Nate Miller's blog

CNN is the only channel I get in English, so I watch a lot of it. Needless to say, I’m kind of sick of hearing about the global economic/financial crisis, especially since the reports of the end of the world as we know it have little relation to my day-to-day life.

Here in Benin, high unemployment and poor business prospects are not news. Home foreclosures and vanishing retirement funds would be news because it would mean that people had actually owned homes and had retirement funds. This is not to say that the crisis has not or will not have an impact here, but if it is, it’s not nearly as visible or talked about.

There has been a lot of speculation over what the crisis would mean for Africa. Some say that it will be felt less here because of Africa’s relative isolation from global markets and its already low levels of foreign investment and trade.  Others argue that many African countries’ already precarious economic states and their dependence on foreign investment, loans, and aid put them in a vulnerable position. 

Want to understand how various countries of the world have gotten richer and healthier? Or how about seeing how China's CO2 emisions have grown as the country has gotten richer? Without having to read? 

You're in luck. The use of animated statistics give us a fascinating moving view of what has happened in the world over the past decades. I highly recommend this video and many more at gapminder.org. And if you really don't like statistics, he also swallows a sword.

Last week a Peace Corps volunteer was murdered while sleeping on her porch in the Beninese village where she had taught children English for a year and a half. Today, I attended a funeral for a colleague’s three-year old daughter who died suddenly a few days ago.

I’ve only been in Benin for six weeks, but it doesn’t take long for the subject of death to come up. And once again, I am led to ponder the role of death in different parts of the world.

 Once somebody asked me why we can’t eradicate malaria by treating every person in malaria-endemic countries with an effective ant-malarial drug at the same time. As long as they all stay on the drug for as long as it takes for the current generation of infected mosquitoes to die (1-2 weeks on average, maybe a month maximum), then the human reservoir will be eliminated, no new mosquitoes will become infected, and that would be the end of malaria. It was an interesting idea, but who, exactly, was going to take on the task of putting every African on the same drug at the same time and making sure they stick with it long enough?

The last year and a half has been an interesting time in Myanmar (the country formerly known as Burma). First, in September 2007 there were mass protests led by Buddhist monks. Then, in May of last year, cyclone Nargis devastated the Ayeyarwaddy Delta, the country’s most populous area and its agricultural heartland.

My favorite part of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech was "We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs." Science and the scientific method – the process of making decisions based on observable, empirical and measurable evidence – have profoundly changed the way much of the human race (and even some of the luckier animals) live in this world.

Continuing on Saadia’s discussion of climate change, I want to point out one part of the world where the effects of climate change are being felt now. Unfortunately, it just may be the one region of the world that can least afford another problem.

The Sahel is the region in Africa where the Sahara desert meets sub-Saharan tropical Africa.  This semi-arid belt runs east to west across the continent and includes the countries of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea.

There has recently been some big news regarding treatment of malaria. First the good news.

Generally, visiting health centers where I work is one of the parts of my job that I most enjoy. But there is one part of the experience I really can’t take: watching kids take their medication. While this may seem like the easiest part of the process, getting a small child to swallow a large, bitter, scary pill can be quite an ordeal. I often remember one particular little girl in Chad screaming (or rather gargling) in terror as her mouth filled with blood (she bit her tongue) while the nurse held her nose and poured the medication into her mouth. Not a pretty sight. And besides being such a traumatic experience for the child, she ended up spitting out most of her anti-malarial treatment.

Hello readers,

I’ve been blogging on my personal site (www.natedownthere.blogspot.com) for the past few years, reflecting on my experiences working and living in Angola, Chad and Myanmar, and traveling to a number of other countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Haiti. I’ve written about my life in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as topics related to international development and global health.