World AIDS Day 2008

Today is World AIDS Day. Ignore the date on the post, for some reason its reverted to US time. I am definitely writing on December 1.

World AIDS Day is relevant to this blog because globally, sub-Saharan Africa is the world region most heavily affected by HIV/AIDS.  Two thirds of all people living with HIV (67%) are in that region, which also accounted for 75% of all AIDS deaths in 2007. An estimated 1.9 million people in sub-Saharan Africa became infected with HIV in 2007. The majority of these cases are in southern Africa, with over one third of both new infections and AIDS deaths. (More recent figures than 2007 are not available. It takes time to collate them and so my source, the 2008 UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, is really mostly about the epidemic a year ago. )

I don’t imagine it’s changed much in a year anyway. And those are staggering figures. You can read more detail in the UNAIDS fact sheet for the region.

The good news is that the epidemic in some of those southern African countries seems to be stabilising, and also that South Africa is doing an about turn on earlier policies based on scepticism about HIV as the cause of AIDS. It’s no coincidence that this scepticism has coincided with the largest epidemic in the world - 5.7 million with HIV, according to UNAIDS – so the change is more than welcome.

I read an interesting book earlier this year that attempted to explain what many consider a nonsensical and dangerous position. In her book on HIV/AIDS in Africa, The Invisible Cure, Helen Epstein suggests that South African President Thabo Mbeki clung to the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS because to do otherwise might play into the hands of racists who blamed the African epidemic on stereotypes of African sexual promiscuity and perversion. She argues that he has been a proponent of an African cultural, economic and political renaissance and such a negative explanation of the devastating epidemic did not fit well with trying to project a positive image of Africa and Africans. But he couldn’t come up with any other reason why HIV – in other countries almost exclusively associated with homosexuality, sex work and injecting drug use – has so disproportionately affected heterosexuals in Africa. 

Whatever his reasons, Harvard researchers last week claimed that Mbeki’s policies are responsible for 300,000 deaths in South Africa. I wonder what he thinks about that? And of course it’s not just deaths – HIV has had a profound effect on African economies in South Africa and other hard-hit countries. It would be a heavy thing to have on your conscience.

Epstein does offer an alternative explanation for the African epidemic. Her theory is that in countries like the US, people practice serial monogamy, but in Africa, people are more likely to have more than one relationship going on at the same time. This can be for cultural or economic reasons – such as marrying your brother’s widow, or young women relying on financial support from older men when structural adjustment programs have eroded their employment opportunities. Or it can just be a different way of approaching relationships. Over a lifetime, an individual African may indeed have fewer sexual partners than a serial monogomast in the west, and they may also, Epstein suggests, remain more committed to the ones they have.

Epstein withholds moral judgement on either system, but points out that it’s a lot harder to pass on HIV through serial monogamy than it is when you’re part of a network of “concurrent” relationships, as she calls them. I won’t go into the details – it’s a complex theory worthy of more space than I can give it here.  If it’s an issue you’re interested in, buy the book, I strongly recommend it.

Epstein isn’t just concerned with dissecting African sexuality, you may be relieved to hear. (Though I think she does it with great sensitivity and integrity). The “Cure” of the title is community mobilisation, an open approach to the problem, and honesty about both the causes and the impact of HIV.  She’s fairly critical of mega-bucks projects financed by western money and inspired by western ideas. The solution, she says, pointing to successful campaigns in Uganda early on in the epidemic, lies with Africans who know their own communities best.

 *****

With the epidemic so bad in Africa, it’s no surprise that our own recent figures on the HIV epidemic indicate that in Australia, proportionally more people from sub-Saharan Africa have HIV/AIDS than other communities for the years 2003 – 2007. I stress that we are talking very small actual numbers here. The proportions are calculated according to numbers with HIV per 100,000, and the 2006 Census indicated there were only 248,699 people born in Africa resident in Australia. The National Centre for HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (phew, what a mouthful) which has provided the HIV stats, has a graph showing we’re talking maybe 25 per 100,000, as compared to 4 per 100K for Australian born. But there are far, far more Australian born people with HIV than African born (63% of all diagnoses for 2003 – 2007).

If you look at the whole picture, in Africa and here, it means a growing new group of people in Australia who are affected by HIV. As I’ve said, there not actually many African people here with HIV, but add in partners, families and friends in Australia and relatives back home, and it starts to be an issue that those of us who are part of African communities need to address. Indeed, African communities here have been doing so. A couple of years ago Africans held a World AIDS Day soccer tournament in Sydney to raise awareness about it.

