Category: Lifestyle

Senior citizens? No, senior students

At 5pm every day, the streets of Nairobi are flooded with people spilling out of their offices and queuing at the nearest bus depot to catch their buses and matatus home. Joyce is one of them but she’s not rushing to get home in time for her favorite soapie or a glass of wine. She’s rushing to get to class. Joyce is a part time MBA student. Big deal, you think?  Well, it sort of is.

A mother of three adult children, 56-year-old Joyce is four years away from retirement. She is employed as a secretary at a government ministry in Kenya. When she started working thirty years ago, her certificate in Secretarial Studies from the Polytechnic of Kenya was enough to get her a job and enable her to house, clothe and feed her children. But, as it happens, times changed, and Joyce had to change as well. A certificate will not get you very far in Kenya today, and anything less than a university degree is not considered a worthwhile qualification. At her age, Joyce is not trying to get a promotion – the time for that has passed. She’s trying to learn as much as she can now, to prepare for her retirement. Joyce, who is also a part-time farmer, always loved business. At the age of 50 she decided to enrol for a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree. She studied, farmed and worked part time, and five years later she graduated with her BBA degree. Why stop now, she thought. In 2012, Joyce enrolled in an MBA program at Kenyatta University.

“I don’t want my life to stop when I retire, I want it to start,” Joyce says. She had to take a loan out to cover her tuition fees but she is confident that her time and effort will pay off once she is a full-time, successful farmer.

(Pic: Flickr/rnav1234)
(Pic: Flickr/rnav1234)

Her choice to continue studying may be unusual but she’s not alone. Thousands of older Kenyans are enrolled in part-time undergraduate and post-graduate programs, all of them wanting to make their dreams of a tertiary education finally come true. Take Juliet for example. By day, Juliet is a nursery school teacher, rhyming out ABCs to restless four-year-olds, but by night and weekend, Juliet is a Psychology of Childhood Development student at a college in Nairobi. There is also Claire, a corner kiosk owner. She runs her business fulltime but takes accounting courses over the weekend.

All the women I have met and spoken with are not just students. They are mothers, grandmothers, wives and caretakers and their student status does not exempt them from their other traditional domestic duties. Culture is still largely unforgiving to the Kenyan woman that doesn’t cook, clean and keep an organised household. By any standards, these women have at least three jobs, but for them, their student status is one they wear with pride because it is a choice they made for themselves.

From as early as I can remember, I was taught that a good education was what would make all my dreams come true. My parents often told me to get better grades or suffer a beating. At some point during my pimple-popping teens and great depression over my nonexistent hips, my mother told me quite bluntly that my looks would get me nowhere in this life, but my brain would get me everywhere. The power of the book is preached fervently to all children in Kenya, and academic competition is as bloodthirsty as a boxing match. I always just knew that after high school I was going to a university and that I was going to get a degree. This was never something I questioned, as far as I knew it was a fact.

This was not the case for our mothers and fathers. In their time, tertiary education was for the extremely bright and well-to-do. Only so many people could get scholarships, and at that time, only a select few had degrees. Now that tertiary education is no longer a luxury but a necessity, our parents’ generation is taking every opportunity available to obtain those degrees that were been denied to them so many years ago.

I’m fortunate to be doing what I always wanted to do: write. I doubt that Joyce wanted to be a secretary, or Juliet a nursery school teacher. But luckily for them, they have a second chance to do what they have always dreamed of doing. Despite the challenges – time, money, late nights – sitting in that lecture hall and feeling that your life’s purpose is finally coming to fruition is the price Joyce, Juliet and Claire are willing to pay.

Sheena Gimase is a Kenyan-born and Africa-raised critical feminist writer, blogger, researcher and thought provocateur. She’s lived and loved in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. Sheena strongly believes in the power of the written word to transform people, cultures and communities. Read her blog and connect with her on Twitter.

Tackling mycetoma: A medical success story in Sudan

Behind the brick walls of the Mycetoma Research Centre trying to unravel the mysteries of the infection is a rare story of medical success in impoverished Sudan.

With bandages on their swollen, deformed feet, patients from across the vast country arrive at the spotless facility set in a garden in the southern Khartoum district of Soba.

For more than 40 years, British-educated researcher Elsheikh Mahgoub has been searching for answers to the mysteries of mycetoma, a bacterial and fungal infection which can spread throughout the body resulting in gross deformity and even death.

Sudan is particularly affected by mycetoma, which is also endemic in a geographic belt including regional neighbours Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, parts of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, experts say.

