Watching a report from Tanzania inspired Morning Irelandeditor Niall Martinand, daughter Laura Martin to help fight malaria among Masai villagers
I remember sitting outside our house, behind a trestle table, with my unwanted toys, penny sweets and home-made lemonade for sale. As a 10-year-old it was mortifying to sit for a whole summer afternoon with our crayon-drawn sale-of-work sign, raising money for my great-aunt Sr Chris in the market town of Thika, in Kenya.
Far more private and captivating for a small boy was collecting stamps "for the missions" or, bizarrely, collecting thousands of ring pulls from soft-drink cans. I have no idea what that was all about, but there was a certain satisfaction in stringing thousands of ring pulls on to a rope and handing them over for transformation into hard cash on the other side of the world.
We sent the few pounds we raised from such fundraising activities to Sr Chris to buy sewing machines and train local destitute women to sew.
A few years ago Goal, Trócaire and Concern noticed a trend in fundraising. People wanted to know where their money went and who benefited. Maybe it was compassion fatigue: the same countries were having crisis after crisis, and even countries that were once relatively wealthy, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, were in spirals of insecurity or poverty. Maybe it was that donors wanted a connection with the recipients; in the film About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson's lonely character writes to his adopted child as if he were family now. "Dear N'dugu, I hope you're sitting down, because . . . I'm afraid I've got some bad news. Since I last wrote to you my wife, Helen, your foster mother, passed away very suddenly, from a blood clot in her brain. The services were lovely and very well attended . . . Life is short, N'dugu."
These days Bóthar, Action Aid, Oxfam, Concern, Trócaire, World Vision, Save the Children and a host of other charities have catalogues from which you can buy goats, pigs, in-calf heifers, hens or even bees for families in the developing world.
It was a Channel 4 report last year that got me thinking. Jon Snow was in Africa, filming the manufacture of a new type of anti-malaria net in Arusha, in northern Tanzania. The A to Z factory employs nearly 5,000 people, making high-tech, long-life insecticide nets. The know-how comes from Sumitomo, a Japanese chemical company. Traditional anti-malaria nets tear easily and have to be dipped in insecticide every six months; the long-life Olyset net has five years of insecticide protection within its plastic fibres.
Last October we sourced 250 of the nets from the A to Z factory. Fr Eusebio, a Divine Word missionary from the Philippines, agreed to carry out a study of two settlements in the bush of the Simanjiro region. The idea was to give nets to one community, then compare how many cases of malaria it suffered with the number at another village, without nets. Nine months later we would collect the data and give nets to the second community.
"We visited each hut in each boma [ or enclosure containing an extended family] telling them about the project. We explained to everyone the importance of the nets in preventing malaria; we told them that some would be getting nets right away and some would get them in June," says Fr Eusebio.
He's a jovial man who demonstrates impressive powers of communication in persuading the very traditional Masai to adapt their ways to modern methods. "It is the old and the young that die from malaria," he tells us as he shows us around a new medical centre at the mission in Simanjiro.
And the Masai are changing. As we speak a wizened Masai man in traditional dress appears from the bush with a mobile phone in his hand. "They come here to use our solar-powered charger," says Fr Eusebio. "We charge them a small fee for this service, and we are able to buy diesel for our ambulances with the money."
The ambulance is in constant use, ferrying the severely injured the horrendously bumpy two- and-a-half-hour journey across the bush to the main hospital in Arusha. The night before we arrived, we learn, one boy died en route.
"This happens regularly out here," says Fr Peter, the Indian priest who was driving the ambulance when the boy died. "Last week a boy was attacked by a lion, and as he reached up to protect himself the lion grabbed his arm in its mouth and broke it. Luckily, we got him to the hospital, and he's fine now."
In the small wards of the medical centre are patients with malaria, Aids and other ailments. The pharmacy is well stocked and contains the latest retroviral HIV-Aids drugs. In 2002 only 1 per cent of Africans were receiving these medicines. Now that figure is 28 per cent. Many of the labels show the manufacturer as Cipla, an Indian company that used to illegally copy many drugs but is now licensed to provide cheaper versions of big-brand medicines.
There have also been huge strides in malaria prevention and treatment. Three big funds - the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the US President's Malaria Initiative - have invested heavily in the 15 poorest African countries. They provide the money to spray the inside of houses with DDT to keep mosquitoes away, they give preventative treatment to women in pregnancy who are at high risk of death, and they buy hundreds of thousands of Olyset nets.
