The Day India Burned:

Partition

Documentary about the effects of Britain’s withdrawal from India in 1947 which triggered one of the biggest migrations in history. 15 million were displaced and more than a million lost their lives. The story is told through the testimony of people who lived together for centuries, but were forced out of their homes as one of the largest and most ethnically diverse nations in the world was divided. Dramatized reconstructions evoke some of the mistrust, violence and upheaval that ensued.

Partition of India and provides a good overview of the fateful events leading to that cataclysmic decision by the British and the catastrophic suffering of ordinary people caught in the crossfire of communal hatred.

It describes in detail: British motivation for leaving India after World War 2 in a quick and face-saving manner; the underlying distrust of Hindus and Muslims of each other despite centuries of living together; Muslim educational and economic backwardness relative to Hindus and their fear of Hindu domination in a united India; the failure of the March 1946 Cabinet Mission in Simla on account of Nehru’s refusal to a agree to a decentralized Subcontinent.

The beginning of the Hindu-Muslim communal riots with Jinnah’s call for Direct Action in Calcutta in August 1946; the desperate attempts made by Gandhi to effect Hindu-Muslim unity via appeal to their humanity; and the pressure exerted on most Princely States to agree to ascension to India.

It also describes: the manipulation of people by political leaders in the name of religion; the slaughter, looting, raping, and mayhem among different communities at the village level; the deep reluctance of people to abandon their generational homes; the brave attempts of certain individuals to save their neighbors of other communities from forcible ethnic and religious cleansing; the horrific price paid by women for defending their honor;

The utter lack of governmental preparation for a mass migration of people; the needless human carnage caused by Mountbatten’s decision to expedite the planned Partition; and the decline of hitherto culturally rich and cosmopolitan cities like Lahore by loss of other communities.

 

Watch the full documentary now (playlist – 1 hour, 29 minutes)

 

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2011 Doris Gooderson Short Story Comp.

NEW FOR 2011 - Email Entries Now Accepted! Please read the entry rules below carefully to ensure that you follow the correct instructions for your postal, or email entry into our competition.   Vital Statistics: Maximum Word Count: 1200 words. Closing Date for all entries: 11th July 2011. First Prize =£ 150.00 Second Prize = £70.00 Third Prize = £40.00 Entry fee: £3 for one entry, £5 for two. Entry forms can be found in the 'Downloads' Section at the bottom of this page in Word format, Rich Text format, and PDF format.   Rules of Entry:   1.     Entries must not exceed 1200 words, be in the form of a short story and written in English. 2.     Prizes: 1st = £150, 2nd = £70 and 3rd = £40. Further prizes may be awarded at the discretion of the judge. 3.     An entry fee of £3 is required, or £5 for 2 entries. (1 entry = £3, 2 entries = £5, 3 entries = £8 (£3+£5), 4 entries = £10, and so on.) 4.     Postal entries from overseas can only be accepted with an entry fee in sterling. 5.     This entry form can be photocopied if required. 6.     An entry form must accompany your entries. 7.     The Closing Date is 11th July 2011. 8.     Entries should not have the author’s name or any other identifying marks on their typescript but each page should contain the story title in the footer or header. 9.     All entries must be on white A4 paper (or foreign equivalent), and be double-spaced, typed, and on one side of paper only. 10.  No entries should be submitted into any other competition, whilst this competition is running, but may be entered elsewhere after 30th September 2011. No entries should have been published elsewhere (including on the Internet, where it has been involved in an editorial process.) 11.  Entries failing to meet all of these rules will be disqualified. Fees from disqualified entries will not be returned. 12.  Copyright remains with the author, although winning entries will be published in the Wrekin Writers 2011 Anthology and may also be published on the Wrekin Writer website. 13.  The judge’s decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into. 14.  Winners will be notified by 30th September 2011. 15.  This competition is open to any one, of any age, from anywhere in the world. 16.  No postal entries will be returned unless a stamped addressed envelope is enclosed. 17.  No postal entries will be acknowledged unless a stamped addressed post card is enclosed. 18.  Entries with insufficient postage will NOT be collected from the Post Office, but returned to sender. 19.  Entry indicates an acceptance of these rules.   Electronic Submissions For the 2011 Doris Gooderson Short Story competition, we are able to accept electronic submissions, subject to the following:   20.  All the rules above apply. 21.  Entries are submitted by email to dorisgooderson@gmail.com by 11.59pm BST on 11th July 2011. 22.  Send your entry as an attachment to the email. All submissions must be accompanied by a completed entry form, which must be attached in the same email. 23.  Entry fees should be made by PayPal to wrekinwriters@gmail.com. The same fee applies for electronic entries as postal entries. 24.  Fees from disqualified electronic entries will not be refunded. 25.  There is no need to sign an entry form for electronic submission, however, entering this competition electronically means that you accept and abide by all rules of the competition. 26.  Do not send payment by PayPal and then post your submission. Only pay by PayPal if you are going to submit an email entry.