The belt also stretches to India and parts of Latin America.

Mycetoma is “a badly neglected disease”, the United Nations’ World Health Organisation (WHO) says on its website.

Yet in Sudan, researchers have been studying the condition since British colonial times, and the Khartoum centre has been globally recognised for its work.

Such acknowledgement in the health field is unusual for a country which ranks near the bottom of a UN human development index measuring income, health and education.

Mycetoma is characterised by swelling of the feet but it can eat away bone and spread throughout the body, causing grotesque barnacle-like growths, club-like hands and bulging eyes.

The traditional treatment was amputation – something the Sudanese centre tries to avoid.

Elsheikh Mahgoub, supervisor of Sudan's Mycetoma Research Centre, shows a picture of an infected foot on his computer. (Pic: AFP)
Elsheikh Mahgoub, supervisor of Sudan’s Mycetoma Research Centre, shows a picture of an infected foot on his computer. (Pic: AFP)

“Most patients who get it are farmers, or animal herders, and these are poor people,” says Mahgoub (78).

“They are poor, and they get poorer.”

Mahgoub says he established Sudan’s first mycetoma centre in 1968, working with a British nurse and a British technician.

“Many people thought: Why should I be concerned about this disease which is not common, which is difficult to diagnose, and difficult to treat?” he told reporters on a tour of the facility, which opened at its current location in the 1990s.

The centre offers diagnosis, treatment, training and research as part of Soba University Hospital under the University of Khartoum, which funds it along with some donors.

It has its own laboratory, two wards, and is served by seven part-time doctors as well as Mahgoub, the research supervisor, and its director A.H. Fahal, a professor of surgery.

Though its resources are limited, they have been used effectively, Fahal has written.

Patients come and go – with 6 400 registered so far – but Fahal remains and so does Mahgoub, challenged by the puzzle of why mycetoma is so prevalent in Sudan and neighbouring countries.

“I think there’s two things,” Mahgoub explains, pointing first to the organism’s presence in soil.

He says people who make their living from the land are more likely to get pricked by thorns, for example, from the Acacia trees which are widespread in the mycetoma-prone region and provide a route for infection.

Secondly, the patients have been found with weakened immune systems. Some not only have mycetoma but also Aids, leprosy, tuberculosis or other conditions, Mahgoub says.

“Why? Why these people? Is it nutritional, because of malnutrition? Is it because of the other diseases they get at the same time?”

He does not yet have the answers.

“But we know that they have got some deficiency in their cell-mediated immunity.”

Thorn jab 20 years ago
Mohammed al-Amien Ahmad is a typical case.

The farmer tells Mahgoub that a thorn jabbed him about 20 years ago.

“This thorn came out and it seemed to be OK. Later on the swelling came up. It was a bit itchy,” says the goateed farmer, who is in his 60s and wears a traditional white jalabiya robe.

Ahmad, his enlarged left foot oozing pus, has travelled more than 500 kilometres by bus from Umm Rawaba where he farms about 70 acres of sorghum.

His condition worsened over the past two years, he says, forcing him to reduce the amount of land he can work, and cutting into his annual income of 30 000 – 40 000 Sudanese pounds ($4 300 – $5 700).

In a majority of cases mycetoma is painless, meaning patients like Ahmad delay seeking medical care.

This makes treatment more difficult, Mahgoub says.

“The main thing we tell them is to come early… Because if the swelling is small it can be excised in total,” with follow-up medication, he says.

A patient's infected foot. (Pic: AFP)
A patient’s infected foot. (Pic: AFP)

The Mycetoma Research Centre provides diagnosis and any surgery patients may need for free. But patients may require months of anti-fungal medication, which they must buy themselves.

Some who cannot bear the financial burden stop taking their medicine, Mahgoub says.

“In that case the disease will just go back to where it started. That’s a real problem,” he says.

Drug prices in Sudan have climbed over the past two years as Sudan’s currency plunged in value and inflation soared.

Sudan’s health ministry has expressed concern about the emigration of doctors and other health professionals seeking better salaries and working conditions abroad.

Nationwide, there were 1.3 health workers per 1 000 people in 2011, against the WHO benchmark of 2.3.

Many primary health care facilities in Sudan “lack appropriate medical equipment and supplies, have inadequate infrastructure or are understaffed,” the United Nations said this year.

In contrast, the Mycetoma Research Centre “is recognised globally as a world leader”, an informal group of experts on the disease wrote after their first meeting this year in Geneva.