So here are some resources that may be useful if you, or people you care about, are closely affected by HIV/AIDS:

The Multicultural HIV & Hep C website has  info about HIV in quite a few African languages. 

PozHet, Straight Arrows and Positive Women are all organisations for heterosexuals with HIV and I think all have had experience dealing with positive people with some kind of African connection. If you’re gay, the National Association of People Living With HIV/AIDS can refer you to local groups. Here’s some info for partners, families and friends of people with HIV/AIDS, and here’s another list of a range of HIV organisations in Australia, including AIDS Councils.

I’ve left it a bit late in the day to post this, but in Australia www.worldaidsday.org.au lists events and actions for World AIDS Day. If you’re not here in Oz, just google the term. Or go out on the streets and buy a red ribbon. This matters to me personally because I have known people who have died of AIDS. So this is for:

Robert Ariss, who died before my son’s birth, Dodj Trafic & Andrew Morgan, who didn’t get to see him grow up, Simon Nkoli who welcomed us to South Africa the first time we passed through, but never since, plus Amelia,  Megan and Richard, Tony, Jacques, Vaughan …

… and for all those still fighting to stay alive & live good lives with HIV.

Culinary success – thanks to the humble peanut

I think I should put it on record that when it comes to Ghanaian food I am not a completely hopeless cook, even by ActionMan’s standards. One dish that I have cooked for him, and he has come back for more, is nkatiakwan, or peanut soup.

Nkatia is the word for peanut in Twi. In English they call it groundnut, which I suppose reflects the surprise of early European explorers, to find a nut growing on the ground and not on a tree.  This term seems to be common throughout Africa. A quick internet search on the origins of the word “peanut” found that “groundnut” is indeed an old usage, and “peanut” was first used in 1807. It doesn’t say by whom, where or why, but it did tell me that peanuts were taken to Africa from South America by 1502. And in spite of Garrison Keillor’s cynical remark that “Peanut butter has survived everything that has been done to improve it”, what great things Africans have done with the peanut ever since!

Before I go into the wonders of peanut soup however I will digress briefly and say that it’s really worth looking around to see what enormously creative things people all over the world have done with the very concept of peanut. For example there are scholarly works such as this one on the importance of the peanut to 19th century Gambian trade networks. Unfortunately you have to pay to read them. There is also a faulous conspiracy theory about The Truth which the powerful and ruthless Peanut Cartel is hiding from us all (that peanuts are to nuts what hot dogs are to meat and you don’t want to know what the shells are made of…).

If you are allergic to peanuts it would probably be best to avoid dinner invitations from Ghanaians because you may risk accidental death by peanut soup. But peanut allergies amongst Ghanaians themselves are rare or possibly non-existent. Allergy researchers have noticed this fact and have been looking into it. It may be due to the number of bugs in Ghanaian guts (known to offer a protective effect against allergies generally), or it could come down to cooking methods. Apparently peanuts are more dangerous when roasted. When boiled they don’t provoke a reaction. (The Foods Matter site summarises research. For more detail you will have to subscribe to something like one of my favourite mags, the New Scientist. It’s where I first read about the research.)

In Ghana peanuts are eaten boiled in the shell as a snack – I used to buy 20 pesewas worth for Nana from a hawker who passed by our place every morning, until Maame Yaa told me the doctor had advised against her eating fatty foods. Or they are roasted, ground and then boiled in peanut soup. The ground peanuts are sold in the markets in plastic bags; obrunis l met in Ghana were very happy about this because it’s a bit of a comfort food, and apparently tastes even better than peanut butter back home. I never tested this, becuase I’m not a fan, but I can believe it – so many of the nut products we get from supermarkets taste slightly rancid to me, but Ghanaian peanuts are definitely fresh. And here’s a tip off: Asians like boiled peanuts too, and you can sometimes buy them in Chinese or Vietnamese grocery stores.

However peanuts are also eaten roasted in Ghana. You can buy tiny quantities tied up in plastic or in newspaper twsits and eat them as a condiment with roasted plantains, or add them to etoh, which is boiled, pounded cocoyams mixed with palm oil. In my opinion you need quite a lot of peanuts and if possible avocado as well, to make etoh really enjoyable.  AM thought it was disgusting and so did his brothers, but it’s one of Obaapa’s favourite foods. Before she left for Ghana I asked her what she wanted to eat first when she got there, and it was etoh.

