Circumcision Reduces Risk of Contracting HIV/AIDs

Some have referred to it as the surgical vaccine that reduces the risk of men contracting HIV/AIDs by at least sixty percent. Some say that the reduction in risk, or protective effect is as high as 76 percent, which is equal to the protection that the flu shot gives against the flue. What is this wonder surgery? Circumcision.

The controlled, clinical trails were held in three African countries: Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. All three countries have high levels of HIV/AIDS. More than 11,000 HIV negative, uncircumcised, young men took part in the trials. In order to be accepted into the study, the young men had to be willing to be circumcised. A randomly selected portion of the men were immediately circumcised by a doctor, while the others did not undergo the surgery. The trials in all three countries were halted early because the results were so evident that it would be unethical to continue to forbid the control group from being circumcised. The South African Study lasted 18 months and 1,446 who young men who remained uncircumcised 49 contracted HIV. While only 20 of the 1,431 who were circumcised became infected.

Scientists believe that the region between the foreskin and the shaft of the penis provides a possible hiding place for HIV to hide after intercourse.

In the face of such compelling trials, the World Health Organization and the United Nations HIV/AIDS agency both recommend circumcision as a component of any comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention program.

Even though circumcision was being practiced thousand of years ago, and these recent trials point its ability to reduce the risk of contracting HIV, the very brief and cheap surgery is far from being the norm all over Africa. Neither Christianity nor many forms of African Traditional Religion forbid circumcision, and it is among the rites of Islam. Traditional beliefs in many ethnic groups in east and southern Africa require circumcision of adolescent young men. Yet, other ethnic groups in that part of the continent view circumcision as a part of their identity. In West Africa, even though many ethnic groups do not require circumcision, community health education has caused a growing number of parents to take their infant sons to clinics to receive the surgery.

Most development and aid agencies currently attempt to persuade families to have their sons circumcised, yet they will have to study further to come up with compelling, culturally appropriate instruction to persuade more to go under the scalpel.

Of course, circumcised men are in no way immune to contracting HIV/AIDS.  It is still best to only have sex within marraige and for both the man and women to be tested for HIV prior to marriage.

For a more information read the following articles:

Circumcision — A Surgical Strategy for HIV Prevention in Africa - The New England Journal of Medicine, 2008

Male circumcision for HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa: who, what, when? -Global Health Sciences Literature Digest, 2009
Research: Male Circumcision and HIV Prevention - USAID On-Line

I have just witnessed a video that has penetrated my deepest emotions. I lived in Kenya for 16 years (1972-88). I am attached to her and her people. The religious, political, and ethnic rivalry and violence pains me, but nothing like in pains the people of Kenya. It is there country. The Kenyans under 35 years of age are disenfranchised from sources of change and power, yet only they can alter the future.

This video, produced by Kuweni Serious (be serious), is about Kenya, yet it speaks words and stirs up emotions that are helpful for the young throughout Africa.

See more from Kuweni Serious at http://www.kuweniserious.org/

Well. Long story short, the TED people (who charge $6,000 to attend one of their conferences) didn’t take too kindly to the idea of their name being attached to “poor,” and Teddy decided that another platform might be a more appropriate venue through which the voices of the poor could be heard. And Villages in Action was born: click here to read entire story.

In September 2010, international organizations, heads of state, celebrities and specialists gathered to review progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As you may know, the MDGs were set in 2000 to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. In the midst of the coverage of these grand events, high profile attendees wined, dined and debated the relative merits of each MDG plan, while the actual “poor,” (the object of these goals) were not invited to these elite events.  click here to read about Villages in Action

First Villages In Action conference to take place in village of Masindi, Uganda, November 27th.  Comments about the up-coming conference on A View From the Cave blog.  click here to read A View from the Cave.

A New Look at Africa

A TED speech by Ugandan Andrew Mwenda.  Andrew Mwenda is a print, radio and television journalist.  He earned a master’s degree in Economics at the University of London in the UK.

