters a debilitating period of exhaustion and weakness. After the attack has ended, the person is wracked by sweat, fever, pain and nausea – sometimes for days on end. Children not strong enough to withstand this battle (especially those without access to water or medical care) often perish at this point. Malnourished people are especially vulnerable to the ravages of malaria, as the disease slowly wears them down to nothing.

Preventing Unwanted Pregnancy and Environmental Degradation in Senegal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK9dU_scooQ
“It’s so hard to feed all of these hungry bellies,” I am told by Adama, a Senegalese mother of seven. We hear about the problems posed by overpopulation, but often cannot comprehend how this issue effects people on an individual level. Coming face-to-face with a malnourished family of nine is heart-wrenching. Due to the absence of reproductive health clinics, a lack of low-cost contraceptives and high infant-mortality rates, parents here are giving birth to very large families (here in Senegal the average is about six). Large family sizes place unnecessary burden on the parents to provide food and the environment to provide firewood and water.

By 2050, world population is projected to reach nine billion, a 38% jump from today's 6.5 billion; most of this global explosion will be heavily concentrated in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. The threat is especially serious here in Africa, where the population is expected to surge from 900 million to almost two billion.

In the developing nations that have effectively promoted contraception, the key to success has been the empowerment of women. Mothers need to be educated to make informed decisions, as research proves that even a few years of education has a great impact on controlling fertility rates. In fact, hundreds of millions of couples around the world want – but do not have access to – family planning practices; it is estimated that one third of the population growth in the world is the result of incidental or unwanted pregnancies. Over the past few months in West Africa, I have witnessed these realities first-hand, so I mobilized my resources, found an incredible local partner organization and created a plan to tackle both issues simultaneously.

The first step was enlisting the help of Tostan (http://www.tostan.org), an amazingly-effective NGO (non-governmental organization) here in Senegal. What drew me to them, besides the accolades they have earned from the international community, is the success they have had in creating community-based development councils. As many know, too much of international development is conducted in a top-down manner, with planners in Western capitals deciding what people in the developing world need to improve their lives. This approach is fraught with peril, as cultural realities and local customs are often overlooked or ignored altogether, resulting in failed projects and a growing mistrust from the locals of the very organizations that were created to help them. Fortunately, Molly Melching, founder of Tostan (and native Chicagoan), recognized this fact and decided to base her development approach around the training and mobilization of Senegalese women to become pro-active agents of change in their communities. Each village adopted into Tostan’s network undergo a 30-month Community Empowerment Program (CEP) wherein local women undergo a rigorous training session to improve their reading skills and are then instilled with strategies for leadership, decision-making, income-generation, communication, budgeting, social mobilization, etc. Upon completion, each village’s Community Management Committee (CMC) meets to assess their community’s needs and then seeks an effective means to affect the positive change. After the creation of these CMC’s, local communities have mobilized to build latrines (drastically reducing the occurrence of infectious disease), dug wells (to improve water access and quality) and built local health clinics (to provide health care in regions that previously had no such access). Tostan has also facilitated the creation of a 1,500 village-wide Tostan’s Empowered Communities Network (ECN) which allows these small communities to work together, pass along lessons of success and share their knowledge and fresh ideas with each other. Utilizing this network to launch a project ensures that the innovative ideas will be effectively spread on a regional basis.

As many know, addressing population control is a touchy subject, as there are many religious overtones involved. Unfortunately, these taboos have prevented the dissemination of contraceptives as well as ideas that would seriously help control the population explosion many countries are saddled with.

In addition, millions of women are seriously injured or die during childbirth, a statistic particularly troubling here in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in sixteen mothers will die giving birth in their lifetime.