However I think you would be hard pushed to find a non-allergenic person who didn’t like peanut soup. I haven’t found anyone yet – even when I’ve only been offering the version that I cook. Although of course, my version has been anglicised for western tastes. I don’t include the dried fish to which Obaapa seems addicted, (I think she just puts it in everything, regardless), and I cheat and put in some diced chicken breast as well as the whole jointed chicken (right at the end of cooking the soup, or it will be too tough). I do use boiling rather than roasting fowls when I can but I probably don’t put in enough chilli. I do, however, use the correct chilli: habanero. It still doesn’t taste quite right, but it tastes good.

Here is the recipe. I have this recipe because a few years ago AM’s primary school decided to capitalise on how multicultural they were and produced an international cookbook. I thought it would be great if Obaapa contributed so I followed her around the kitchen taking notes one day, ran it through my own test kitchen and then submitted it to the school. The kitchen-stained page linked above is the result. Whenever I despair of feeding AM, this is the page I turn to. Enjoy.

What price a good meal?

ActionMan and I have been engaged in delicate financial negotations recently. I’ve been looking for some extra work to top up the family income, and he sees this as the green light for more pocket money. Not necessarily, I said, as working full time might mean I have more expenses, like travel, work clothes and perhaps more take-away food. (not to mention breaking the back of my Ghana debt).

His solution to this was to offer to cook – for a price. $10 for two meals, $50 for seven (that really doesn’t add up, does it?). And to prove that he could do it, he cooked four nights in a row: pasta, pot roast (at his uncle’s house), steak, pot roast again (at home). He did well. Everything was edible and he learned a few things about cooking. It kind of fell apart over the weekend, and when he finds out today that I didn’t get the job I was after, his enthusiasm may fall apart too.

Not that I’d agreed to $50 for seven meals. I’m open to paying $10 for two, and I might do that even without a second job, but there’s the little matter of contributing to household chores to consider. I reckon he could be doing more than he is, and I don’t think I should be paying for all of it. Perhaps i could do a trade where he cooks instead of doing other things around the house. Not that he’s doing a lot now. He reckons that when he leaves home he’s going to live in a mess because he doesn’t like things tidy anyway. I try and remind myself that I, too, was a slob when I was his age and it took cleaning other people’s houses for a job, to make me more house-proud myself.

Anyway, it was very nice to have my meals cooked for me for four days. Even though he managed to leave a thin film of grease over everything in the kitchen: salt shaker, fridge door, floor ….

It’s not that I hate cooking, it’s just that I like a bit of mental space to do it. I don’t feel I have that after being at work all day. Plus AM and I have totally different taste in food. He likes meat, I like vegies. He likes spicy food, I like “bland, disgusting” food. I like beef, he likes lamb. etc. etc.

When AM was a baby I tried to do all the right things the baby books tell you about food. Introduce one new food at a time, mashed.  Start with banana, avocado, pumpkin. He didn’t like any of them. Unbeknownst to me, whenever they were home alone together DadaK would give him food straight out of his own bowl – spicy, oily, meaty Ghanaian food – and he loved it. No wonder I wasn’t getting anywhere! Many people were astonished that so young a child could eat such hot food. I can only put it down to his African genes or to the fact that I was eating a lot of chilli while pregnant. DadaK was cooking my favourite Ghanaian foods for me almost every night in the last month or two before AM was born.

AM still loves chilli and fatty meat, scorns sandwiches and salads. So feeding him is a challenge. Far better if he gets to know how to cook what he likes and all I have to do is steam some broccoli to go with my portion. Oh, and foot the bill.

I have made attempts to cook African food for AM. Well, for both of us. I’ve tried jollof rice – rice cooked with chili, onion, tomatos and shreds of tinned sardine or corned beef. But it’s never as nice as DadaK’s or Obaapa’s and I end up having to eat it all. Soggy would be the best word to describe my attempts at this classic West African dish, which DadaK pronounces as “Joylove”. Not when I cook it.

At one time before Obaapa’s arrival, DadaK moved back in with us for a while because he was out of a job and convalescing from an operation. Friends sometimes brought food over for him – invalid’s sheep head soup complete with teeth. Not for me thanks.

Faced with the challenge of trying to feed DadaK as well as AM,  I got into the habit of cooking a very tasty  – er – thing – to go with green bananas or cassava. It goes like this: You boil a tomato or two with a habanero chilli, some lady’s finger eggplants and/or okra. Then you grind up some raw onion with the boiled chili and salt, and roughly mash in the vegetables and some tinned sardines. The final touch is to fry a small amount of onion in quite a lot of palm oil and pour it over the top. Soft peaks of mashed eggplant poke through the rich orange pool of oil. Delectable. Truly.