Ian Timberlake for AFP.

Me, Obama and Sarah Baartman in Istanbul

Despite my general disregard for Turkish Delights, Istanbul holds a special place in my heart. This is where I became two iconic black people: Sarah Baartman and Barack Obama – for a few minutes anyway.

I associate cities with books I have read about them. But when I think of Istanbul, it is not Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s novels; nor even the must-read Honour by Elif Shafak that comes to mind. I associate Istanbul with The Book of Chameleons, a novel by Angolan Jose Eduardo Agualusa. You see, this novel is about a man who trades in memories. His business card reads: “Felix Ventura – Guarantee your children a better past.”  His clients are well-heeled people whose futures are secure, but who lack a good past. So he sells them brand new pasts. He gives people saddled with disgraceful family trees or uninteresting childhood memories, a chance to photoshop their histories, complete with tangible evidence to support these new pasts. This is how one fellow gets a new set of illustrious grandparents resplendent with nobility— along with photographs of him spending memorable days at their lovely house.

Istanbul reminds me of this novel because, like Felix Ventura, Istanbul gave me two brand-new identities in 2011. I got to be watched and photographed like the enslaved black South African woman, Sarah Baartman, whose body was exhibited as an ‘exotic’ across  Europe. I also got to be Obama. But unlike Felix Ventura’s customers, my new identities came unprovoked, uninvited, on a prepaid contract – compliments of my blackness.

The day I became these two icons is the same day I first tasted roasted chestnuts. We were visiting the Aya Sofya museum, which embodies Istanbul’s popular image as ‘where East meets West.’ An architectural wonder when it was completed in 537AD as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral, the building has over the centuries served as a Roman Catholic cathedral, and a mosque, before becoming the museum it is now. Its architectural wonders aside, Aya Sofya’s interiors are a rich display of Turkey’s layered histories, as distinctive Islamic calligraphy rubs shoulders with stunning mosaics of the Virgin Mary and Angel Gabriel.

So, outside Aya Sofya, my friend and I waited for the vendor to wrap our freshly roasted chestnuts, entry tickets already purchased. I enjoyed the familiar sounds of the Turkish greeting ‘Merhaba’, which could have come straight from Kiswahili; glowing with pride in our shared Arabic linguistic roots. I was at home.

There was a long queue of tourists, but I noticed a particularly excitable bunch of Turkish school children in uniform. I figured they were typically excited as students tend to be on school outings. I remembered my pure delight as a Grade 4 student about a class trip to our local museum, whose key attraction was its reptile collection and the requisite ‘Picasso-goes-native’ anthropological paintings of bare-breasted black women bravely bearing the burden of beads on their necks. So, I dismissed these teenagers’ laughter, jostling and their inability to stand in a queue as typical student excitement.

When you have never been an object of paparazzi interest, you don’t quickly make the link between flashing cameras and yourself. It took me a while to join the dots between the mini-stampede of flashing cameras and my face. Then I stood there transfixed, blankly scanning the queue, the nearby streets, my friend, the chestnut vendor, before I finally acknowledged the truth I had already registered, but suppressed: I was the only black person around. The second truth was harder to face: I was the cause of the students’ excitement. So much for our shared linguistic roots. To them, one of those women they only knew as paintings and pictures about Africa was standing right before their eyes. In the flesh. Munching roasted chestnuts. Sure, I was dressed wrong for the ‘peoples-of-Africa’ look of those paintings and postcards, but my blackness remained astonishing for this group of teenagers.

Snapping out of the shock, my friend and I literally ran into the Aya Sofya, school children and cameras in tow. And thus unfolded my ‘participant-observer’ tour of Aya Sofya Museum: playing Black Mampatile (hide-and-seek) with a bunch of Turkish students desperate to capture evidence of their close encounter with blackness for their Facebook friends. I was a bonus on their museum trip, an artifact to be watched and photographed, alongside the murals on the walls.  As I ducked into corners in the beautiful Museum, in-between nervous glances at its gorgeous paintings, while my friend ensured the students were safely out of sight before we could move to the next part of the museum, I remembered Sarah Baartman. I had read lots about her, most recently in Pumla Gqola’s book What is Slavery to me? But for the first time, I had a glimpse of what it must have felt like be a curiosity, to be ‘exotic,’ to be studied and photographed because you are different; to be assaulted with the giggling stares of teenagers’ cameras. Unlike her, I may have been a free woman, there on my own volition. Yet I remained helpless and humiliated. It wasn’t my favourite Kodak moment. But my day was about to get even better: an encounter as Obama awaited me at the Grand Bazaar market.