Fortunately, there is an innovative new approach that is proving to yield results: CycleBeads, which is a pregnancy prevention methods using the Standard Days Method. Basically, these beads, in the shape of a necklace, provide a tool for women to keep track of their menstrual cycle and avoid unprotected sex during their fertile 6-day period of the month. The United Nations Family Planning Association describes it as “a portable, durable, and renewable calendar, the ring contains 32 coloured beads that represent each day in a woman’s monthly reproductive cycle. For a woman with a regular menstrual cycle that falls between 26 and 32 days in length, CycleBeads can identify when she is most likely to conceive. During that time, she and her partner either abstain from sex or use another form of protection.” More effective than a diaphragm and nearly as effective as condoms, this tool was developed by the Institute of Reproductive Health at Georgetown University and has been distributed worldwide to address over-population.

What really excites me about the use of these beads (except for the fact that they glow-in-the-dark for those dark intimate moments) is the fact that there is no religious objection to their use here. Senegal is 95% Muslim, but everyone here, including the imams, have given their support. This is especially important, as birth control pills and contraceptive injections have (erroneously or not) been blamed for health complications among local women, but there is no mistrust towards the beads, as the women understand this is simply a way for them to become familiar with the natural cycle of their bodies. To see a video featuring Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Haiti demonstrating how these beads work: http://www.4real.com/tv/details.asp?pageid=12

After speaking with the regional directors of Tostan, 100 Friends has donated $500 for the purchase and distribution of 500 of these CycleBeads to be distributed to fifty women in ten separate villages. From there, the techniques will be passed along to even more communities through Tostan’s Empowered Communities Network (ECN).
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Another issue that demands action is global warming and deforestation. One of the most simple and effective means of dealing with these twin issues is improving the wood stoves that people in West Africa use to cook with. Open fires cause many burns and health problems: over 1.6 million people die every year from respiratory diseases caused by smoke from wood stoves. On an environmental scale, wood fires are very inefficient in terms of energy and the soot from these fires contributes greatly to global warming, as the black noxious particles in the smoke increase the atmospheric temperature. Coupled with overpopulation, the collection of firewood is stripping the local environment of its trees and resources, which leads to desertification and infertile soil which in turn makes these families’ situations even more precarious.
Fortunately, there is a very simple and cost-effective way to address these problems: the installation of more efficient woodstoves. Instead of cooking over an open fire, round one foot-tall shelters (shaped perfectly for the pots the families cook with) are easily built from local materials. By surrounding the flame to reduce heat loss and the effect of wind, these stoves become much more effective.

Working through Tostan, 100 Friends is providing $500 to fund a training session for ten villages. Two community leaders from each village will be given a 2-day training session to provide the instruction and materials needed to install these improved stoves in their communities. Each of these twenty leaders will then train ten other community leaders within Tostan’s Empowered Communities Network (ECN) to build and maintain the stoves.

So in less than a year, this $500 investment will have resulted in the construction of 200 of these improved woodstoves. Every family utilizing these new stoves will use 66% less firewood, from 6 to 2 logs a day. They will also save about 2 hours in meal preparation due to the greater heat efficiency generated by the improved stoves. To put that into context, if each family uses 4 less logs per day, multiplied by 200 stoves, and 365 days, that equals 292,000 logs of wood saved per year! This will ease the deforestation threatening these villages´ survival. As for the time saved with these more heat-efficient stoves, 200 families x 2 hours per day x 365 work days is an extra 146,000 extra hours of time that can be devoted to farming or other income-generating activities, and that´s not even counting the time saved from foraging for firewood , an activity that is especially time-consuming in this part of the world.

It is amazing to see just how easy it is to stretch $1,000 into such a far-reaching initiative to tackle the issues of overpopulation, deforestation and global warming all at once. Your contributions are making the difference in these peoples’ lives, so keep the donations coming!

Adam Carter's AFRICA AID #1: Sweetness Helps Low Blood Sugar

Welcome to Africa!