The whole package is called ampesi – which as far as I can tell means ’starchy vegetables and whatever hot & salty stuff you care to eat with them’. Ghanaians seem to name their meals for the starch that’s consumed rather than the protein. Where I’d say “I had steak” they’d say “I had potatoes”.  Well, probably that’s simplifying it, but to my mind it about sums up the different eating patterns of wealthy and poorer countries.

I think I make a good ampesi, at least according to the recipe I’ve outlined above, but I haven’t cooked it for years. Partly because palm oil is totally saturated and I’m trying to be healthy, but also because – guess what! AM doesn’t like green bananas or cassava. He only likes yams, which are much harder to come by and far too expensive for anyone to risk me stuffing up the cooking of them. Sigh. Now I’m really feeling nostalgic for Ghana food.

Stay tuned for my next exciting installment and recipe for a Ghanaian dish that we’ll both eat: peanut soup.

So what is cultural difference?

Australian African network has just released preliminary results for their online survey of people in mixed relationships in Australia. The data’s a bit skewed, cos mostly white women filled in the survey – but it’s also the first survey of its kind that we know of in Australia. It’s also a bit skewed because it’s focussing on challenges – where’s the question that asks about the positive things in mixed relationships? Well I have to take part of the blame for that oversight, (being on the AAN committee), but our observations have been that there are more challenges in mixed relationships, which is why we asked it. And the survey did provide evidence for this in that around one third of respondents were no longer in mixed relationships – but were still parenting their mixed children from those relationships.

So what did people think were the challenges? Most people named lack of connection to African culture, cultural isues and racism/prejudice from the society.

Well if most of your respondents are white, I guess it’s no surprise that connection to African culture is a problem – but really, it shouldn’t be that way, should it? Women talked about losing contact with African communities after separation and were concerned for their children. This is a complex issue – I’m not going to blame African communities for not being more inclusive – tho perhaps they could be. I think it comes down to the next big ticket item on the challenges list: cultural difference. If it’s a challenge in your relationship, then it’s going to be a challenge when you are in your (ex)partner’s African community. (I don’t mean mixed African events here, I mean just Ghanaian, or just Kenyan).

I know I’m not the only white woman who’s gone to an African community event – say a wedding – and felt awkward and isolated. Just as an African at an all Aussie event can feel out on a limb (although they may also be getting targeted with racism). It can be an experience of culture shock, unless you already have good friends in the community, or speak the language fluently, or are boundlessly confident and extroverted.  It takes time to connect and feel included, and if all your connections are via your partner, you can lose that with separation and it’s hard to rebuild.

But what exactly did those survey respondents mean, when they said “cultural difference” or “cultural issues”? It’s a very broad term and not really that helpful if you’re trying to pin down what resources & support to provide to a comunity. The term can cover a huge range of things, from the jovial celebration of food, music and style that’s promoted by our multicultural policies; to acute and profound disagreement about how to raise your children, or how many people you should be having sex with; to the feeling that the rug’s just been pulled out from under your feet and there’s no floor underneath. You plummet downwards, wondering how you could have got it soooo wrong. Your culturally different partner watches, perplexed. Or perhaps they’re falling down a different crevasse.

Is that why people didn’t go into more detail on the survey? Because they couldn’t put into words that feeling of desolation when you suddenly realise that you each have totally different interpretations/ understandings / judgements about something and are not even in the same book, let alone on the same page? Or was it because to voice the specifics might feel politically incorrect, or because they didn’t want to air their dirty linen in public?

Or was it less fraught than all that? Perhaps people just didn’t think it worth detailing the pettty conflicts over how to wash the dishes (sink or running water? Anglo Aussies can get a bit tense about this: compromise with a rinsing basin), or having to cook separately because you don’t like each other’s food, or which bits of your body you think it’s appropriate to shave.

Whatever. All we can do is speculate about exactly what people mean by cultural difference, but at least the fact that people mentioned it points to it being a challenge – just as AAN suspected. However the survey did bring up other interesting data, like the fact that kids in single parent non-African households have less access to African language, and that mixed families have less extended family support, and that settlement issues like unemployment and financial problems have an impact on mixed families too.

The survey is, as I said at the beginning, skewed. I think of it as imperfect but important. There’s valuable info but mostly from one set of perspectives. If you’re in a position to redress the balance, please fill out the survey.  It’s online unti late December. Just don’t forget to spell out what you mean by cultural difference!

