Perhaps it is Halloween and its effect,but I feel awfully unnerved. Perhaps it is the harrowing news this week in one of the local papers that the body of man was found, with the genitalia, heart, several fingers, right foot, eyes and who nows what else, missing.
In the river dumped. It was in the North East of Namibia, where it is green and lush.
Before the article came out on Thursday, with the gruessome picture of the decaying body, my colleagues spoke to me about this on Wednesday. They told me about how it is dangerous to go about in the bush now, when it is green, lest someone kill and sell your private parts. In the Northeast of Namibia, the trade of human parts is notorious. To me this story is new, but not to those who live in this region of Namibia.
I was at my youth group yesterday, my old youth group and I met up with my friend Jean-Pierre there. I told him about this piece of the news - he had not heard of it. He said it was very dodgey, which means "sketchy" for all you Americans, with his eyes widened and his face brightened.
"Why can you not write about these people cutting others?" asked Lavinia, one of my four colleagues that enters the data for the health facilities census. "Cutting like a chicken, they must be killed also, why can't they bring death penalty only for these people." She bemoaned the situation, to say the least. I told her of how my letter was published in The Namibian, the independent newspaper of Namibia (one of many, but it calls itself that). I wrote a letter in about 40 mins about how ordinary people are precluded from calling in and chipping in on "Talk of the Nation" on television. This was on Monday, after I felt quite frustrated by non-participation.
I wield great abilities now, I realized : I can write a letter and get it published, I can mobilize the youth at my Church and get them to talk about volunteerism (that was today) and I can do wonderful research for my public health thesis (still to come). Now she wanted me to act, to write about this issue. It is a sordid, petulant, stinking issue - just thinking about it makes me want to throw up. Yet it is happening. I wonder what the relationship is between this type of fetishism and witchcraft and traditonal medicine. Traditional medicines are herbal and they mostly provide palliative treatment, especially for those suffering from the side effects of antirtetroviral therapy, according to a professor at UNAM. Now, is the relationship a continuum, where traditional medicine is on the light side of a spectrum of constructed views of healing and human fetishes are on the extreme dark side? Or are they two distinct ways of healing? Why does someone even take human body parts? Could it be for something distinct from their health, such as to get rich quickly, or to become sexually active again? Are the two things I mentioned actually separable from health in a meaningful way, given that the indicators of health (such as blood pressure in the West Indies) could be a function of collective representations of reality (cultural beliefs).
Just as the government condemned traditional healers that advocate the rape of baby girls as means for someone to rid themselves of HIV, I hope our government will unequivocally crack down on people who kill and commodify other people.
I think I will work on an article pertaining to traditional medicine and I will cast my net sufficiently wide to draw in fetishes into the discoure.
However, what about my idea for an article on the prisoners and HIV.
I still have this idea about prisoners and HIV. However, I find myself being pulled in the direction of discussion pharmaceutical policy in Namibia (how will we ensure the sustainability of our ARV rollout) and the difficulties in harnessing traditional medicine. Our government is going to pass a law that categorizes and standardizes traditional medicine for the consumption of the Namibian people.
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