The A to Z factory can manufacture eight million nets a year, for just €4 each. There are various ways to get the nets into every home in the targeted countries. Some are bought at full price at retail level; some are provided at a discount through a charity, with a voucher; most, though, are given away by non-governmental organisations.
So it is to the brand-new factory outside Arusha - the president of Tanzania will open the plant officially in October - that we go to collect the nets. "We operate 24 hours a day," Kalpesh Shah, its director, tells us. "The insecticide is already impregnated in the polyethylene beads that are spun to make the fibre for the nets." The World Health Organisation has certified the nets as safe and as offering at least five years' protection, he says.
"Is this a sweatshop?" my 14-year-old daughter whispers as we walk around the factory. One of our group has a discreet word with some of the employees, who are mostly women. He reports back that no children work at the factory and that, although the workers earn little, they are being paid more than the minimum rural wage, which was last changed in 2002.
The nets, which come in blue and white, are loaded into our jeep, to be brought to our control group in the village of Emboret. The latest batch cost just €660. I routed the funds through the Medical Missionaries of Mary, which gets the added benefit of 42 per cent of that money back from Revenue, to buy more nets next year. The organisation has sisters working in many east African countries that are within easy reach of the A to Z factory for distribution.
In our reports on RTÉ's Six One Newsand News2daychildren's news from Monday, we'll be delivering nets to the control group of Masai and assessing the results of our study to see how well the nets are preventing malaria.
Medical Missionaries of Mary is at Rosemount Terrace, Booterstown, Co Dublin, 01-2887180, www.mmmworldwide.org. Unicef is at 25-26 Great Strand Street, Dublin 1, 01-8783000, www.unicef.ie. Morning Ireland is on RTÉ Radio 1, Monday-Friday 7-9am
The priorities for me as a teenager are not very significant. Will I miss the next episode of Lostor Grey's Anatomy? Do I have enough credit on my mobile? Will I be able to scab a lift off my mum to my friend Laura's house, even if she only lives two minutes away? I thought a 10-minute walk to her house was long. I was wrong. I went to the local school in Ngaramtoni, the village where I was staying. I asked the kids there how long it takes them to get to school. Most said about two hours. They leave at about 6am, for school at 8am. I couldn't believe it.
Esso was my favourite place. It is a small slum village in the suburbs of Arusha. We arrived at the house of Fr Noel O'Connor, a parish priest originally from Tipperary. The roads are just mud, with huge potholes and gullies. I normally complain about traffic on the M50 and how traffic lights are always against us. I will never complain again.
At the top end of the village is an area piled high with rubbish. You see the poverty everywhere.
Fr Noel says lots of people still don't get enough to eat. But with the help of Tracy Piggott's Playing for Life charity they are building a two-storey community centre, and villagers have recently built a playground.
The next day we went back for Mass. At 5.30am I was given a wake-up call. We had to leave for the Mass in Esso in a couple of minutes. I don't do two things: mornings and Mass. By 6am it was light already. Tanzania has 12-hour days and 12-hour nights, because the country is so close to the equator. It goes from dark to bright within minutes. But even at 6am the roads were bustling with people on their way to Mass. Masses are long in Tanzania. I heard the average was about two hours, but they have been known to go on a lot longer. I heard that, after we left, a procession was held that lasted about five hours.
I had brought sweets for the children; as I handed them out I saw a girl of about seven carrying a toddler on her back in a kind of wrap. The kids were adorable.
The best-known tribe in Tanzania is the Masai. As you drive along you see its people herding their goats and cattle. I spent an evening with two villages of their tribe in the middle of total wilderness. It was amazing - we were greeted with their songs and traditional dances. We were given an insight into their way of life - something tourists never get to see. They were really friendly. We had dinner with them. They had slaughtered two goats. I had never eaten goat before. It was a little tough, but it wasn't bad. They have the meat on a stick; one of the Masai sliced it into little pieces with a huge sword in complete darkness.
But the Masai have adapted to some modern things. Our cameraman, Paddy, was filming in one of the huts when a mobile started ringing. "The Masai have mobiles! I've seen it all now," he said. I wonder if they worry about whether they have enough credit. It's a long way to the nearest shop. LM