And if you’re really feeling enthusiastic about expressing your point of view, you may also want to be interviewed for a small research project on mixed relationships. Email anniestopford@optus.net.com.au for more details.

More to the point

I’m back home in Sydney after the Making Links conference and reflecting on some of the great things I learned about. A couple that may be of interest to readers of this blog are:

The Home Lands Project. Coordinator Kirsty Baird gave a great presentation on this internet TV project, which seeks to link young people from refugee communities in Australia with their homeland communities by making TV programs about themselves, on the premise that such connections build stability for young people settling in a new country. They are working with two communities in their pilot project – Karen and Sudanese. Young people from both communities in Melbourne have already started making programs, and young Karen in a refugee camp on the Burma/Thai border have also started. The project is still trying to establish links with a suitable Sudanese community back in Africa – they are looking in Southern Sudan, Kenyan Kakuma refugee camp, and Sudanese communities in Egypt. Wish them luck, it’s a great intitiative for which I can see loads of potential down the track, in linking many communities of different diasporas. Including, perhaps, mixed kids? Who needs Fox studios anyway?

The other initiative I want to mention is Africa on Screen. This link doesn’t give you a lot of recent info about it, but I think it’s a group of film-makers that formed after some Sierra Leone journalists made a  film in Australia – Darkness over Paradise – with footage they’d smuggled out of their country during the conflict. Bouyed by film-making tuition at Information and Cultural Exchange, a growing group of Africans in Sydney, from a wider range of countries, have been making more films. One, Colourblind, was screened at the Making Links conference digital arts festival. It was a moving short film about how racism can affect even people who are blind. It’s told entirely without words; very effective.

And finally, I didn’t get to finish my last post about the Aboriginal language Awabakal – just wanted to tell you that apparently the clergyman who wrote down the language in the 19th century was a Yorkshireman – and so when the community was trying to figure out how it would have been pronounced, they had to get in a linguist to ‘de-yorkshire’ it before they could proceed any further. Made me laugh – also made the token Yorkshireman who was at the conference laugh when I told him about it. So I leave you with this thought: how many other languages have been the victim of accent attack?

Making links with language

I am shamelessly promoting a conference that I helped organise – Making Links 2008, a conference for not-for-profits on information technology, web development, multimedia & stuff like that. It has nothing whatever to do with bicultural parenting, but … yesterday there was a fantastic session about a database and training program called Miromaa  which has been set up to record Aboriginal languages in Australia.

The presenter, Daryn McKenny from Awarbukarl, was passionate abnout this project, which is really interesting. The fact that the database includes pix and video of words & concepts and that he made his whole presentation using digital stories (including some cute animationes) rather than PowerPoint, made a potentially dry subject fascinating. I also learned that the Awabakal language – I think it’s from the  Newcastle area, where he’s based, was recorded by missioaries in the 19th century and the very first book of an ABoriginal language was published somewhere around the 1890s. So I cornered him after the session to talk about language preservation, and how his organisation Awarbukarl are figuring out how to rebuild a language which, except for a few words,  no one speaks anymore. He seemed happy to be cornered, it is his passion, after all.

Others at the session seemd more interested in the techie bangs & whistles, and I can’t say I blame them – although another presenter, open source advocate nancy Mauro-Flude later expressed concern about his reliance on microsoft technology. Gotta go, my internet credit’s running out! I feel like I’m back in Ghana …

Yes, it’s still true

Almost 24 hours later, Barack Obama is still President elect of the US! It’s not a dream, McCain conceded, Florida’s all okay this time, it’s really, really true. (ActionMan even tried to fool me yesterday that McCain had won, such is his warped sense of humour, but he was too late, the truth was out).  Yay!

Run around in excited circles for five minutes jumping up and down and squealing. 

Although his election looked a sure thing, I was so anxious it would get derailed by racism at the last moment – but no, in fact the opposite. It’s a very hopeful thing.  

And it’s an indication of real change in a society when a US President stars in a reggae song.  Yay!

I still don’t know how to embed YouTube videos, it doesn’t seem to work for me - but you can sing along with Coco Tea at http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxn9jhypHfo

The US has come a long way since Buffalo Soldier.

And then there’s the Kenyan comedians staging a mock election in Kisumu.

Quite apart from his compassionate outlook, progressive politics and wonderful oratory, (etc., etc) having a Black President is going to inject a lots of great African culture into politics.

And I guess I just have to say, a trifle smugly, just look what can come of a mixed race marriage …

Yay!