**CURRENT CALLS**

 

CONTEST: TRUE CRIME
postmark deadline: September 30, 2011

 

For an upcoming issue, Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays about true crimes—detailed reports of premeditation, follow-through and aftermath, whether gleaned from police blotters or the news, passed down as small-town legend or family lore, or committed in cold blood.

We want true stories of petty theft, identity theft, embezzlement or first-degree murder; of jaywalking, selling (or maybe buying) weed or assault; of crimes and punishments and unsolved mysteries. Think "The Devil in the White City" (Larson), "In Cold Blood" (Capote) and "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" (Malcolm); or "Half a Life" (Strauss), "Lucky" (Sebold) and "The Night of the Gun" (Carr). If it’s against the law and someone—maybe even you!—did it anyway, we want to know all about it.

We’re looking for well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice. Essays can be serious, humorous or somewhere in between. Creative Nonfiction editors will award $1000 for Best Essay.

Guidelines: Essays must be unpublished, 4,000 words maximum, postmarked by September 30, 2011, and clearly marked “True Crime” on both the essay and the outside of the envelope. There is a $20 reading fee (or send a reading fee of $25 to include a 4-issue CNF subscription–U.S. submitters only); multiple entries are welcome ($20/essay) as are entries from outside the U.S. (though due to shipping costs, the subscription deal is not valid). Please send manuscript, accompanied by a cover letter with complete contact information including the title of the essay, word count, SASE and payment to:

Creative Nonfiction
Attn: True Crime
5501 Walnut Street, Suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

BOOK PROJECT: BECOMING A NURSE
postmark deadline: November 30, 2011

Creative Nonfiction is seeking essays by and about nurses for a new collection, Becoming a Nurse: Real Stories of Nurses, Their Lives and Their Patients.

Most Americans will be hospitalized at some point in their lives, and nurses will be their most consistent point of contact with the health care establishment. While doctors have long been the subjects of the more glamorous pop culture depictions of medicine, nurses provide the day-in, day-out care for patients and families.

But what motivates nurses to enter, and to stay in, this demanding profession, and how are their daily lives affected by ongoing changes in the healthcare system? Becoming a Nurse will present readers with the world of medicine from the perspective of nurses in hospitals, in-home care programs, long-term care facilities, hospices, and the armed forces as they tell stories that recall and recreate the most salient moments of their careers.

We are looking for writers who can write dramatically and vividly about this profession for a collection of essays, which will be published by Creative Nonfiction. Essays can be from 2,500-5,000 words but should be written in a narrative form, with scenes, description, vivid characters and a distinctive voice. To submit, please send your manuscript to:

Creative Nonfiction
Attn: Becoming a Nurse
5501 Walnut Street, Suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Please include a word count on the first page of the essay, as well as your contact information and an SASE or email address for response. Any additional questions can be directed to information [at] creativenonfiction.org. Submissions must be postmarked by November 30, 2011.

