Out of Africa
Kenyan nurse Nancy Wambui Itotia is working in a nursing home in England. What has brought her there - so far from home and family? Vanessa Baird reports.

Hope FM
To Kenya with Nancy to see what she has left behind - and the effect that the money she sends home has on her family.

Itinerary

Acute phase
Hospital visits reveal the brain-drain of nurses and a deepening crisis in Africa's health provision. Who is to blame?

Health & Migration – THE FACTS

The Kikuyu cradle
A journey through the country’s troubled past to visit Nancy’s 90-year-old mother.

Stop being corrupt!
Kenya’s struggle with sleaze.

Aaieeeeee!
In Banana Hill much is expected of a nurse from abroad.

IF... migrant workers left the rich world what would happen?
An answer in pictures.

We are sorry... We stole your daughter
Nancy helps repair a tradition that was damaged in her absence.

Action

What is to be done?
Brain-drain. Racism. Exploitation. Poverty. Inequality. Charting a path through the healthcare minefield.

FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR

It’s odd. So often debates on migration spin into abstraction. Reality becomes reduced to competing theories and statistics.

The NI is not entirely immune from engaging in this kind of argument, so beloved of political parties and the media in general.

And in doing so we can lose sight of the most important thing – the flesh-and-blood reality of people who for one reason or another live and work thousands of miles from where they were born. We may even lose sight of the fact that these people are ourselves or our ancestors.

This issue of the NI approaches the subject differently by telling the story of one individual, Nancy Wambui Itotia, a migrant nurse working in Britain.

And instead of simply looking at the ‘pull’ factors which have brought her to work in Europe, it examines more closely the ‘push’ factors which have caused her to leave Africa.

In order to do this Nancy kindly agreed to be my guide on a trip back to her home in Kenya so that, in her words, ‘you and your readers can know my environment’. The result is this magazine. It is Nancy’s story and her family’s. And it is her country’s. But it is also the story of a widespread crisis in international healthcare – and the poignantly human costs of our global free-market economy.

Vanessa Baird
for the New Internationalist
Co-operative
vanessab@newint.org

Letters
Street children: an English teenager's response; fighting 'honour' killings; Wolfowitz's record in Indonesia; abortion: both sides now.
PLUS: Letter from Lebanon - after years of self-censoring silence, Reem Haddad says goodbye to the Syrians.

Southern Exposure
The heartbreak of a woman from Tamil Nadu, India, who lost her granddaughter to the tsunami, photographed by Arindam Mukherjee.

View from the South
Are journalistic 'sting' operations exposing corruption justified? Or have journalists climbed on too high a horse? The debate is raging in India, as Urvashi Butalia explains.

Currents
The King of Nepal's draconian crackdown; will the US be forced to stop subsidizing cotton?; Disney rewrites Carib history.
PLUS: WordPower – the language of the environment.
PLUS: Seriously

Worldbeaters
George W Bush goes for broke with his neocon appointees to the World Bank, the UN and UNICEF.

Big Bad World
Corporate responses to protest: part 598, by Polyp.
PLUS: NI Prize Crossword

FRONT COVER & MAGAZINE DESIGN: Alan Hughes & Ian Nixon
On-line mag maintained by: Simon Loffler
All monetary values are expressed in US dollars unless otherwise noted.

© Copyright 2005 New Internationalist Publications Ltd. All rights reserved.