Living 25 hours per day

Term 2 has Media, Culture and Globalization being taught by Prof Radha Hegde. This obviously means that there’s a lot of reading to be done. There’s also a lot of watching that has to be done. This is the first course I have been a part of which showed an R Kelly video (Snake). The video was used to portray Orientalism. But I digress.

One of the course particulars includes us watching this video from Ghana where I suspect some NGOs Anya Kandel, founder of Momentus International (more about it here) and a graduate student at NYU, went around asking the kids about the questions they had for “The Man”. Here’s a video for your viewing pleasure:

Some questions are simple, such as why don’t the Heads of State fight wars themselves like duels of the past, as was the case during Aristocracy or why do Western nations come and work in Africa but make it tough for Africans to work there. Those are the hardest to answer. Then there were those which asked, why was it that in Africa they cane people. The answer to that I suppose could be because developed nations seem to have found an expensive alternative: suing.

One simple enough question on which I indeed had an opinion was when one boy asks whether there were mosquitoes in other countries, because here in Ghana, they bit them like crazy.

A simple check would tell you that Canada and US has anywhere between 400-2000 (?!) cases of Malaria each year, most of them attributed to immigrants from Asia and Sub saharan region. (Source). This is hardly surprising given the temperate regions that these nations lie in.

Jeffrey Sachs in End of Poverty and Commonwealth highlights how with the onset of rising temperatures, there are higher chances of US and other temperate regions facing a rise of malaria apart from a myriad of other diseases they’d have never experienced. As I have always maintained, while climate change will affect all of us (Remember in the long term, we’re all dead ), in the short term it will create winners and losers. Of course, with the rising temperatures, that’s going to be the least of their worries.

Update: After watching the video, we had a skype call with Anya to discuss her work and learning in Africa. Some interesting take aways from that:

1. The schools in South Ghana that Anya met had Muslim and Christian associations. Yet, when Anya asked them about a communal rift, they seemed puzzled. Anya shared that there was absolutely no communal issue, at least at the school level there.

2. The children were puzzled by the amount of waste that was being dumped into Africa by the developing nations. Having read a little about it earlier, I am aware that Africa is one of the largest dumping ground of electronic waste in the world.

3. Western nations have a intricate and violent history and there’s no escaping that. Any development work that takes place there needs to keep that in mind. At the same time, it’s also important to understand that Africa isn’t a homogeneous continent. Some nations have stable governments, some don’t. Some have done well for themselves as far as governance and economy goes (Rwanda for example under the leadership of Paul Kagame), some have well…not done so well.

It was nice chatting with Anya. She was quite patient with our questions and told us that she too was facing similar questions (Academia vs Corporate world/ notions of development/ impact vs approach ). Sort of tells us, despite the cultural differences, twenty somethings (or people in general) around the world have multiple strands connecting them.

Tagged as: ghana, globalization, malaria, media

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