 

(Un)Lock It:

the Percussive People

in the Go-Go Pocket

by Thomas Sayers Ellis

Opening Reception August 5, 2011 from 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates August 5 - October 7

Go-Go is a non-stop, vernacular dance music unique to Washington, D.C. and the Pocket is the percussive conversation between or beneath Go-Go grooves and songs. This photography project takes its title from a term ”Lock It” used by the Go-Go community to describe a perfectly played (or locked) Go-Go Pocket. The goal of the Pocket is Home Rule and its anthem is “Bustin’ Loose,” Chuck Brown’s classic call for ‘The Bridge.” In a city as Capital as Washington, this work is a percussive attempt to reclaim the pictorial power of photography for D.C residents, the folk who (as Walt Whitman once wrote) “do the real living and dying in this land.”

The Gallery at Vivid Solutions
2208 Martin Luther King Jr Ave SE
Washington DC 20020

A satiric comedy of African racism

A freewheeling, boldly told fable of an extraordinary cast of characters living in a dysfunctional post-colonial state

By Madison Smartt Bell

July 10, 2011

Born in the Sudan and (following the murder of her birth parents) raised by adoptive parents in the United States, Kola Boof has published at least eight books in various countries, and appeared in more than 40 Arabian movies. The protean Boof sometimes appears bare-breasted to read from her own work, “as a way of holding on to my Nilotic culture and . . . to taunt those Africans who are ashamed of our original cultural beliefs.” The legend constructed by her own accounts includes these startling details: For the writing and missions she undertook for the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, a Khartoum court found her guilty (in absentia) of blasphemy and treason, and condemned her, by fatwa, to beheading. Because of her brief love affair in the 1990s with Osama Bin Laden (the only aspect of her flamboyant career she would prefer to have kept secret) she was listed as a terrorist and menaced with the loss of her US citizenship.

THE SEXY PART OF THE BIBLE

By Kola Boof

Akashic, 224 pp., paperback, $15.95

It’s dubious to project a character back onto her author, but in this case it’s also safe to say that Eternity, heroine of “The Sexy Part of the Bible” (who becomes an international supermodel and the consort of King Sea Horse Twee, an African rap star who rises to the rulership of the parodically dysfunctional African state of West Cassavaland) is no more extraordinary than her inventor.

Eternity Frankenheimer, a.k.a. Orisha, has an identity crisis, as you might too with names like that - or in her circumstances, as the jet-black child of two white American missionaries who run an AIDS clinic in West Cassavaland.

In its post-colonial period, West Cassavaland has a majority population of pure-blood Africans, ruled by a lighter-skinned European-African upper-class calling itself (hilariously) the Pogo Metis Signare, though formerly known as the “Bastars Elite.” For the usual racialist reasons, the Pogo Metis Signare can’t rule the unadulterated African masses directly, but require a figurehead and proxy: President Yaw Ibrahim the Black. Come election time, the black majority, politely identified as “the national class,” throngs to the presidential palace, “beating bongos, slicing coconuts open with machetes, and performing extravagant tribal dances for the benefit of fascinated white foreign dignitaries while calling out one of the most traditional election time chants known to West Africa: ‘He killed my pa, he killed my ma. . . but I will vote for him!’ ”

Meanwhile, back at the AIDS clinic, Eternity has more personal complications. Her white parents could not possibly have engendered her, since Eternity’s “father,” Stevedore, gave her “mother,” Dr. Juliet, a sex change so that the two could be together as man and “woman.” Reproached for playing God, Stevedore responds with triumphant joviality, “Of course I’m God. . . . I’m a white man!” The white parents didn’t adopt Eternity either, but (as Dr. Juliet reveals in a fit of pique at her discovery that Stevedore and Eternity are lovers) cloned her, and not from just anybody; Eternity is genetically identical to a black activist named Orisha who was beaten to death by a mob whom she was trying to dissuade from using toxic lotions and oral concoctions in the hope of lightening their skin and so assimilating to the Pogo Metis Signare master class - for this effort the “bleachers” and “swallowers” called her “The Racist.”

These revelations destroy Eternity’s enthusiasm for being pregnant with Stevedore’s child, and turn her suicidal. “I decide that the only way for me to own myself is to drink the Wife of Tarzan,” an insecticide brewed by Stevedore that has already killed another resident of the clinic who believed (despite its being labeled “POISON-DO NOT DRINK”) that it was really “the secret formula that caused Michael Jackson to fade from black to white.” It’s a hot day when Eternity pours her own dose, and Stevedore, “his ice-cream flesh dripping from the heat,” takes her glass and makes his own quietus.