This is my first field report from my humanitarian trip to West Africa.
Here is a video intro:
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgrWX0UJqg

AFRICAN AID #1: Sweetness Helps Low Blood Sugar

On the eve of my recent birthday, #34, my thoughts centered on my child hood hero, Walter Payton, the record-breaking Running Back for the Chicago Bears. As a child, I idolized #34 for his amazing blend of agility, speed and power, but what really impressed me as I matured were his off-field attributes: grace, dignity and compassion. Though involved in local charities for years, he became a spokesperson for organ donors after contracting a rare liver disease in 1999. On that day when “Sweetness” was laid to rest, thousands flocked to Chicago's football stadium to watch, while countless others, watching from afar on TV felt touched by his spirit.

In honor of his legacy, as I tururned 34, I christened this “The Year of Sweetness.”

Soon after my arrival here in West Africa, wandering Senegal's bustling and overcrowded capital Dakar, I attended a UN-sponsored information session about diabetes, which is growing at an alarming rate in Africa. Though the disease was never seen on this continent a century ago, there are now over ten million people suffering from the disease today and estimated to be twice that by 2025! Though millions suffer from consequences of the disease, such as amputations and blindness, countless others die of diabetes before even being diagnosed with the disease. Around here, insulin is a health cost many cannot afford.

As I stood looking on, I watched a man frantically begging the officials for insulin. Much to his chagrin, the workers told him they were only dispensing information, not insulin. Dejected, he sat on a bench with his head in his hands. That is when the spirit of Sweetness swooped in; call it deus ex machina, NFL style. As a Type 1 diabetic, the most serious form of the disease, Komla's survival depends on injections of insulin to avoid life-threatening hypoglycemic reactions. As he pricked his finger to test his dangerous blood sugar level, I could see that we did not have much time to lose. Komla and I then embarked on a seven-hour journey through the city in search of his special insulin. Since it was Saturday, many of the hospital wings were closed, though one of Komla's nurses that has treated him in the past directed us to a pharmacy that might have it in stock. But at all of the five pharmacies we visited, spread out throughout this hectic city, we were told the same thing: due to the limited shelf-life of the insulin, they only ordered it when personally requested. We were able to order some but relied on temporary injections to keep Komla's blood sugar levels from reaching a critical stage.

Watching the insulin enter his weakened body reminded me of a withered plant that suddenly comes back to life after a nourishing rain. Suddenly, this worried man who minutes earlier had nearly been hit by a car due to his weakened eye sight and desperation looked up at me and smiled.

“Thank you my friend. You have no how much better I feel. Just when I think God is finished with me, he places help in my path to restore me.”

Komla's story is laden with difficulty. As a teenager, he started suffering from a melange of maladies, such as drowsiness, heavy breathing and bloody gums. Since his diagnosis seventeen years ago, his sight has worsened, twenty-two of his teeth have fallen out and he suffers from skin and foot problems. In 2005, he fled his native Togo after his political violence swept the country after his president's death. He traveled to Mali and then to Dakar in order to study tele-communication and is set to graduate from Chiekh Anita Diop University in three months. Sadly though, there is no government help for diabetics in Senegal (or Togo) and no health insurance companies will cover him based on his condition. This puts Komla in a perilous situation until he can graduate from university and look for work. He has relied on the help of a few individual foreign expatriates in Dakar to help him buy his insulin (and buy dentures for his teeth), but the American military officer that has helped him the most is back in the states for a few months. I am currently researching projects that provide insulin to needy patients in Africa, and have found a program sponsored by the International Diabetes Federation to see if Komla might qualify for assistance. But for the time being, in the name of 100 Friends and my generous donors, I was able to buy our suffering friend a supply of insulin to last him until his graduation and/or the return of his benefactor.

The next day, when Komla was back to his usual jovial self, we shed our benefactor/recipient role and spent the day as friends. As we sat on the nearby N'Gor Island eating fresh grilled fish, I told him about how my favorite childhood teacher had recently undergone an amazing recovery from diabetes after undergoing a kidney transplant. We also spoke about the new African hero Barack Obama and my childhood idol Walter Payton. Komla wisely reflected that these three men, each in their own way, provided him hope for the future.

“But Adam, I have one question for you? How did you know that I am also 34 years old?”

Laughing, I assured him I had no idea. Must be Sweetness' spirit looking down, I said.