aweil is alive. she is the girl for whom i wrote my book, the one with tuberculosis who arrived to the hospital early in my mission, and stayed with me throughout it. i visited her every day, got to watch her change from a dwindling infant to a strong, smiling, laughing, grasping girl with bright eyes. the war came, after i’d left, and i lost her. she’s been found. or at least word has been. she is in a town in southern sudan, with her father. that news has made for the brightest February.

after Leeuwenhoek, we realized that things were much smaller than we imagined, and we’ve busied ourselves ever since detailing the infinite number of tiny moving parts that make up our world and ourselves. we’ve become so fascinated at our ability to reduce, that we have almost been able to convince ourselves that love is a flush of seretonin and oxytocin and dopamine, or a broken heart, their nadir. perhaps the truth is that when someone’s heart starts beating pat-pat-pat at the first rings of her telephone, that these hormones are not love’s explanation, but rather the residue it leaves as it passes through her, to him.

circling back to itacare, brazil, high in the air. the last time i was there, between sessions of being tumbled by the ocean’s wash, surfboard tangled somewhere deep below (above?), i was checking my email madly to see if a mission had come through. this time i will be doing it to see if i get to travel to London to accept the John Llewyn Rhys prize for the book i wrote about the one that eventually did. it might be the only compelling reason in the world to leave brazil early. in the hold below me, in my backpack underneath pairs of shorts and sunglasses and different flavors of Frisbees is an overcoat, a scarf, galoshes, a shirt, and a tie.

i think there is a subtle shift in the psychology of many in the high income world with their responsibility to those who are born into poverty. a decade ago, there was a belief that spending oceans of money would allow some of it to trickle down and float boats for even the poorest. it was easy. business as usual. we’re doing something by doing nothing. now with the wisdom of overconsumption in question, i sense a change in belief, one that allows us to keep our actions unexamined, to conduct business as usual, to ignore a true responsibity to those who suffer, then die young. it is this: does the world really need any more humans?

“thanks,” i said.  the boy smiled, proud of  his english compliment, and skipped down the cobblestone road, towards town.
i like to think he meant “strong”, but i have been eating a lot of injera.  like, a lot.  at least two times a day.  i haven’t been able to work it into my breakfast plans yet, [...]

i flew into ethiopia 2 weeks ago to better understand the state of emergency medicine in addis, particularly at the postgraduate teaching hospital of Addis Ababa University, the “black lion”.  though it might be better to draw out the suspense, i’ll cut it:  there is none.
nor did i expect to find any.  there are no [...]

oct 3 2009
addis, yo.
i second hand smoked two ethiopian taxi-cabs yesterday.  actually, more like two thousand.
one of them, however, was well worth the asthma.  its driver was 75 years old, ancient by ethiopian standards.  he was once a priest, and one of the few remaining scholars who could translate the ancient language of gees.   on [...]

I am writing this in east berlin. it is raining softly. the skies, however, look like they are about to clear. there is a hum of traffic from a nearby street. from my balcony I can see four silent staring statues, perched on the roof next to mine, dark with soot.