All that before the book has reached page 50! Reading this novel is less like following a conventional plot, more like falling out of an airplane.

Kola Boof

 

Its jacket copy proclaims Alice Walker and Toni Morrison to be Boof’s “idols,” and the novel shares a number of their usual concerns: race and racism, (especially black) women’s oppression, liberation, and progress to fulfillment. But Morrison and Walker are not often funny, at least not on purpose, whereas a reader of this book will laugh loud and long, often because the satire is so well and comically turned, and as often out of sheer astonishment at the audacity of this text, which exploits the power of speaking within the tribe to a mind-boggling extent.

Boof doesn’t just explode clichés, she murders them, but playfully, like a cat killing mice. Yes, there are serious issues here, and no, the author does not take them lightly, and by the way she may have written the most jubilant celebration of black African beauty so far seen in the English language. Read this book and you’ll learn just how sexy that part of the Bible can be, and you may also be convinced that there’s nothing so likely to cure racism and oppression than wave after wave of laughter and love.

Madison Smartt Bell’s most recent novel is “The Color of Night.’’ He teaches at Goucher College and can be reached at mbell@goucher.edu.

Crowd control in Rwanda

• Josh Ruxin¹
• & Antoinette Habinshuti²

29 June 2011

 

A health center offering family planning services in Rwanda, supported by Partners In Health/Inshuti Mu Buzima.

Sub-Saharan Africa's most densely peopled mainland nation is determined to head off a population crisis. Others should take note, say Josh Ruxin and Antoinette Habinshuti.

There are few places in the world where the full pressure of population growth is felt as strongly as in tiny, landlocked Rwanda. Known for the 1994 genocide (which some claim was partly caused by population pressures), Rwanda is the most densely populated mainland nation in sub-Saharan Africa, packing more than 11 million people into an area smaller than than that of Belgium. Today it boasts economic growth, security and rising prosperity. Nonetheless, its politicians and citizens are keenly aware that their country — with the 15th highest fertility rate in the world — is nearing a population crisis. United Nations' projections indicate that if the population continues to grow at its current rate of nearly 3% a year, it could exceed 40 million by 2100, giving the nation a density five times that of Japan's today.

A. TRAYLER-SMITH/PANOS

With 11 million people packed into a small nation, Rwanda is hoping to lower its high fertility rate so that it can benefit from future economic growth.

The situation in Rwanda is forcing reality and political pragmatism together more rapidly than in neighbouring countries. The choices are stark: restrict population growth or remain in poverty, without the capacity to support either a growing population or an emergent economy. Rwanda is determined to do what works. Policies such as educating girls and women, and pushing for prosperity, are accepted by all. Others, such as making contraception freely and widely available, remain low priorities for international donors. The lesson from Rwanda for other nations is that without coordinated efforts on all these fronts, population growth will swallow up a country's potential.

The challenges

Rwanda is a small country, and one of the world's fastest growing. Women in rural areas have an average of 6.3 children, and those in urban areas have an average of 4.9 (compared with Begium's average of 1.9). Today, 80% of the population lives in rural areas, where poverty tends to be more prevalent. A rural family of eight is generally confined to a plot of less than half a hectare — which, even if well cultivated, scarcely provides for their nutritional needs. These factors lead to malnutrition and stunted growth.

Meanwhile, massive improvements in the country's public-health system have led to dramatic declines in infant and child mortality. For instance, mortality among under-fives dropped from 152 per 1,000 in 2005 to 103 in 2008. More children surviving means that many more people will be having children, and the country's resources will be increasingly taxed. This makes it much harder for Rwanda to deliver real prosperity to its people.

