COVID and Climate

With abundant sunshine and temperatures going up to the mid-60s (Fahrenheit) for three days now in Amman, I cannot help but hope that hotter weather will soon be upon us and will kill off the coronavirus causing the global chaos we are in.

There is this preprint (not yet peer-reviewed) on medRxiv titled Spread of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus likely to be constrained by climate which explores correlations between the incidence of positive cases and aspects of weather. The authors write that their models "support the view that the incidence  of the virus will follow a seasonal pattern with outbreaks being favored by cool and dry weather, while being slowed down by extreme conditions of cold and heat as well as moist."

Alas, the World Health Organization tells us in its Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public: Myth busters page that the virus can be transmitted in ALL AREAS regardless of climate - hot, humid, cold, freezing...The internal temperature of our bodies is still the main point of reference, not the external weather temperature, for assessing the spread of the virus. The WHO page notes that "The normal human body temperature remains around 36.5°C to 37°C, regardless of the external temperature or weather." It is our bodies that the virus seeks to replicate itself.

There is no escaping from diligent hand washing, social distancing and quarantines, for lord knows until when.

At least now in Jordan, the gov't is responding very carefully, in controlled measures, to the need of people to get daily necessities - see the Jordanian gov't's announcements and updates on the Covid curfew on Roya News.

And yes, there may not be evidence that the sun's heat will make the coronavirus slink away, but it sure is nice to have this glorious sunshine melt some of the anxieties away.

Hunker down, Gamble, Refuse outright...Human behavior in times of pandemics

Day 3 of the complete curfew in Jordan. It's a new world. I looked out of our wall and saw a cat lazily gliding down the street and eyeing a bird basking in the sunshine in the middle of the street. Are the non-human mammals and the aves contemplating to join that half-living/half-dead creature called coronavirus in taking over the world?

Not such a crazy thought if we the people cannot coordinate our range of behaviors to deny (or at least delay) giving the coronavirus a host to become alive and replicate itself. This article, Enforcing compliance with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions: Psychological aspects of a national security threat, explores threat in human behavior terms.

In the face of unknowns about the coronavirus, giving out clear messages on how to behave is, to say the least, difficult. I think most people are willing to comply and hunker down at home but will go out and about if given the chance. Too risky when people play it like a game of chance (see For Italians, Dodging Coronavirus Has Become a Game of Chance). But for a while, I was hoping the Jordanian authorities will at least allow individuals to go out for a walk as a form of self-care albeit at a distance from others (see for example Is It OK to Take a Walk? as applied to New York).   But on further thought, a complete curfew might just be the right approach as it leaves little room for equivocation about the seriousness of the situation.

Except for reports of about 400 arrested on the first day of the curfew, it appears to me that Jordan's 10M population are cooperating with their government, which appears to be doing its best to meet the people's basic needs. I see garbage, gas and water trucks going around, making sure basic services are being met. The gov't just announced that the curfew will not be eased on Tuesday as many people were hoping but announced a mechanism for delivery of basic needs to citizens. In a sense, we are all in for a global experiment on containment -which variables to manipulate, which ones to hold constant (are there such variables in this kind of situation?), which approach results in better outcomes...(The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst)

I'm just glad the sun has been coming out since yesterday. The weather here in Jordan was unusually cold and rainy as this lockdown was enforced. My husband and I are lucky to have an outdoor space to walk out to when we start to feel cooped-up. I could not go out to buy a shovel to dig up the garden but I found some putty knives and a screwdriver around the house. These worked out quite well to loosen up the earth to get sown with the seeds I bought four days ago. I imagine the bright face of a giant sunflower and the smell of fresh basil, thyme and oregano and I feel hope that, together, the human race will at least gain a little more strength and buy more time to fight these invisible, deadly viruses.

Wishing we can poop Covid away

If there is one measure of misinformation about COVID-19, it would be the number of emptied shelves of toilet paper. As far as I can read online, the symptoms of COVID-19 do not include a leaky anus. So why the panic buying of toilet paper?

This article tries to explain why. It cites one psychologist who says people hoard because there is "comfort in knowing that it's there. We all eat and we all sleep and we all poop. It's a basic need to take care of ourselves."

And so here comes the Dutch PM telling citizens to relax, saying there's enough toilet paper for 10 years that "We can all poop for 10 years."

