By Brahima Ouedraogo As many as 12,000 HIV/AIDS patients in Burkina Faso are at risk of losing food aid, which they rely on to keep them healthy while taking life-prolonging ARV drugs. OUAGADOUGOU, 14 May 2015 (IRIN) – For years you couldn’t tell if someone in Burkina Faso had HIV/AIDS just by looking at them. Now it’s getting easier again because cuts in food assistance are depriving them of nutrition, AIDS advocates say. Some 12,000 HIV/AIDS patients who rely on food aid are at risk of food insecurity and health problems this year if programmes don’t receive the required level…
Author: ARIN News
By Jennifer Lazuta Children wash their hands before entering a classroom in GueckedouGUECKEDOU, 13 May 2015 (IRIN) – “Life is back to normal, but everything has changed,” said 30-year-old Yawa Keterine Camara as she slowly stirred a boiling cauldron of sauce outside her mud-brick home in southeastern Guinea. “I live again like before, but nothing is quite the same.”Camara, who lost her husband to Ebola in November, said her life, like many, many other Guineans, is now divided in two: pre-Ebola and post-Ebola, the before and after.“Sometimes it seems impossible that we are still here, still doing what we did…
By Jennifer Lazuta Patients receive treatment at Gueckedou’s busy hospitalGUECKEDOU, 8 May 2015 (IRIN) – Until Ebola, the main hospital in Gueckedou was often deserted. Now, on a Saturday afternoon, the place is bustling. Doctors and nurses move efficiently from patient to patient. Families sit on straw mats beside the beds of their loved ones, talking quietly as they wait.“Before, the service was empty,” Doctor N’Fansoumane Kalissa, the hospital director, told IRIN. “The sick didn’t come…They saw traditional healers or were treating themselves. But people have started coming here because they know Ebola was real and that even though Ebola…
Many children in Freetown who should be in school are notFREETOWN, 6 May 2015 (IRIN) – Fear and poverty are keeping many children in Sierra Leone out of classrooms and on the streets hawking or labouring– another effect of the Ebola outbreak that kept schools closed for nine months. Four weeks into a new term, a third of the seats in Freetown’s Kroo Bay Community Primary School are still empty. “Most [parents] complain that they don’t have the money to send kids to school. There are many challenges in the school and the community. Kids have a lot of fear,”…
By Karim Camara and Jennifer Lazuta Guineans vote in the capital Conakry in the 2010 presidential electionCONAKRY, 5 May 2015 (IRIN) – There appears to be little appetite for the Guinean opposition’s promised campaign of civil disobedience. However, deep-rooted ethnic tensions, suspicions over Ebola and simmering resentment for the security forces could still see pre-election protests boil over.Opposition-led demonstrations have turned increasingly violent over the past month. Hundreds of protestors have been arrested. The opposition says at least two have been killed, scores more injured. “I’m really afraid,” Ibrahima Bah, a taxi driver in the capital Conakry, told IRIN. “People…
IRIN’s West Africa editor Jennifer Lazuta recently spent eight days in Guinea, travelling in and around the town of Gueckedou in the heart of the country’s Forest Region, where the Ebola outbreak is believed to have begun in December 2013. She shares some impressions from the field. By Jennifer Lazuta A billboard exhorts citizens to handwash with soapGUECKEDOU, Guinea, 1 May 2015 (IRIN) – The first thing that struck me on flying into Guinea wasn’t so much the pervasive hand-washing stations or constant temperature-taking. It wasn’t the giant billboards scattered throughout the city proclaiming “STOP EBOLA” in multiple languages. And…
Tuareg rebelsBAMAKO, 30 April 2015 (IRIN) – The last few years in Mali have been busy: an independence declaration, a coup, a mutiny, a northern takeover by Islamist groups, a French military intervention, a hostage crisis, a guerrilla campaign, a preliminary peace deal, and finally, in February, a ceasefire.Given all the turmoil, it is little surprise the last two entries – the peace deal and the ceasefire – are now under grave threat.Tuareg rebels have long fought for independence, or at least greater autonomy, for the large part of northern Mali they call Azawad. The rebels are dragging their feet…
By Jennifer Lazuta A child receives a shot of measles vaccineGUECKEDOU, 29 April 2015 (IRIN) – The odds were stacked against Guinea’s vaccination teams. The initial side effects of the measles vaccine can easily be mistaken for the first symptoms of hemorraghic fever and a false rumour had spread blaming the distribution of deworming pills in late 2013 for bringing Ebola into the country. But thanks to an exhaustive door-to-door effort, promoting the benefits of the vaccine and dispelling myths about Ebola, nearly 100,000 children between the ages of six months and 10 years in Guinea’s southeastern Gueckedou region are now…
Follow @{0}More than 100 aid workers were killed or injured by improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2014.DUBAI, 17 April 2015 (IRIN) – Welcome to IRIN’s weekly assortment of journalism and research about the humanitarian world that piqued our interest.Five to read: There can never be a humanitarian component to military action Stephen Cornish, executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Canada, calls into question the practice of mixing military and humanitarian missions. “There is simply no compatibility between humanitarian action and the use of military force in combat,” he says. “One has as its singular objective the…
WEIRD whichever way you look at itBELGRADE, 15 April 2015 (IRIN) – I’m WEIRD. I’m not sure whether I became an aid worker because I’m weird, but I was definitely a WEIRD aid worker. I realised this after reading a 2010 academic article which pointed out that an overwhelming proportion of psychology experiments were carried out on an “extraordinarily restricted sample” of humanity – American university undergraduates. The article concluded that this sample was “one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens,” because they were too WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.That seemed credible to…