The conflict between population and economic growth is nowhere more apparent than in tourism. One of Rwanda's main industries, tourism has grown rapidly since the genocide. However, the country's only major wildlife park, Akagera National Park, was whittled down to one-third of its original size in 1997 to provide adequate farmland for thousands of post-genocide returnees. Poaching and encroachment have risen, and are particularly marked on the doorstep of the Virunga National Park, home of the renowned 'gorillas in the mist' that brought tens of millions of tourist dollars into the country last year. Farmland rolls right up to a stone wall that demarcates the park, and the gorillas frequently forage outside their zone, coming into greater contact with people and their diseases.

A woman receiving an in Depo-Provera, a contraceptive injection. Access to contraceptives is one of the family planning services offered at health centers supported by PIH/IMB in Rwanda.

The solutions

“The choices are stark: restrict population growth or remain in poverty.”

Other fast-growing countries have made progress in controlling their populations. Starting in the mid-1970s, Bangladesh, which has a gross national income per capita just a little higher than that of Rwanda, used female outreach workers and mass-media campaigns to change attitudes about family size. Contraception use by married couples rose from just 8% to about 60% in 2004, and the average number of children per woman dropped from 6 to 3.

This success inspired the Navrongo project in Ghana in the early 1990s, which reduced family sizes from about 6.5 to 4.5. Unlike other initiatives, the project sought to influence reproductive choices by engaging community leaders, chiefs and elders and creating 'community health compounds' to serve as village clinics.

In Bangladesh, evidence from early interventions was used to influence national policies in a top-down way. Sadly, in Ghana, hopes of turning the Navrongo project into government policy lost momentum — not because of a lack of results, but because of a loss of political will.

Indeed, too often in African nations, the will to support family planning is lacking because of religious belief, neglect or the assumption that a populous nation will be more prosperous. For example, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has repeatedly declared that his country, home to one of the world's fastest-growing populations, is “underpopulated”.

So what is the Rwandan government to do? In our view, the lessons from Bangladesh and elsewhere are clear. First, economic growth and educational achievement (particularly in women) strongly correlates with a decline in the fertility rate. Second, mere access to free family planning — even in the poor — usually results in rapid uptake. Together, these offer a simple recipe: grow your economy, educate your girls and offer free contraceptives in every health centre and through every community health worker. That will get you 90% of the way.

Rwanda already has ambitious economic and education goals: it aims to grow its economy by 8% per year and to ensure that by 2015 every child is getting nine years of basic education and that 90% of the nation is literate. The government is keenly aware that education has a direct effect on reproduction as well as generating jobs and income. Women in Rwanda who have little or no education have an average of 2.6 more children than those who have at least a secondary education. Rwanda also promotes female empowerment: 56% of its lawmakers are women.

Rwanda also hopes to exploit 'family planning by television' — the close correlation between economic growth and decreased fertility. (As couples get wealthier and have television sets in the bedroom, they have fewer children.) Rwanda's economic development plan, Vision 2020, calls for a per capita income of 600,000 francs (US$1,000) by 2020, up from 180,000 francs today. Yet if the country's population continues to soar, such development — and any effects of contraception — will be elusive. Here we focus on the final ingredient in the recipe: family planning as a positive and essential health service.

Rwanda's experience

Rwandan culture, government and religious institutions have historically discouraged family planning. Furthermore, the Catholic Church manages about half of the health centres in the country and refuses to provide contraceptives on site, even to men with HIV.

Despite these challenges, the nation has made significant progress in making family planning more widely available through hospitals and health centres. Some government and partner programmes have even set up family-planning centres just outside the doors of the Catholic facilities. In our experience, when women are offered family-planning measures discreetly and for free, they take them. The women call this kuba kuri gahunda: being on target. Policy-makers might also call it a no-regrets policy. Contraception is relatively cheap and reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies has other benefits: it lowers maternal mortality and reduces the number of abortions, which are illegal, and therefore risky, in Rwanda.

Before the genocide, a 1992 survey found that 13% of married women were using modern contraceptives. This number had dropped to just 4% in 2000. By 2005 it had risen to 10% — and preliminary survey results indicate that by 2008, uptake was 27%. Rwanda aims to boost contraceptive use to 70% for married women by 2020 (in line with most industrialized nations) and to reduce average family size to three children. Demographic changes are slow, but are heading in the right direction: in 2005, the average family size was 5.9; by 2007, it had fallen to 5.5.