After sneaking out of the Aya Sofya church, my friend and I decided to visit the Grand Bazaar market, on a bargain hunt. As we explored the busy market, each pathway filled with throngs of shoppers and stall owners calling customers to their wares and haggling over the prices, one man’s voice rose above the din shouting ‘Obama! Obama! Obama!!’ This sounded odd to both my friend and I; and we simultaneously looked back to check who Obama was. ‘Yes! Obama!’ the man said, making eye-contact with me, and waving his hand, a wide smile on his face. Goodness?!  It was me! I was the Obama in question. And, by the smiles on many shoppers’ and vendors’ faces, I was the only one who didn’t realise that I was Obama.

I had followed the endless stream of media commentaries on what an Obama presidency meant for Kenya and Africa at large. But I had clearly missed the part about his name becoming the new shorthand for ‘black person’— at least at this market in Istanbul. I wondered whether to be flattered, amused or offended at this new ‘John Smith’ code for black folks. I smiled awkwardly and gave the man a little wave, hoping to shut him up with acknowledgment. As we squeezed through the crowds to leave the market, I wondered how this would play out in Turkish villages. Would I be followed by groups of children shouting ‘Obama! Obama!’? Would I need a souvenir T-shirt declaring ‘I am not Obama’ the way tourists to East Africa wore the ‘I am not Mzungu (white) T-shirt?

Fast-forward to April 2013. I am sharing a house with colleagues from different countries. One housemate, Salah from Iran, is a spitting image of Obama. His dress-sense, his graceful walk, his height, his salt-n-pepper hair, his skin-tone, right down to the smile. My friends and I remark to each other on this similarity. Salah shares my friends’ passion for Table Tennis, and they play regularly. One day, I tell him. “You know you look like Obama.” Ever graceful, he looks at me slowly, then asks: “is that a good thing?” Yho!? Who saw that one coming?  I mumble that I mean the nice Obama, not the one busy killing every audacious hope we ever invested in his presidency. My friends jokingly break the awkwardness: “Actually it is not such a bad thing. You could play Obama in a Hollywood movie about him. But do you play basketball? You will have to learn basketball for the movie.”

Salah laughs good-naturedly, then says “No. I play table tennis. Obama will have to learn table tennis so he can be more like me.”

Ek se! Give that man a Bells!, I think quietly to myself.  I suppose this is what they mean by thinking outside the box. Indeed, why shouldn’t Obama learn table tennis, in the hypothetical scenario of Salah playing him in a movie? See, sometimes the mountain must go to Mohammed.

Grace A. Musila is a Kenyan who studied in South Africa.

One Young World: The winners

Earlier this month, the Mail & Guardian showcased 10 inspiring Africans doing great things in the fields of technology and development. Some of them shared their stories of leveraging technology to improve their communities on the M&G’s Voices of Africa blog.

This coincides with the upcoming One Young World Summit in Johannesburg, where  over 1 300 young leaders from 190 countries will gather to share their ideas and visions on development and leadership. As part of its commitment to developing young leaders, the M&G is sponsoring two of the 10 shortlisted candidates to attend the event and share their ideas with a global audience.

We’ve chosen Oscar Epkonimo from Nigeria and  Gregory Rockson from Ghana. Congratulations!

Oscar (26) is a software developer and social entrepreneur behind Aiderz, a crowd funding platform for social good. It was recently instrumental in raising funds for a student to undergo surgery in India to remove a brain tumour. The platform is currently being developed. Once complete, there is huge potential for many deserving individuals and communities to benefit from the power and generosity of the digital crowd. Read Oscar’s story here.

Gregory (22) is passionate about access to healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. The young Ghanaian founded mPharma, a system which digitises the traditional prescription notepad and transforms it into an interactive prescription writing tool. This way, physicians can send mobile prescription scripts to their patients and record and report adverse drug reactions in real time. Gregory has successfully partnered with the Zambian health ministry to deploy mPharma in the country’s health facilities. Read Gregory’s story here.

Ipaidabribe: Fighting corruption in Zimbabwe

I will admit that I paid a bribe at a roadblock just hours before launching an anti-corruption site. In May last year, I was pulled over by a police officer. He inspected my car for “vulnerabilities” and then asked if I had a fire extinguisher. He said I could be fined $20. When I told him that I did not have that much on me, he quickly gave me a way out. “Give me what you have and I will look away.” The alternative was that he would detain me until he knocked off duty – and I didn’t have time for that. I paid him a bribe.  I didn’t like it and my conscience weighed me down. Frustrated, I brainstormed, decided to create a website and by the end of the day www.ipaidabribe.org.zw was up and running, thanks to the beauty of open source software.

