Join me in saying thanks

There is one page in the Economist that I always check out first.  It is the last page.

When you have been reading a magazine long enough, you check out your favorite sections first.  I start with the last page of the Economist.  What's there?  An obit essay.

Yep. About somebody who died.  Almost always, the person who died would have done something wonderfully constructive.  Sometimes, the obit is to be thankful that an awful person is no more. It is in this latter category that I hope to read about Mugabe really, really soon.

When it is about a constructive contribution, often the person is one who is not really a household name. Which is all the more that I love that last page.  Like this time.  It was about Donald Ainslie (“D.A.”) Henderson.  Up until I read this, I had no idea about this Henderson!

As a teenager, Henderson became obsessed with smallpox after the virus re-visited New York City, which panicked the residents. 

He wanted to study the causes, spread and suppression of epidemics. Rather than serve in the army he joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Communicable Disease Centre in Atlanta, for what he called “firefighter” training. As soon as a disease broke out anywhere in the world, he would dash to tackle it—becoming a proper “shoe-leather” epidemiologist, as opposed to a “shiny-pants” desk-bound sort. When he was hauled away from his anti-smallpox work in west Africa and sent to Geneva for the WHO in 1967, at 38, he wasn’t thrilled. But if they wanted the world rid of the virus in ten years, he would give it his best shot.

From the stories I have heard from my father and grandmothers, smallpox was one mighty enemy that people feared.  A cousin of my father's was a typical survivor, with scars on his face as evidence of the battle.  By the time we kids came along, the worry was only about chickenpox.  We owe it all to Dr. Henderson and his “surveillance-containment” towards "Target Zero":

Problems rose up constantly. In Ethiopia, rebels attacked the vaccinators. Afghanistan brought deep snow and no maps. In Bangladesh trucks could not cross the bamboo bridges; in India mourners had to be stopped from floating smallpox corpses down the Ganges. He experienced most of this himself, frequently decamping from cramped Geneva armed with “Scottish wine” (his favourite medicine) to urge on the troops. Out in the trenches he also faced the full horror of what he was fighting. At a hospital in Dhaka the stench of leaking pus, the pustule-covered hands stretched towards him, the flies clustering on dying eyes, convinced him anew that he had to win this war.

The last recorded case was in 1977.  A decade after he was appointed to the job, Henderson did rid of the world of this monster.

To borrow from Einstein, we are standing on the shoulders of giants who made our lives so easy.  

Thanks, Dr. Henderson.

Mogadishu was once scenic and attractive like this ...

Above, a picturesque downtown Mogadishu around 1936.
Pictured on the right is Arba Rukun mosque, known as the Mosque of the Four Pillars. Built in 1269 AD, the mosque predates Ibn Battuta's historic arrival in Somalia.
The Italian-built Catholic cathedral, which now lies in ruins, sits in the center, and the Triumphal Arch, honoring Italian King Emmanuel III, on the left. 

More here

Ibn Battuta, a big time wanderer whom I should probably study more given my wandering genes, visited India too, when a good chunk of the northern area was under the rule of Muhammad bin Tughlak.  Oddly enough, the first time I ever knew about this historical note was from Cho's satirical movie. Back in India, when I was a kid!  As I noted in post a few months ago, Cho's satirical writing and movies provided me with quite some fascination for satirical humor.
 

Cartoon of the day: Obama's wars

Why Somalia, you ask?  Because:

A U.S. drone aircraft fired on two leaders of a militant Somali organization tied to al-Qaeda, apparently wounding them, a senior U.S. military official familiar with the operation said Wednesday. ...
The airstrike makes Somalia at least the sixth country where the United States is using drone aircraft to conduct lethal attacks, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.

Redemption, religion, and Rrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's story is one that I find discussing in many different contexts with my students--it can be a discussion of migration, Somalia, Islam, female genital mutilation, radical Islamism, ....
In this Q/A, the final question/response is:

Are you in touch with your mother?
I talk to her on the phone. She says, Please go back to being a Muslim because that’s the only way that you’re going to have any kind of redemption in the hereafter.

