Goodbye the Swedes

Over the last 2 days our Swedish visitors have left St. Anna to continue on their own paths. Yesterday, Maja (pronounced Maya), the young lady who has been here for a week, headed on to Nairobi to meet up with her class-mates. From there they will continue their way to various reserves and national parks studying the animals and conservation for 4 weeks (it sounds top). Maja is studying to be a veterinarian at Uppsala (spelling?) University in Sweden and during her time in Kenya, she will be writing a paper specifically on Vultures! Now if you’re thinking that there isn’t much call for that sort of thing, you’d be wrong. Believe it or not there is even a monthly journal dedicated to them. Maja is a veritable fountain of vulture knowledge, for example, did you know that vultures:

. stick together for life, and take it in turns hunting & minding the nest; even if one of them finds food first think in the morning, they will not swap…your day is your day!

. are naturally immune to anthrax.

. circle in the sky to signal to other vultures that dinner is served below them

. have a separate pouchy / sack thing called a “crop” for storing food to bring back to their young This is not to be confused with regurgitating like wolves or other birds of prey. I am not sure how they choose whether to put food in their own stomachs or the crop; I am awaiting Maja’s clarification on that point!

Fascinating, I’m sure you’d agree. Anyway ... she was fun to have a round and knew a tonne of games. We’ll all miss her (but don’t tell her I said so).
Today with the remaining Swedes, Äke, Göte & Gunilla, we visited a local tea factory (see tomorrow’s blog). But this afternoon, they also began their journey home via a couple of days in the Masai Mara.

It is a fact that I have not had much contact with the Swedes before, but having spent 10 days with and around them I definitely rate them very highly. They are really nice folks.

So, to fill the hole before tomorrow’s summary of today’s events at the tea factory, I propose the following. I am currently reading a book called “Dead Aid – Why Aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa”, and I wanted to share the following extract with you to illustrate the many issues & challenges the continent is facing. If that doesn’t take your fancy, go to the BBC website and read of Sachin Tendulkar’s record double century again South Africa; i’d understand:

“With an average per capita income of roughly US$1 a day, sub-Saharan Africa remains the poorest region in the world. Africa’s real per capita income today is lower than in the 1970s, leaving many African countries at least as poor as they were forty years ago. With over half of the 700 million Africans living on less than a dollar a day, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of poor people in the world – some 50 per cent of the world’s poor. And while the number of the world’s population and proportion of the world’s people in the extreme poverty fell after 1980, the proportion of people in sub-Saharan Africa living in abject poverty nearly doubled, leaving the average African poorer today than just two decades ago. And looking ahead, the 2007 United Nations Human Development Report forecasts that sub-Saharan Africa will account for almost one third of world poverty in 2015, up from one fifth in 1990 (this largely due to the dramatic developmental strides being made elsewhere around the emerging world).

Life expectancy has stagnated - Africa is the only continent where life expectancy is less than sixty years; today it hovers around fifty years, and in some countries it has fallen back to what it was in the 1950s (life expectancy in Swaziland is a paltry thirty years). The decrease in life expectancy is mainly attributed to the rise of the HIV-AIDS pandemic. One in seven children across African continent die before the age of five. These statistics are particularly worrying in that (as with many other developing regions of the world), roughly 50 pre cent of Africa’s population is young – below the age of fifteen years.

Adult literacy across most African countries has plummeted below pre-1980 levels. Literacy rates, health indicators (malaria, water borne diseases such as bilharzias and cholera) and income inequality all remain a cause for worry. And still across important indicators, the trend in Africa is not just downwards: Africa is (negatively) decoupling from the progress being made across the rest of the world. Even with African growth rates averaging 5 per cent a year over the past several years, the African Progress Panel pointed out in 2007 that growth is still short of the 7 per cent that needs to be sustained to make substantial inroads into poverty reduction.

On the political side, some 50 per cent of the continent remains under non-democratic rule. According to the Polity IV database, Africa is still home to at least 11 fully autocratic regimes (Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, The Gambia, Mauritania, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda and Zimbabwe). Three African heads of state (dos Santos of Angola, Obiang of Equatorial Guinea and Bongo of Gabon) have been in power since the 1970s (having ascended to power on 2 December 1967, President Bongo has recently celebrated his fourtieth year in power). Five other presidents have had a lock on power since the 1980s (Compaore of Burkina Faso, Biya of Cameroon, Conte of Guinea, Museveni of Uganda and Mugabe of Zimbabwe). Since 1996, eleven countries had been embroiled in civil wars (Angola, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda). And according to the May 2008 annual Global Peace Index, out of the ten bottom countries, four African states are among the least peaceful in the world (in order, Central African Republic, Chad, Sudan and Somalia) – the most of any one continent.