Mwenda is an active critic of many forms of Western aid to Africa.  He has strongly criticized aid agencies and charities for what he says is their ineffectiveness and collusion with corruption.

Mwenda journalistic career has led him to the Daily Monitor newspaper in Kampala starting in the mid-1990s.  He has hosted a radio show, Andrew Mwenda Live, since 2001.

In 2005, Mwenda was charged with sedition by the Ugandan government for criticizing Ugandan President Museveni on his radio show.

He has produced documentaries and commentary for the BBC on the dangers of aid and debt relief to Africa.  In December 2007, he launched a new newspaper in Kampala, The Independent, a leading source of uncensored news in the country.

Click on the video below or to read a transcript of the the speech click here and click on the iterative transcript option in the right hand column.

Andrew Mwenda said,

• Some people, including the G8 members, see massive aid as the answer to Africa’s problems.
• Most African countries receive 12-15 percent of the their gross national product (GDP) in foreign aid, 10% higher than the Marshall Plan gave Germany and France.
• The media is not telling the whole truth about Africa when it only talks about her problems.
• There are 63 nations on the continent only 6 civil wars (as of the time of this speech).
• This negative news appeals to sympathy and pity.  The response has stripped Africa of self initiative.
• We need to re-frame the challenge that is facing Africa: the challenge of hope is wealth creation.
• The wealth creating agents in a society are the entrepreneurs.  They make up about 4% of the population and another 16 percent imitate them.
• African governments are listening to outside funding agencies and not their own citizen entrepreneurs.
• Aid going to governments has made government service one of the post profitable careers in African countries.
• So ethnic groups within a country vie for control of the government, because government is the source of aid funds.
• Between 1960 and 2003 African countries have receive a total of 600 billion dollars in foreign aid.
• Where has this aid gone - to governments, not to local entrepreneurs and business people who can create wealth.

What do you think of Andrew Mwenda’s speech?  Is private business and entrepreneurship a better answer than government to the poverty in Africa?

Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

Chimamanda Adichie says, “I am a story teller.”  She is a entertaining and intelligent speaker. The proof that she is a superb story teller is the way she will grab your attention and your heart.

Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977 and grew up in the town of Nsukka. She graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University and went on to receive her Masters in Creative Wiring from Johns Hopkins and, in 2008, her Masters in African Studies from Yale.

I am presenting Adichie as the second in a series of six outstanding African speakers.  Click on the photo below to view the video.  If you cannot view the video, click here to view the written transcript of the speech.

In this speech Chimamanda Adichie said:

• She wrote about her experiences in reading.  She had read European books with white characters, so her first writing from the age of seven were about white characters.
• We are vulnerable in the face of stories, especially children.
• When she discovered African books, things changed.
• She discovered that she and the things around her in Nigeria also had a place in literature.
• It saved her from having a single story.
• The single story of Africa that most believe, that of hunger, war, and corruption, comes from Western Literature.
• Show people as one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
• A single story outlook robs people of dignity.

What do you think about what she said?  Post comments below.

New Book

Half of a Yellow Sun

A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed.

What Does God Know Anyway?

by Richard Chowning

What does God know anyway?

.. there’s a husband with an empty place inside.

.. a Kipsigis woman longs for the daughter who died at birth.

.. a groom’s heartaches at the suffering and death of his bride.

What does God know anyway?

.. the joy of holding a new born child.

.. the freshness after the rain.

.. the fulfillment of completing a task.

What does God know anyway?

.. warm spit sliding down his face and blood steaming down his body from his forehead to the nail pinning his feet to the stake.

What does God know anyway?

.. the gut wrenching anguish of watching someone he has helped turn against him.

.. the dilemma of commitment and the price that must be paid.

What God knows most of all is ..

.. his labor, pain and determination brings eternal salvation and rest to those wiry and afraid.

What I want God to know is..

.. I praise his being and his name because he knows me, really knows me, and loves me anyway.

..……Richard Chowning