it’s more like a sweet doughnut [than plain bread]. Traders sell them on the side of the road and shout “ObamaObamaObama” to get sales!

Here’s a pic of an opened-up Obama:

Mona knows as well as you or I that donuts are sweet so this treat is definitely not part of the President’s health plan!

In Charlottesville, Virginia
Jeff

They are the most remarkable photos I’ve seen of it. Mostly, I think, because the photos I’ve see are

1. In Black and White
2. Taken by Ugandans and made with developing-nation-quality photo supplies
3. Or “Art” photos where the photographer was going for colorful sunsets or dramatically contrasted close-ups.

In this case, though, the photographer just wanted a picture. She got excellent clear light, and one has sky that looks like it might rain. Rain is often an exciting prospect in many parts of Africa.

This same lady has had the amazing privilege of not only visiting the House of Worship in Kampala, but also the one in New Delhi and spending a lot of time at Baha’i Holy sites in Haifa and Akka, Israel.

    

* if I ever get to name a road, as happens sometimes in the US when you live on a private drive that needs to be named so the Emergency Services can find you, I’m naming it Kikaaya Hill.

The correspondent asks, “What is peace and why is it so important to us?” He goes on to explore why a goal of world peace is not a Utopian dream, but the responsibility of each one of us. He believes that to achieve world peace will take a restructuring of human society where human diversity is the cause of pride, not conflict. He says that those claiming humans are incapable of removing prejudice from their outlook and will always have war are representing a distortion of the human spirit.

I agree. The declaration that peace is not possible ranks with other great statements that deny the strength of humanity. How many times in the past has someone said that man would never circumnavigate the earth, fly like a bird, walk on the moon, split the atom or cure any number of diseases. Women have been heads of state in several countries. African-americans serve in the US Senate. Thousands of things that were impossible in the past are reality today. World peace is tomorrow’s reality.

Great achievements require a lot of work. How do we work for peace? On the larger scale, I can only rely on representatives to the United Nations to do the work they do. I live in a representative democracy, so my abilities to influence the workings of my government are fairly limited to voting for the most responsible candidates and keeping them informed of my opinions on issues that are in their jurisdiction. But on the smaller scale, the scale that each one of us exists at each day, I can have more influence. I can teach my children to, “have loving and tender hearts.”* I can teach them to stand up for justice.* We can practice being “a friend to the whole human race.”*

But I’m only one person in one family. How much help is it if I consider the “Earth as one country”* if I’m surrounded by people too distraught by the frantic modern world to think about their own attitudes or how they relate to the rest of the world? I don’t know yet, but I’m trying to work on service to my community. There are a lot of communities I’m part of. I work in an office with a few dozen people. I attend some of the meetings of the Charlottesville Java User’s Group (Java the computer programming language, not coffee). And I’m a member of the Baha’i Faith in Charlottesville. But I spend most of my time in my neighborhood. I’ll take more time soon to talk about our neighborhood. Now, I’ll just say that it’s becoming more of a community all the time. That’s the kind of world peace I’d like to see. Not just countries avoiding war on each other, but a town, a country, and a world full of neighborhoods where friends care about each other, and care for each other.

The Great Peace towards which people of good will throughout the centuries have inclined their hearts, of which seers and poets for countless generations have expressed their vision, and for which from age to age the sacred scriptures of mankind have constantly held the promise, is now at long last within the reach of the nations. For the first time in history it is possible for everyone to view the entire planet, with all its myriad diversified peoples, in one perspective. World peace is not only possible but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of this planet–in the words of one great thinker, “the planetization of mankind”.

The Promise of World Peace

There was so much disappointment on so many fronts that I can’t begin to write about it now. For the next few weeks, I expect, I’ll just be trying to get things back together. It takes a certain amount of optimism to report on plans that are in the works or progressing. There’s no optimism right now, just a lot of disappointment and disorganization. If otherwise unscheduled time appears, I may try to write about our trip.

In Charlottesville, Virginia (US):
Jeff Lavezzo

Good thing, too. They found that both ulcers were perforated. But one of them had perforated next to the gall bladder and the gall bladder basically plugged the perforation, preventing what would have been near fatal internal bleeding.

While they were in there, they found that the calcification they saw in an x-ray on his appendix was actually a large villous adenoma that had inverted his appendix into his lower intestine, causing a significant obstruction. Of course they removed that too. Four hours later he was in the ICU recovering. This morning he was actually sitting up in a chair, something he has’t done in a week, for sure. He’s likely to be out of ICU to a regular ward in 5 days or so and they expect significant recovery after that.

Tici is seriously relieved. As she puts it, now we just have to heal him from the surgery. All the unknown factors, like how to get rid of the ulcers, are out of the way.

