Ebola | Joan Baxter

November 23, 2014

Yes, let’s feed the world – but with healthy food from healthy farms

By: Joan Baxter

Despite all the problems there are with Band Aid 30’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas, few would take issue with the noble sentiment of the stirring chorus line near the end of the song that exhorts us to “feed the world”.

Just as I’m left wondering where, exactly, the funds raised by Bob Geldof’s charitable efforts will go “to fight the Ebola crisis” in West Africa, I am also curious about what, exactly, they are thinking the world should be fed with.

I’m not just being ornery; this is an important question.

We live on a planet that is plagued by hunger and periodic famine, caused increasingly by climate change, conflict, politics, perverse policies and poverty. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), close to a tenth of the world’s population does not have enough food to lead a healthy active life.

At the same time, there is also a good deal of excessive consumption of calories that has led to another kind of global health crisis.

Bob Geldof, Band Aid and Do They Know Their Song May Be Harmful?

By: Joan Baxter

Bob Geldof and Band Aid have done it again. They’ve re-recorded the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, first performed by UK and Irish musicians 30 years ago to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. The Band Aid 30 version has been tweaked to raise funds to fight Ebola.

Thankfully, the tweaking has excised the awful line that Bono sang back in 1984, “Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you”. Also gone is the ludicrous one bemoaning the lack of snow in Africa, which Sir Bob (he received a knighthood for his charitable work) and his co-writer Midge Ure curiously decided was a continent where “no rain nor rivers flow” and “nothing ever grows”. The inane question “Do they know it’s Christmas?” – asked about a continent full of very devout Christians who most certainly do, and many Muslims and non-Christians who may not care so much if it is, but also celebrate the holiday – has also been removed from the chorus.

But no matter how much tweaking they’ve done, there’s still an awful lot wrong with the Band Aid 30 song (just as there was with its previous versions). The new lyrics lump together hundreds of millions of people in more than a dozen West African countries into one basket of “doom” and “death” and “fear”, informing everyone in the region that they will have “no peace or joy this year”. Has no one told Geldof that Nigeria effectively controlled and eradicated Ebola? And that Ghana, like most countries in West Africa, has had no documented cases?

Ebola: How an awful disease is shredding the social fabric in West Africa

By: Joan Baxter

11 October 2014. Nairobi, Kenya. As the fatality statistics pile up and the gruesome awfulness of the Ebola catastrophe in West Africa unfolds, I’ve been seeking escape and solace from the grim present by spending time in the past, in the company of thousands and thousands of photos collected in the past eight years in Sierra Leone. They’re a tangible part of the immense wealth of the bank of memories that the people of “Swit Salone” – as it’s known affectionately in the country’s lingua franca, Krio – bequeathed me.

Many of the memories that the photographs evoke involve Sierra Leonean friends and colleagues sharing their food, fun and laughter with me, the stranger in their land. The more I read about the ravages of Ebola in Sierra Leone, the more those wonderful memories come back to me, riding violent waves of nostalgia so powerful and deep that it aches like a migraine of the heart.

What is striking in the photos is the preponderance of high wattage smiles on peoples’ faces. People sharing, playing, working, partying and living – together. Loneliness is not a social ill people endemic to this part of the world. The shots capture village chiefs in consultations with their elders, groups of young men at work in their oil palm stands, family members ecstatically greeting each other – falling into each others’ arms – after long absences, groups of women weeding rice fields or parboiling rice or chopping green leaves for the wonderful sauces known as plassas, entire communities processing rich, red palm oil, groups of teenage girls selling hot peppers or peanuts, lean and exuberant footballers chasing after balls in the waves breaking on Freetown’s magnificent Lumley Beach.