I have to admit such potty talk made me laugh at the absurdity of panic-driven behaviors yet cannot deny the seriousness of the situation. This morning at 7 am, sirens from police cars patrolling the streets of Amman let us know the curfew in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has begun and we must take it seriously. Apart from the siren's wee woo, it is deathly quiet. Having raised three boys who are now in their 30s, I wonder how families with young, active children and living in apartments without outdoor space will cope until the curfew ends. Well, I know that's the least of our worries in the wider scheme of things but not hearing the normal movements of kids going to school or playing outside makes me feel like a blanket of doom has covered the earth.

Back to toilet paper, I am amused that there are websites on toilet paper history as well on the history of lavatory language. And if you are really curious about toilet paper consumption, you will know it is actually an important commodity tracked by market statistics. I like this one by the Observatory of Economic Complexity showing China as the top exporter and the U.S. as the top importer. A very nice relationship.

Still, this toilet roll hoarding behavior makes me think of how our perception of what the 'basics' are can become distorted. Fun facts on the Toilet Paper History website puts out this statistic that about 70 to 75% of the world's population do not use toilet paper. That is not such an outrageous percentage if you have lived at all in parts of the world where the cost of a roll of toilet paper can be more than the cost of a loaf of bread. I grew up in a very rural area of the Philippines and you don't want me to tell you the ways, other than water,  that we used to clean ourselves post-defecation. 

We think of water as the universal solvent, not paper, and then we wonder why bidets are not common in the U.S.?  This takes us into an interesting history of hygiene practices related to our most basic bodily functions. And here I'm looking at the design of the Toto Washlet or this Kohler bidet - . It gives me the sense that we have this most basic need to poop but wish we shouldn't be pooping at all.

Learning in the time of COVID

During the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918-19, one advice offered to Americans was to avoid touching library books. In 2020, we are advised not to touch other people's keyboards, mice, and other electronic devices. But at least now, we can go online and enter a wide world of learning opportunities as we practice social distancing to help flatten the coronavirus curve.

Yesterday, I, along with 200+ plus other people from around the world attended ICVA's Virtual Annual Conference 2020, an event that would have been normally held in Geneva. The topic was Protecting principled humanitarian action: an honest conversation on risk. I sometimes find these discussions going in circles or not able to bridge the gap between broader frameworks (like political declarations) and field-level operational realities. But it's good to come together and try to discuss these things.

I wanted to post some questions but, still waiting to get a contract for my supposed next job, I didn't feel I am in a legitimate role to ask one. The example collaborative initiatives discussed at the last session focused on risk areas of safety, security and ethics (sexual harassment/violence). I wanted to know more about collaborative initiatives that address operational risk areas. Since we recognize that humanitarian operating environments are unpredictable and that risk is not always a negative, I wanted to ask what collaborative and principled initiatives or approaches are there for quickly identifying and maximizing unplanned opportunities to reach common objectives? How do we link these initiatives at field or operational level to larger initiatives such as political declarations and international legal frameworks?

Today, just to be informed beyond news reports and gov't announcements, I signed up for the free online course Science Matters: Let's Talk About COVID-19 -  offered on Coursera by the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA) at Imperial College London. I'm also looking at the following resources:

• The COVID-19 Learning Pathway just set up by Save the Children on Kaya/Humanitarian Leadership Academy to enable humanitarians to respond to the global pandemic. 
• Remote Learning, EdTech & COVID-19 set up by the World Bank to support national dialogues with policymakers around the world on utilizing technology for remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lucky me. I have all this precious time on my hands (not to mention excellent internet service) and still the freedom to move around outside in the now quiet, almost deserted streets of Amman. As someone supposed to be working in the humanitarian sector, I cannot help but think of people who don't have the luxury of working from home and still earn a living or just the health workers who must go to work in hospitals to care for the sick. When gloom from the inability to do something sets in, I take a break from the screen and go for a walk. Today, I walked/run to my old neighborhood in Jabal Hussein (45 minutes each way) to look for seeds to plant in the small garden spaces of the Airbnb apartment in Shmeisani where my husband and I are staying. The nursery where I used to buy plants was closed but stores that sell food were open and I was lucky to find one that sold garden seeds too. I will dig the earth, sow the seeds and hope to watch seeds grow into plants. This always makes me happy.