We’ll be in Malawi in a couple days and expect to dash from the airport to the hotel where the coach line stops to catch the 12:30 bus to Blantyre.

In Charlottesville, Virginia (US) till tomorrow:
Jeff Lavezzo

It’s going to continue to count down till we leave. Then it will count down hours till we arrive. Then it will count down the days we have left in Malawi. Then again it’ll count down the travel time back to Charlottesville.

Enjoy!

We’re very excited about our trip. Tici’s dad’s been in and out of the hospital for about 5 months now. It’s been very hard for her to be away from him and hear a weak voice on the other end of the phone. We hope he’ll get a some more strength back before we arrive. Ether that or Isobel and Cecilia’s energy will rub off on him. Tici’s also bought him lots of high-calorie foods to bring to him. He needs it!

We’ll also hopefully get to visit friends there like the Malakets, the Massa family, the Mazloums, Hakimis and especially Janine. And there’s a chance we’ll be meeting up with some of the high-tech blogger’s Malawi’s produced lately (see the side bar under “contemporaries”).

In Charlottesville, Virginia (US) for a few more days:
Jeff Lavezzo

Mostly it seems they provide their unique service to other agencies. For example: An organization called PEARL set up a cooperative among coffee growers in the devastated Rwandan coffee growing region. National University of Rwanda begins collecting information about the global coffee market. Freeplay steps in and supplys the coops with 70 radios and helps the University broadcast their information. There are also programs where school children listen to lectures via radio.

So, to my friends out there working in development: think about how a project you’re working with could benefit from some old-school one-way communication. And if you’re going into the bush for a while and want a reliable radio, C. Crane and Simply Radios will donate a Freeplay Lifeline radio for each one you buy.

In Charlottesville, Virginia (US):
Jeff Lavezzo

The most surprising part is the folded up dimensions are the same as my current wallet. It’s just designed to hold a lot more.

In Charlottesville, Virginia (US):
Jeff Lavezzo

So let’s cross my second-hand experience with the US nursing issue with my second-hand experience with hospital care in Malawi. This example is brought to us by Joanne Jorissen, a US citizen working as a Nurse Midwife in Lilongwe, Malawi, who writes at BabyCatcher

This morning I went to the hospital to check on the woman who had the surgery and found her resting in the postnatal ward. The postnatal nurse was passing out medications and told me that the patient was all right but that her vital signs had not yet been taken today. I quickly looked over her chart and noted that Lwanja wrote, “check vital signs regularly” but couldn’t find even a single set of vital signs since the time of her surgery yesterday. Considering that there is one postnatal nurse for close to a hundred patients, this comes as no surprise. As I was standing near her bed, the nursing matron (i.e. the charge nurse of the hospital) came and told me that someone tested the autoclave machine (the machine that sterilizes all the instruments used in surgery for both Bottom and Kamuzu Central Hospital) and found that it was actually not successfully sterilizing anything. At this point there is only one autoclave so it cannot be put out of commission until fixed.

There are quite a few details on Joanne’s site that highlight the differences between hospital care in Malawi and the US and just what “shortage” means. He’s a statistic from my experience: when my second child was born, our postnatal nurse was covering four patients, two mothers and two babies. Joanne routinely mentions shortages she works with, both in coworkers and equipment.

So, if you are yourself in a nursing program, and have been motivated by the need to fill shortages, I hope you can see that there are shortages and there are shortages. Joanne has said, “individual efforts really can and do make a difference.”

Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confined to your own self.
- Baha’u'llah

In Charlottesville, Virginia (US):
Jeff Lavezzo

My parents-in-law have been living in different parts of Malawi since 1975. That of course is worth a whole batch of articles unto itself. There’s a serious food shortage in Malawi right now. So I did what any computer professional who is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and Africa lover stuck in the US would do: I set Google News to build a custom list of headlines about Malawi for me. One day it pulled up Mike Mckay’s Hactivate blog. And that pointed to more Malawi blogs. And they were good. They were important! News! Firsthand accounts! Pictures of wild animals! well… that part wasn’t so important, but reprints of newspaper articles about the current famine and stories about the challenges of living in a “foreign land” inspired me. I said, “well I’ve resisted it for a long time, but I’m going to set up my own blog.”

There are lots of reasons to do this. One is that I’ve been trying to get some children’s stories written and writing practice is never a bad thing. Another is that I’m getting more into some independent projects that could use some exposure. And the impetus today is that my friend Patryk Laurent who had been generously giving me space on the server he ran is giving up that server and switching to a DSL system. So, I was forced to get a new hosting company. I found Dreamhost.com who charged me, what I referred to yesterday as, “chump change” for one year. They also provide “one click installs” of software packages including, you guessed it, this Word Press blog.

All of this begs the question: How many people’s first blog post is about their blog?

In Charlottesville, Virginia (US):
Jeff Lavezzo