Hello dear readers I am welcoming you to another of my blogs. I want to start with a reflection on my week, but before let me just underline the disaster in Haiti and how our response is needed. Imaginate, non ci rendiamo conto del fatto che mentre che ci occupiamo di impegni quotidiani e affair della nostra vita, tante gente cerca di sopravivre, una vera lotta per la vita. Anzi, cene rendiamo conto solo quando siamo davanti alla TV, guardando le notizie del giornale e poi continuamo a vivere come sempre =( Imagine we do not realise that while we are occupying ourselves with our day to day business, we do not realise that people are struggling to survive. Actaully, we do realize this, but only when we are in front of the TV watching the news and then we move on.
How did we become so inured and desensitized to disasters? Anthropologists probably have looked at this phenomenon to understand the social structures and cultural constructs that allow us to bypass any serious, long term engagement with people who are suffering in places removed from our world, such as on the island of Haiti. In any case, I donated U$5 to the relief efforts in Haiti, it was online and took me less than 5 minutes. Please donate – whatever it may be – to save lives. It really makes a difference.
I am writing now after a long Sunday. I went to mass in the morning with my mother and I was supposed to meet up with an Italian lady, Barbara Castelli, that I met here in Windhoek (at the Aataba Contemporary dance performance in July 2009).
She did not make it, had to pick up her daughter from a farm nearby Windhoek in the morning. The friends of the daughter were apparently going horse riding and they could not take her with (kind of rude). I then went to the youth mass at Corpus Christi parish in Wanaheda, Katutura, what some may call the Ghetto side of town. The taxi driver I was in from Pioneerspark (where I always go every Sunday , usually with my mother) told me the history of the church in Pioneerskpark in relation to the one in Waneheda. Both are Catholic, but the one in Pioneerspark is just a road crossing away from the suburb of Hochlandpark. This suburb was called the Old Location, where black people used to live before the forced remove of 1959. One of our Namibian Heroines protested against this forced removed, and the police shot at her and the crowd. She fell and died amongst others that fled for their lives, their blood – as is in the Namibian National anthem – waters our freedom. People were forced to move to Katutura, which means “the place we cannot stay in Katutura”.
The youth mass in Wanaheda was resounding, it was loud, I heard the reverberations of dozens of voices of young men and women, blending together, alivening the whole church, reaching every one of the four walls and the slanted roof. The voices, so deep of the men were under the high voices of the ladies, it was rough, rugged, not professional, and full of life and potential. The church was really African for this reason, and that we also danced, in steps, during the offertory procession and as we stood in pews, singing songs in indigenous tongues. And there is the rhino stone for an altar. Covered in cloth, this black rock really made it all African.
When I was in the first mass, sitting next to my mother, I thought of the things I set myself. The goals and I have and I wondered whether I am living according to God’s Will or to my own, as the priest talked about in his homily (preaching). I though, all of a sudden of Dror, as I looked outside the rectangular window of the church, and how the peach brown hues of the wall broke to the light bright and blue of the world outside the window. The “bird of freedom” that is what his name means and I wondered to what extent he continued to dialogue with people, as he did at Brandeis under the DOME (Dialogue on Middle East). I wondered what he was doing and whether he found a job. I meant to write to him, but just as many other thoughts that flutter into my mind, it passed and it came again. The computer screen and the internet are not there at the instant – when I want to put my thoughts to posterity – so I am writing it now in my blog.
As far as the United World College experience is concerned, two experiences of the day come to mind. The first is a girl in our Catholic Youth Group who applied for the UWC scholarship, cause I announced in our group, it was advertised in the paper. I wonder whether her application made on time and whether she called the number in the add to make sure. The guys on our national committee, who select, are busy putting together a framework for it all, the selection process, rather than just making it up as they go along. Then, there was conversation I had this afternoon with the Bulgarian consulate to Namibia. He is a friend of our family – even before he became the consulate – and he told me about the genocide in Serbia. The international community – except Namibia – condemned the actions of the Serbian government against the Muslim (Albania) minority and voted for the sending of troops back then, in 1999. He told me how the genocide was a reaction to the killing of Serbian civilians – women and children – by the Albanian minority, who were instigated and armed by the US, according to him. Retribution followed swiftly and the international response completely ignored the fact that Serbs were also killed, that this was not a one dimensional ethnic cleansing inspired by some hate of Albanians. I think now to major conflicts in the world, and always when I have spoken to the people most viscerally affected – such as Palestinians or Orthodox (should I call them Zionist?) Jews – I always come away with the feeling of sympathy for the affected group and how unjustly they are treated. It is rare to find someone who can explain the position of his or her people while taking into account the view of the “other”.
About the “other”, I wrote about it in an article on non-communicable disease and AIDS, which I will soon send to the HIV clinicians’ society and a non-profit called Management Sciences for Health, with whom I want an internship. I wrote about how the Non-communicable disease are literally relegated to the “other” category of the patients health care card for ART treatment and how this categorization compromises surveillance efforts for chronic illnesses such as diabetes or heart disease. I guess I could have written more than just a paragraph about the “other” in this huge article, it reads like a major review on non-communicable diseases, but I think that would be a literary article as opposed to public health one.
Then, there are the flies, Drosophilas, in my kitchen. Our kitchen. I live at home, if you don’t recall. We have a peach tree and we collect small peaches, with small seeds inside, they are a mini variety. They rot quickly and flies congregate around them, flying over them. These fruit flies remind me of my lessons on development of the Drosophila melanogaster. I want to go into detail about the different genes, such as bicoid, hunchback, even skipped and the segment polarity genes, as well as shibire, a gene involved in the pinching on the