Even with a clear national strategy, family-planning policies can be easily misconstrued. A national push for free voluntary vasectomies has had some unintended consequences. In the past year, the government has encouraged male sterilization as one of the most effective methods of contraception. But recently, the Rwandan health ministry had to defuse concerns, caused by confused press reports, about whether the policy might be targeting the poor. Although the procedure is unlikely to make a substantial dent in population growth, it is informing a broader discussion about the need for family planning. In addition, increasing men's awareness is altering the perception of family planning as solely a woman's concern.

Public discourse is also changing. Today, politicians and church leaders speak of kubyara aba ushoboye kurera — 'giving birth to those you are able to raise fairly'. Many traditional Rwandan names, however, are religious and passive in their interpretation: Harerimana ('only God raises'), Habyarimana ('only God gives birth') and Hakizimana ('only God gives wealth or healthy life').

Time to act

Rwanda's neighbours do not share its vision. It is fashionable for leaders of poor nations to speak of environmental destruction and the challenges of achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals to end poverty. Most remain tight-lipped on population control. The global population is projected to keep rising — to 7 billion later this year, and to 9 billion by 2050. Nearly a billion of those additional people will be Africans. This growth will probably fuel increased poverty, contribute to institutional and government failure, and generally constrict development.

Family planning is cheap. The UN estimates that for every dollar invested there is a threefold economic return. Simply put, countries interested in boosting their economies can make no better investment than in family planning.

Sadly, international organizations and agencies are not paying attention, probably because they are afraid of stoking religious or political flames. This scenario has played out repeatedly in global health priorities: the Worldwatch Institute, headquartered in Washington DC, estimates that, between 1994 and 2007, family-planning aid dropped from 30% to 12% of overall aid. Until wealthier nations and large donors step up to fund family planning, poor nations themselves will have to take the lead. For those that choose this path — as Rwanda is doing — the rewards will be healthier, wealthier and smaller populations.

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Affiliations

1. Josh Ruxin is an assistant clinical professor of public health at Columbia University in New York and directs the Access Project in Rwanda

2. Antoinette Habinshuti is the deputy country director for Partners in Health in Rwanda.

How We Helped Pave

Haiti's Road to Cholera Hell

Canada and the UN have committed public health malpractice on a very large scale.

By Crawford Kilian, 7 Jul 2011, TheTyee.ca 

Ambulance drivers take critically ill patients, referred by the Red Cross, to a cholera treatment centre. Credit: Amanda George/British Red Cross/Creative Commons.

• Who's Reporting on Haiti's Cholera?

  That question asks: Who truly cares about the suffering island? And how democratic, really, is the web?

• Timid Bureaucrats Can Be Lethal

  Caution: Government embarrassment may be hazardous to your health. Epidemics prove it.

• Haiti's Misery, Our Disgrace

  Port-au-Prince is still in ruins, cholera rages, the UN proves useless. We all stand indicted.

 

On Oct. 18, 2010, Cuban medical personnel in rural Haiti reported they had treated 61 cases of acute watery diarrhea in the previous week. On that same day they had another 28 cases and two deaths.

That was the start of a public health catastrophe that has so far infected over 370,000 Haitians with cholera and killed over 5,500 of them. A proportionate epidemic in Canada would have sickened 1.2 million of us, and killed over 18,000.

It was a totally avoidable epidemic; worse yet, it was brought to Haiti by the UN peacekeepers who were supposed to be protecting the Haitians. Since Canada is involved with MINUSTAH, the UN agency that effectively runs Haiti, we share some of the responsibility for inflicting needless suffering on an already traumatized country.

First cholera in Haiti in 100 years

Ever since 2004, when the U.S. and Canada encouraged the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the nominal government of Haiti has been ineffective, especially the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP). Haiti has been run by MINUSTAH and thousands of non-governmental organizations. They range from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Medecins Sans Frontieres to religious groups.

