While the horrors that occur routinely in Africa — massacres in the Darfur region of Sudan, the AIDS crisis, absolute poverty — often seem callously but comfortably far away, it is bracing to remember that in the age of globalization, we cannot unsympathetically dismiss another country’s problems as irrelevant to us; we are, after all, very intimately connected.  

Consider that in the city of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an average family of seven will spend approximately $63 a month. Accepting bribes, peddling goods on the street, and prostitution are some of the means of eking out a living. As Davan Maharaj reports in the Los Angeles Times, 37-year-old Goma resident Mama Rose turned to prostitution after her husband was robbed and killed by militiamen. As a mother with four children to support, she parlayed her gender into a dangerous and only marginally profitable profession: prostitution. As Mama Rose explains, “Every truth is not good to say … But let us face it. In Goma, everything has a price. And I don’t want to sell myself short.”

When Mama Rose’s clientele is, like herself, impoverished, she earns less than $25 a month. In the months when her clientele includes the United Nations soldiers who are stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo — since the five-year long regional conflict that wreaked havoc in the DRC only ended in 2003 — her income may be somewhere in the region of $75 a month. According to the regional governor, 80 percent of Goma’s sex workers are infected with HIV or AIDS.

As the AIDS crisis increases its stranglehold on Africa, there is a brain drain occurring in the African health care sector as nurses are lured to practice their profession in more lucrative and less hellish conditions abroad. Celia W. Dugger reports in The New York Times:

In Malawi, a quarter of public health workers, including nurses, will be dead, mostly of AIDS and tuberculosis, by 2009, according to a study of worker death rates in 40 hospitals here.

The statistics are staggering and the prognosis bleak.  

While the Bush Administration officially introduced its $15 billion emergency anti-AIDS program in February of 2004, the project has been criticized for lengthy funding delays. As an entire continent is destroyed by the AIDS epidemic, it should benefit everyone to keep in mind the sobering fact of the interconnectedness of all things.

Mimi Hanaoka