March 2011

In Asia, it used to be that 24-karat gold was the sign for having made it. Then came having a mobile phone. Singapore entrepreneur Jack Sim hopes that having a toilet will be next. He doesn’t think non-profit organizations which he says have to spend half their time fundraising and the other half writing reports, are up to the task of solving the hygiene problems he’s trying to address. An estimated 1.2 billion people worldwide, according to UNICEF, defecate in the open due to a lack of toilet facilities of any kind. Sim is beginning his campaign in Cambodia where every year 11,000 people die of diarrhea linked to open defecation, a figure that is more than the combined deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Why not, he believes, tap into people’s dreams rather than their fears? “If you tell someone they may die of diarrhea, it is not much of an incentive to build a toilet. But if toilets become a sign of wealth, jealousy over the neighbors’ latrines will drive them to build their own,” Sim says. “…if people can buy 20 million hand phones in India, they can buy 20 million toilets.”
Sometimes,it takes an entrepreneur…

For most of us death is not an easy subject and when it is related to a diagnosis of terminal illness, it is even more so. Patients don’t want to hear that they’re dying, and doctors either don’t know how or don’t want to tell them they are. The issues surrounding death and dying have been inadequately addressed for generations and decades ago Elizabeth Kubler-Ross became famous for trying to remedy their long-time neglect. Now the American Society of Clinical Oncology has issued a booklet giving guidance on how physicians can discuss with patients the choices before them, such as comfort care, or the fact that further chemo has become futile. The booklet’s ideas are beginning to be used, for example in a program called Closure. Created by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, it teaches families how to talk to each other and with their doctors about what they want or don’t in their final days. It has been so successful that although it started in one hospital in Pittsburgh it has spread to several.
Because death and dying are the subject of so many of ours fears and misunderstandings, any effort that weakens them needs to be both hailed and heeded.

There are those who ask if Arabs are ready for freedom. It’s a question that makes my blood boil, for I can think of no human being anywhere who is not ready for the end of oppression. Indeed Egypt, Tunisia and any other country where tyrannical, exploitive regimes have toppled—or will—are bound to fumble their way to whatever form of government they will end up having. Aren’t we in the U.S. still, even if we’ve had over two centuries of practice? Decades ago in my native Morocco I heard the French say Arabs were not ready for freedom when they did not want to let go of their hold of North Africa. I also heard a similar version of the argument during the Civil Rights movement, from those who did not believe in racial equality. I grant there is a margin between not wanting to live under oppression whether from colonialism or from anything else, and being ready to handle the responsibilities of freedom. Whether we like to admit it or not, there no doubt are those for whom individual freedom may be too demanding. Not only would such people form a minority, more to the point countries are also not like individual human beings. They are collectives and within the collective some are strong enough to carry those who are not able to rise to the occasion on their own for whatever reasons. In each movement toward freedom, there are leaders, people who can inspire others. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela are powerful examples, leaders who inspired not only those they were trying to free, but the whole of humanity. That’s why when I contemplate freedom in Arab States, I look forward to the leaders who are bound to come forth, the men—and women—who will lead their countrymen and in turn all of us.