When cholera arrived last October, Haiti had not seen it in a century, if ever. It had started along the Meille River in a rural area, downstream from a MINUSTAH peacekeepers' camp that had just received a contingent of Nepali soldiers, and suspicion fell on them at once.

After all, they had left Nepal in late September during a cholera outbreak. While they had all had medical exams (including stool tests), they had then been granted ten days' home leave before reassembling in Kathmandu.

Deny, deny, deny

The Nepalese army denied that its troops were to blame. MINUSTAH also denied the accusations, claiming the Nepalis had tested negative for cholera.

Under pressure, the UN finally arranged for an investigation into the origin of the outbreak. That report was published on May 4, after cholera had been raging for over six months. Indirectly it admitted the Nepalis had brought the disease, but it didn't mention them explicitly; it spent more time blaming the Haitians for their lack of clean water and a sewage system.

Meanwhile, a team led by Renaud Piarroux of the Université de la Méditerranée had done its own survey in November 2010. It found the Nepalis the likely source, but needed more evidence. After further work, Piarroux has just published a more detailed report in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the US Centers for Disease Control.

Appearing in a peer-reviewed journal with the implicit support of the CDC, Piarroux's report is even more devastating than his original survey. It tracks the outbreak using evidence that "strongly suggests" the epidemic emerged from the Nepalis' camp.

Where was the source?

Worse yet, Piarroux argues that it could not have come from a recovering cholera patient, or from an asymptomatic carrier. To infect users of water from the Meille and Artibonite rivers, the quantity of Vibrio cholerae would have to come from at least one seriously sick cholera victim.

This directly refutes the assertion of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson in Haiti, who had claimed "negative" test results on the Nepalis. Cholera is a spectacularly messy and smelly illness causing both diarrhea and vomiting, so everyone in the base would have known about it. Suppressing information about such an outbreak would have required the collusion of senior Nepali officers, MINUSTAH officials, and at least some healthcare professionals in PAHO and the MSPP.

The UN had originally said the source of the epidemic was unimportant compared to the need to fight it. Piarroux's report pointed out that knowing the source was critical to an effective response to cholera.

Ignoring this obvious point, MINUSTAH issued a press release saying the study had been followed "by many others... each with different possible scenarios." To my knowledge, no such alternate studies exist, and MINUSTAH didn't cite any. We have only the UN report and that of Piarroux.

So the Piarroux report is an indictment of the United Nations and its agents in Haiti, including PAHO, which is the western-hemisphere branch of the World Health Organization. The denials and press releases only aggravate the problem.

Who will believe WHO?

This means that even WHO's integrity is compromised. It was ridiculed for calling swine flu a pandemic in 2009, and criticized for allowing Indonesia to withhold virus samples of bird flu. Now WHO has exposed itself to a far more serious charge of suppressing vital information about the epidemic while it spread explosively through the whole island of Hispaniola, including the Dominican Republic.

When the next serious outbreak arrives, therefore, WHO's ethics and credibility will be in question. Governments, health professionals and individuals will all be justified in wondering what the real story is, and whether the scare is really a scam or a coverup. Such skepticism could cost lives. (The Tyee sent a draft of this article to WHO, but did not receive a reply.)

This is not a problem just for faceless bureaucrats in Geneva or some third-world country. Canada has been deeply involved in Haiti since the 2004 coup against Aristide. We have sent some of our best cops to train the Haitian police; two of them died in the quake. Canadian Forces went into Haiti after the earthquake in Operation HESTIA to deliver humanitarian aid. The Canadian government has promised almost a billion dollars in aid since the 2004 coup.

A Canadian, Nigel Fisher, is the UN's Haiti Humanitarian Coordinator, supervising UN projects and coordinating with the NGOs.

What's more, our last Governor General, the much-beloved Haitian-born Michaëlle Jean, is now the UNESCO special representative to Haiti. If the UN's peacekeepers, health experts and humanitarian coordinators are compromised by a cover-up, so is she.

So over 80,000 Haitian-Canadians must now wonder if their new homeland really cares about Haiti as much as it says it does. The rest of us have grounds for feeling the same way.

