June 2005
Issue No. 379
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Out of Africa
Introducing nurse Nancy Wambui Itotia, her dilemma - and her country's. 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
Kenya Profile
Population: 33.5 million
Total area: 582,646 square kilometres
Life expectancy: 44 years
Acute Phase
Hospital visits reveal the brain-drain of nurses and a deepening crisis in Africa’s health provision. Who is to blame?
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?
There are 86 million economically active migrant and immigrant workers, including refugees, in the world today. Nearly half of them are working in North America and Europe.
We are sorry... We stole your daughter
Nancy helps repair a tradition that was damaged in her absence.
Action
Action contacts and resources.
What is to be done?
Brain-drain. Racism. Exploitation. Poverty. Inequality. Charting a path through the healthcare minefield.
News, views, and & voices
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.
Currents
Bolivia's next challenge to globalization
Presidency hangs in the balance as the
country refuses to knuckle under to Big Oil
Cotton worm turns
Will the US be forced to stop subsidizing cotton?
Disney rewrites Carib history
Pirates of the Caribbean and the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica.
Hell no, they won't go!
After the extraordinary intervention of students from a Glasgow high school, the deportation of a family of asylum seekers from Scotland to Kosovo was put on hold.
Honduras trade protests
On 3 March 2005, the Honduran Congress ratified the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the US, becoming the second country after El Salvador to do so.
The crowning victory
The King of Nepal’s draconian crackdown.
The Vietnamese declare war on Agent Orange
This April marked the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Yet the war is not over for an estimated two million Vietnamese whose exposure to Agent Orange (the nickname of a dioxin-laced herbicide) has been scientifically linked to a series of di
Big Bad World 379
Corporate responses to protest: part 598. by Polyp
Mixed Media
Film
In Santiago, Chile, 1973, during the Allende Government, an élite fee-paying secondary school, run by priests, offers free education to boys from a nearby shanty town.
The priests’ initiative, opposed by many parents, brings together very different worlds
Film
Palindromes
Music
As an androgynous performance artist who sprang out of New York’s club scene, Antony (he lost the surname a long time ago) may seem an unlikely pretender to the tones of Nina Simone, the British-born singer is making an excellent go of it.
Music
Nakedness, for dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, is something akin to a state of absolute truth.
Book
100 Myths About the Middle East by Fred Halliday
Book
Comrades and Strangers: Behind the Closed Doors of North Korea.
Book
A package of hard numbers encased in simple statements is all it takes in David Lester’s The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism to make a powerful agit-prop tool out of a small book. Like an unrelenting Michael Moore in print, the type is crudely designed to make
Making Waves
Interview with Dave Logie from Greenpeace Amazonas.
NI Essay
Jeremy Seabrook uncovers his own roots in a now-lost industrial culture to track how the world has been dazzled and damaged by consumerism.
Country Profile
Venezuela
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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
Voices from the margins:
Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more.
- Poetry Slam in Zimbabwe
- The House of Hunger poetry slam held in Zimbabwe in 2006, and organised by the Pamberi Trust, showcased young artists performing inspirational work on issues from corporate power to child soldiers. The video features four of the poets.
Published by Pambazuka News.
- Iranian women speak out
- 3 March 2007, London. Women's rights activists marched through the English capital last week to celebrate International Women's Day with a protest against the misogyny of the Islamic regime in Iran and the threat of invasion by the US. Hear the voices of Iranian feminists Azar and Leila Parnian and the sounds of the demonstration as it passed through the heart of the city. Click here to learn more about the campaign.
Produced by Heidi Bachram.
- Raised Voices audio:
- Benny from West Papua on Corporate Power
- Vinayan from India on agriculture
New Internationalist (NI) workers' co-operative exists to report on issues of world poverty and inequality; to focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide; to debate and campaign for the radical changes necessary to meet the basic needs of all; and to bring to life the people, the ideas and the action in the fight for global justice.
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