The site got over 3000 visits in the first two days. It was clear that many Zimbabweans were as frustrated as I was about corruption and now we had a chance to do something about it.

What ipaidabribe.org.zw is all about:

The idea behind ipaidabribe.org.zw is to fight corruption by empowering the crowd. If anyone in Zimbabwe can report corruption (even anonymously) and if the reports are available for everyone to see, a solution to the problem should become obvious to at least somebody. The reason why crowdsourcing the fight against corruption works is because it tackles the three biggest conditions that are conducive for corruption to thrive:

  • Opportunity: People get involved in corruption when systems don’t work well and they need a way to get things done regardless of the procedures and laws.
  • Little chance of getting caught: A lack of accountability comes when there is little transparency (for example, public officials who don’t explain what they are doing, how and why), and weak enforcement (law agencies who don’t impose sanctions on power holders who violate their public duties).
  • Certain attitudes or circumstances that make average people disregard the law. They may try to get around laws of a government they consider illegitimate. Poverty or scarcity of key goods such as medicine may also push people to live outside the law.

What we’ve achieved so far:

The site is now a popular way of reporting corruption in Zimbabwe. It’s been successful in:

  • Getting people to start speaking out when they see corruption around them.
  • Getting people to talk about how they refused to pay bribes. This gives the crowd a good example of how people can achieve things on the basis of personal integrity.
  • Establishing partnerships with media houses and using these to escalate some of the reports

Admittedly, there are areas where I need to improve:

  • Verification of reports. One person can only do so much here so I am happy to talk to people and/or organisations that can help with verification of reports. This aspect is difficult to crowd source.
  • Escalation of reports. There are still many reports that have not been properly escalated. My idea has always been to have the crowd handle the escalation of reports. We are clearly still a long way from this.
  • Marketing. Scaling up too fast was a concern for me because it would increase the chances and number of reports that are not verified and escalated. But it goes without saying that scaling up is an absolute necessity.

From running ipaidabribe, I learnt the following lessons:

The future of fighting corruption
It is on this basis that I have decided to focus my efforts to fighting corruption on road-blocks. Working with a colleague, we are building what could be the future of the fight against corruption Kombi.

We know that the fight against corruption can be more effective if we change mindsets rather than try to attack specific incidents. Because of this we have decided to build a video game which will be targeted at younger people. The video game is called Kombi, named after a vehicle for public transport that’s an essential service throughout the continent. It’s called a taxi in South Africa, matatu in Kenya, dala dala in Tanzania, tro tro in Ghana,  the list goes on.

We chose to go for a video game was because we know that people love games. With a game we potentially engage many people simultaneous because they have a lot of growth potential. The legendary Angry Birds, for example, took only 35 days to reach 50-million people. Compare this with the 3.5 years it took Facebook to reach that same number or the 75 years it took the television to reach the same number of people.

It will be a few months before Kombi hits the market but here is a sneak peek of how it’s going to work:

  • Every players starts at the bottom but depending on the points they earn in the game, they can graduate from being a conductor (the lowest level) to being a driver, then kombi owner, then police officer, then ultimately, police commissioner.
  • Every player is in a situation similar to that of the average Zimbabwean where they may have to pay/take bribes meet their daily targets or get through the day but every time the pay/take bribes, they lose points and hence take longer to become a police commissioner. The result is that players learn that although corruption can seem to help in the short term, it hurts in the long run.
  • The game will be real-time and online – you will be competing with other players to get passengers, fuel, reach the destination faster, etc.
  • Third party Developers in different areas can build their own routes and add them to the game. They can also earn money for themselves on the permit fees paid by players to drive on the routes they have developed.

I’d like to invite any game developers (especially those based in Zimbabwe) who would like to get involved in Kombi to send me an email. We don’t care about the platform you develop on for now.

Tawanda Kembo is interested in finding innovative ways to meet social needs. He explore existing methods to see if he can remake or modify them to serve today’s society. He is one of 10 young Africans shortlisted to be a One Young World delegate at this year’s summit. At this event, the M&G’s Trevor Ncube will be chairing a session on African media and what Africans think of their journalists. To share your views, complete this short survey.