Hmmm ....

I can't but wonder why quite a few people so preoccupied with the hereafter can't be "human" in the here and now :(  Oh well ...

So, death threats because of .... this?

Remember these cartoons from a couple of years ago?  The police nabbed a Somali who broke into the house of the Danish cartoonist. 
The Somali group, al Shahab, thinks that this Somali did something awesome; according to the BBC:

Al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Ali Muhamud Rage told AFP news agency: "We appreciate the incident in which a Muslim Somali boy attacked the devil who abused our prophet Mohammed and we call upon all Muslims around the world to target the people like" him.

(ht)

BTW, the New Yorker has an excellent piece on Mogadishu and Somalia

Of course, even academic analysis is subject to this same treatment.  As I blogged earlier,

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

The problem with Somalia

Hail a cab, explore the world

Whether I travel for work or pleasure, whether I go to cities in the United States or abroad, I find it difficult not to engage in one activity: talking with cab drivers about global economics and politics.

It was the night after the elections when I flagged a cab at the airport in Phoenix to head to the hotel and conference venue. I resisted the temptation to ask the driver if he was from Ethiopia, because once before in a different city I asked a driver that same thing. The driver informed me that he hailed from Eritrea, and his brusque tone indicated that he did not quite appreciate my question.

The small country of Eritrea became independent from Ethiopia after a 30-year war, and border and ethnic tensions persist. So it was understandable that my Eritrean driver felt a tad offended when I asked him if he was Ethiopian.

Having learned from my mistakes, which is something my wife says I don’t do enough, this time I asked the cab driver if he was from somewhere in East Africa. Yes indeed — he was from Somalia.

That was all I needed to engage him in a conversation about Somalia and his take on the United States.

I asked him about a news item from the previous day about reports of a female who had been stoned to death. According to news reports and Amnesty International, the female was a 13-year-old rape victim. According to a few Somalis, she was a 23-year old woman who had confessed to adultery. I asked the cab driver for his views.

The driver was convinced that the victim was not a 13-year-old, but a 23-year-old. And that it was not rape, but adultery. And, finally, it was not a case that was initiated by society, but was triggered by her admission of guilt — confession. The cab driver’s logic was that people had no choice in the matter because her confession automatically warranted the punishment.

When I suggested that stoning somebody to death was harsh and cruel, well, he did not think so. His response was strange to me, given that this conversation was happening in the United States, and more so in Arizona, which is known for its libertarian tendencies.

The item and the conversation with the cabbie was a refreshing reminder of the rule of law that we have in this country. While a sexual relationship outside of marriage might be considered by some Americans as immoral, we clearly make a distinction between individual notions of morality and a collective sense of legality. Death by stoning, which is thankfully a rare practice anywhere, introduces a harsh and extreme version of legality.

On the other hand, if Amnesty International and news agencies are found to be correct in their reports that a 13-year old rape victim had been stoned, then the story takes on an entirely different dimension and surpasses any discussion of morality, legality and cruel and unusual punishment. It is simply atrocious.

I could not discuss these matters further with the driver because we had reached the hotel. But neither am I able to shake off the news. It was my first conversation with somebody who defended anything as terrible as death by stoning. The clichéd conversation with cab drivers that commentators often rely upon, as if we are hard-wired that way, turned out to be anything but ordinary.

But this story is only a small part of the tragedy Somalia has become. It has been a failed state for a number of years. Piracy off its coast is not a Hollywood-style “Pirates of the Caribbean” swashbuckler but real, with economic and human costs. Neighboring Kenya has been warned by warring Somali factions that it should stay out unless it wants to be drawn into the conflict.

Perhaps there is no better time than now to follow up on these and many other global issues that we need to understand, and to see if there is something we could do constructively in order to make it a better world. This is a good time because the week of Nov. 17 is celebrated as International Education Week as well as Geography Awareness Week.

And, yes, please continue to have conversations with cab drivers, too.

For the Register Guard, November 17, 2008