In these first days of spring, rain and sunshine alternate in Amman. The air is crisp, some streets wet. The Covid-related closures definitely reduced traffic. A few people are out and about. There is a wariness about each other. We keep our distance. As a Filipino woman, I always felt strange walking long distances in Amman (a maid out and about perhaps?). It was more strange today, walking on near-empty streets otherwise busy with traffic or teeming with shoppers. But one keeps walking, not looking at anyone, but ready to offer a smile or gladly accept one when I entered the open stores. Fear and goodwill co-exists.

Back to my computer screen, I re-enter that digital world where one must exercise discipline to choose the right links to follow and the spaces to learn in. I'm ready to learn about pandemics and the basic reproduction number, phylogenetic analysis, the economics of outbreaks, etc. But it's easy to digress. I got a note from an aunt who wrote "I understand that the Millennials are referring to Coronavirus as “The Boomer Remover” but they aren’t gonna get me!" Haven't heard of that phrase before so off I go and searched for Boomer Remover. I'm 57 years old, not quite a Boomer but I kept following the links....age as a factor in pandemic fatality rates...

I'm not gonna get Covid get into my head too much. Perhaps, I should sign up for those pilates/yoga classes that I used to attend at ILI near the 4th circle but now offered via Zoom...

Higher education in time of war and disease

As with coffee and Yemen, there was no previous association in my mind between Yemen and China until I've met a few Yemenis who have studied in China. That association gained more details during this horrific global spread of the Covid-19 as I read Supreme Council continues to follow up on evacuation arrangements for Yemeni students in China (Feb 6) and later, UAE evacuates Yemeni students from China (Feb 20).

This got me curious how people in war-ravaged countries like Yemen manage to continue their education despite the odds, particularly those who were able to get out and study in another country, in this case China. I do not know the individual stories of the 187 Yemeni students evacuated from Wuhan. From where I'm sitting, I can only look up online and learn a little bit more in terms of numbers.

I was not able to find stats on Yemeni students abroad in any functioning Yemeni government website for education or foreign affairs but found some Chinese gov't data on international students in China. The latest that I can find is this Statistical report on international students in China for 2018 which gives a total of "492,185 international students from 196 countries/areas pursuing their studies in 1,004 higher education institutions in China’s 31 provinces/autonomous regions/provincial-level municipalities..." It's hard to tell how many of this almost half a million students are from Yemen since Yemen is lumped into the continent of Asia. There is a table of number of students by country of origin but only the top 15 countries are given.

Poking around some more, I found this data on Inbound International Students to China, 2011-2016 which shows that for 2016, the number of students from Yemen was 3,247 out of the total 442,389. That's less than 1% of the total but the increasing numbers from 2011 to 2016 for Yemen is quite interesting considering that the country's ongoing war is now into its sixth year. See my chart of the data below:

I found this study Leaving Home: Yemeni Students Discuss Study Abroad Migration whose author interviewed Yemeni students (all males) in Guangdong province of China about their decisions to leave Yemen to study abroad. The conclusion notes how "tribulations brought about by war and financial devastation have been catalysts for personal growth" for the participants and how they are "highly motivated toward economic success, and that this drive comes from older male family members in whom participants exhibit a great deal of pride and affection." I guess we can say the same for any group in similar circumstances but to me this highlights a fundamental difficulty in fighting for principles that require a level of detachment from personal, family or tribal ties. I see this especially as the author of the study continues to note the participants' detachment from the humanitarian toll going on in their country. But maybe, I, who considers herself a humanitarian, do the same. What really drives me to keep waiting for a visa to go work in Yemen? Or, as I started writing this post amidst the fear of a Covid-19 pandemic, how much attachment and detachment do we cultivate in our lives to truly be engaged, involved and caring about the issues of our times?

Yemen and Coffee

Eggers, Dave. Monk of Mokha. New York: Vintage Books, 2019.

I chose to buy this book because I was intrigued myself that the origins of coffee, this drink that I cannot start my day without, includes Yemen, of all places. I also thought it would be a good break from reading articles on the conflict and humanitarian situation in that country.

The first chapter of the book deftly hooks you into the story with a satchel filled with money and a new laptop only to get lost as fatigue caught up with the boundless energy of dreams for a bright future. It reminded me of how I felt sunk and very stupid, when I lost my new Surface 3 laptop, in circumstances carrying lesser dreams than what the protagonist found himself in but gut-wrenching nevertheless. And with that, I wanted to know how our hero, Mokhtar, overcome such a loss to become the founder of Port of Mokha, a company selling highly-rated coffee from Yemen.