Old-fashioned incompetence

The UN didn't set out to make matters worse in Haiti. Importing cholera looks like old-fashioned incompetence, frosted with some misplaced political appeasement.

Someone allowed the Nepali peacekeepers to spend ten days at home while a cholera outbreak was going on. No one demanded that the soldiers be re-tested before leaving for Haiti. Someone allowed the sewage tank at the Meilles base to leak right into the river, and no one did anything about it before the new troops settled in.

If Piarroux is correct, one or more Nepalis had active, symptomatic cholera. Someone should know who they were, and who said what to whom about such cases. And someone must have known that the truth would come out, but chose to deny both Piarroux's initial report and this more detailed one.

The denial may have been in part to spare both the UN and the Nepalese government from embarrassment. Nepal has been exporting soldiers since the days of the British Raj, and in September 2010 it was supplying 5,044 troops on peacekeeping missions. The UN was reimbursing Nepal to the tune of US$1,028 per soldier per month.

Demand for infectious peacekeepers being zero, Nepal would therefore stand to lose over $5 million a month, and the UN might have trouble finding replacements.

The Piarroux report has certainly embarrassed all concerned, including the Canadians in Haiti who didn't protest MINUSTAH's denials. But it may well be swept under the rug anyway. The mere mention of Haiti induces instant donor fatigue. That's why most of the money promised for both earthquake relief and for cholera has dried up.

The current second wave of cholera cases has gone largely unnoticed in the North American media. This is convenient, because the resurgence shows how little the UN has done to eliminate the squalor that cholera thrives on.

Dr. Rupert Virchow, the 19th-century doctor and politician, famously said that "Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale." In the case of Haiti's cholera, Canada and the UN have committed malpractice on a very, very large scale.

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

What Is Reality?

A BBC Horizon Documentary

by Maria Popova

What walking through walls has to do with tropical fruit and the search for the God particle.

We’re big fans of Horizon, BBC’s iconic popular science documentary series, whose claims to fame include pitting science against God and illuminating how music works. Their latest installment deals with one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: What Is Reality? — an inquiry so deep and complex it has occupied the seemingly insufficient minds of brilliant scientists and philosophers for eons.

It’s one of the simplest yet most profound questions in science: The search to understand the nature of reality. But on this quest, common sense is no guide.”

The series is available on YouTube in four parts of questionable quality and legality, and covers a number of fascinating scientific theories about the nature of reality, from theoretical physics to mathematics to quantum mechanics.

From the discovery of quarks, the fundamental building blocks of matter, to the story of the Large Hadron Collider, to the elusive Higgs boson, better-known as the God particle, the series takes an ambitious peer into the depths of intellectual inquiry and the outermost frontiers of human understanding.

Perhaps most fascinatingly, the documentary bridges concepts familiar from science fiction — parallel universes, time travel, teleportation — with areas of rigorous scientific research, brimming with concepts and discoveries so mind-bending yet grounded in present scientific investigation that they leave you questioning the very nature of everything you’ve come to know and accept as real.

For more on this enormous question, on par with our grand inquiry into what makes us human, you won’t go wrong with Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality — an elegant and eloquent read about the most important clash in theoretical physics, which shaped the course of quantum research. And of course — we’re almost embarrassed to mention this, that’s how fundamental a read it is — Stephen Hawking’s seminal A Brief History of Time should be required reading on any academic curriculum and a linchpin on every lifelong learner’s syllabus.

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Hugh Masekela

OkayafricaTV:

Hugh Masekela

At SummerStage

July 5, 2011 Posted by: gingerlynn

Last Sunday, legendary South African musician Hugh Masekela, the multi-talented trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer, visited Central Park’s SummerStage at Rumsey Playfield for a wonderful outdoor concert.  OKA was lucky enough to go behind the scenes and talk one-on-one with the man himself.  Watch our short documentary (above), shot and directed by Yahya Ismail, in which Masekela challenges the notion of a “legend,” reveals a lesson in humility, discusses being an international superstar and an African, and much more.  For more perfect outdoor summertime performances, check out the programming for SummerStage right here.