There was a long programme on the
radio this morning about the work going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo
to reduce deaths from cholera. Today is ‘World Water Day’ – Journée mondiale de
l’eau. You know how we do these ‘days’ – International Women’s day, World AIDS
Day… I assume the Pope doesn’t have them in his diary as he goes blithely on,
excommunicating women who protect their daughters from rapists and telling the
African faithful that condoms exacerbate the problem of AIDS in that most
AIDS-afflicted continent.
The DCR has the world’s highest
rates of death from cholera, including every year, hundreds of children. The
story of how two doctors, one French the other Congolese, came to work together
to reduce those dreadful figures is as good an example as you can get of what
can be achieved by a combination of science, an intimate understanding of local
culture and a sense of solidarity with your fellow men. Renaud Piarroux,
working at the time in the DCR as a volunteer, met Didier Bompangué there, saw
his potential, brought him across to France to do a doctorate on the cholera
epidemics of Africa, shared his house and his French salary with him, paid for
his family to come over and join him while he was studying and eventually went
back with him to put the results of Bompangué’s learning to use in the DCR.
Paris has been basking in spring
sunshine, although judging from pictures of the blossom in London parks, our
temperatures have not been so high. Last weekend when I walked up to la
Villette it felt as though the whole of northern Paris was out, on
roller-blades, bikes, trottinettes (scooters), with buggies, picnics, frisbees
and balls. Yesterday the canoes were skipping up and down the canal like
dragon-flies and the bateaux mouches trundling slowly under the bridges and
through the locks. The MK2 café had thrown off its plastic rain-hood to let the
sunshine in and the terrasse was full.
fishing on the canal de l'Ourq
Later when I went along to the
péniche Anako long queues were forming at the cinema, the lights
glittering off the water. The occasion was a film-conference on the Yemen.
The audience this time was bigger than the last time I went, but the
conférencier nevertheless said that he felt he was ‘en famille’, so I must have
been one of the few complete outsiders among the thirty or so people in the
room. You can’t fit many into a barge, even a large one and the Yemeni
community in France is tiny - compared to the numbers in the UK, for example.
The film was very beautiful
although, having been shot in the 1990s shows a pre-modern society which has
since largely disappeared. Some things don’t change however. Yemen's population
growth remains the highest in the Middle East. Yemeni women, still often
married off at the onset of puberty, can expect to bear up to seven children
each. Many of those children will never see adulthood however: the infant
mortality rate is among the worst in the region. Even so roughly half the
population is under 15 years of age. Poverty is getting worse, not better. In
1992 19% of all Yemenis lived below the poverty line. Now a quarter of the
population does. The statistics on literacy are mixed - 40% of Yemenis aged 15
or older could read and write in 1990. However the data on women for the same
period found that only 26% had basic literacy skills
In the DCR as in Yemen, there is
a massive need for more generous investment in basic infrastructure like water
filtration plants and sewage systems, but also for giving more women access to
education which might eventually, although possibly not in my lifetime, help
them raise a smaller number of healthy children to adulthood and achieve a
greater measure of autonomy for themselves within these sprawling,
autocratically-run families they belong to.
The evidence suggests we won’t
get very far with clean water, women’s rights or education as long as we think
getting hot under the collar one day a year is enough. As
for Pope Benedict - a misnomer that if ever there was one - no point
adding to the column inches that have already been wasted on him and his
ill-judged interventions.
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