The next chapters offer that joyful possibility that an individual, struck by a knowledge that makes him or her dream of big things, will open himself/herself to opportunities and key people along the way and somehow carve out a path, circuitous and perilous that may be, and make a dream a reality. Mokhtar wasn’t even a coffee drinker when he got excited upon learning that coffee had its origins in a Yemeni port called Mokha. Why did that discovery stirred and drove him to learn more and, against all odds, to bring Yemeni coffee to the U.S. and beyond?

We could look at the story from several angles but still the angle that I can understand is that of an immigrant whose identity was otherwise linked to war, conflict, terrorism, religious backwardness and poverty but who found something worth redeeming about his country of origin’s link to coffee. He embarked on an uncertain path whose twists and turns were guided by a network of family, friends, mentors, employers, colleagues and other people along his way.

There was money to be made but also a lot of money needed to get the dream become a reality. There were several points in the story when we worried that Mokhtar will not be able to get anything going because of lack of money to pay the coffee farmers, to build a mill, etc. But the guiding principle behind Mokhtar’s journey can best be summed up in a saying that his grandfather instilled in him, “Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart.” Or as fully stated from a quote from the medieval Islamic imam, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya,

“When there is money in your hand and not in your heart, it will not harm you even if it is a lot; and when it is in your heart, it will harm you even if there is none in your hands.”

That's my big take anyway from the story. For a review of the book as one of Dave Egger's series of books on immigrants to America 'caught in the jaws of history', see the New York Times review.

Following the immigrant angle, I got curious how many Yemenis immigrated to the U.S. On the website of the Migration Policy Institute (which draws its data from the U.S. Census Bureau), I see that for the period 2014-2018, there were 51,800 - mostly in the states of Michigan, New York, California and Illinois. Interesting to note that almost 30% of that number is for Wayne County, Michigan where Detroit is the county seat. As to how these numbers compare to other countries of origin and other time periods, that's for another day of browsing the web.

Maputo's Street Names

[Note: I actually wrote this post while deployed in Mozambique from Sep to Dec 2016. I left it as a draft and did not really develop the blog as I wanted to. I've lost so many written notes on places I've visited so I decided today to work on this blog.]

In Maputo (at least in the area where I stayed), it is rare to find street signs at street corners, on poles, like in most cities I've visited. This has disoriented me during my first few days in Maputo when walking from A to B. I would have the street names and directions in my head from browsing Maputo on Google Maps but once I stepped out onto the streets, I got a bit lost as I tried to look for the street names on poles. I soon learned to look instead for plaques on concrete walls.

Beyond navigation though, the names of major avenues in Maputo remind me of the socialist and communist ideological inspirations for the revolutionary movement in Mozambique. To go downtown, I almost always walked down Av. Kim Il Sung or Av. Vladimir Lenine, both of which run into Av. Mao Tse Tung which is joined by Av. Salvador Allende. Further on, I could take Av. Karl Marx which runs into Av. Ho Chi Minh and if I walk towards the beach, I could stroll along Av. Friedrich Engels.

Beside these familiar names in history are street names in honor of men who played pioneering roles in the independence movements of other countries in Africa: Av. Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Av. Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), Av. Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Av. Marien Ngouabi (Congo), Av. Ahmed Sekou Toure (Guinea), Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), Agostinho Neto (Angola), Av. Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana).

And, of course, Mozambique's own revolutionary heroes are also given tribute through streets named after them: Av. Eduardo Mondlane (FRELIMO's founder), Av. Samora Machel (1st President), Av. Josina Machel (Samora's first (?) wife but was also a key figure in the struggle for independence) , Av. Joaquim Chissano (2nd President),  Av. Emillia Dausse, Av. Tomas Nduda, Av. Armando Tivane and so on.

As if to set these intersecting names in historical time, a few major avenues in Maputo are named after important dates in the country's revolutionary history: Av. 25 de Setembro - the Mozambican war of independence officially started on Sep 25, 1964; Av. 24 de Julho - Mozambique's Independence Day; 16 de Junho - Massacre of Mueda; Av. 10 de Novembro (Maputo Day).