Faithful fighting malaria

by Vahid S. (Iran)

I thought this is a great example of just some of the things we can do when we work together…Just read the story.

KATHRYN BERNDTSON AND ABDALLAH S. DAAR

Globe and Mail Update

December 23, 2007 at 5:05 PM EST

It is difficult to pick up a newspaper these days without reading about brutality and violence, often predicated on religious differences. Christians and Muslims have killed one another in Chechnya, Srebrenica, and Kosovo; Hindus and Muslims are slaughtered in Kashmir; Buddhists and Hindus die in Sri Lanka; Sunni and Shia Muslims battle in Iraq and Pakistan; Jews and Muslims lose their lives in Israel and the Palestinian territories — the list goes on.

Yet the prevalence of religious conflict need not preclude the potential for powerful inter-religious collaboration. Last summer, Laura Bush travelled to Maputo, Mozambique, to announce funding for Together Against Malaria (TAM), an interfaith partnership to fight malaria, one of Africa’s biggest killers, particularly of children. Much of that funding is from USAID and the President’s Malaria Initiative. In a time so strained by religious conflict, this initiative provides a much-needed example of how various religions can put their differences aside to focus on a crucial, life-affirming initiative — in this case, malaria awareness, prevention and treatment. As Hassan Makda, President of the Islamic Congress of Mozambique, has stated, “Mosquitoes don’t just bite Muslims.”

Sixty-five per cent of childhood hospital admissions in Mozambique are due to malaria. The disease prevents 40,000 children each year from reaching their fifth birthday. Faith leaders across the country are all too familiar with the funerals that accompany these grim statistics. Eleven faith leaders representing Christian, Muslim, Baha’i, and Hindu traditions decided to act.

Faith leaders in Mozambique are among the most trusted leaders and teachers. They can mobilize entire communities to achieve the large-scale action required to reduce malaria morbidity and mortality. Mozambique’s faith leaders also have a history of effective interfaith collaboration. “This is not about religion,” said a provincial Baha’i leader in Zambezia. “This is about human beings, about health.”

Accessing and utilizing religious infrastructures will be an indispensable part of the battle for health equity. Africa’s faith-based initiatives against HIV/AIDS have already played significant roles in combatting that disease — and TAM will serve as a model for strengthening that capacity. For all of the violence that is carried out in the name of God, this interfaith collaboration in rural Mozambique demands that we acknowledge that religious co-operation is not only possible, but powerful.

In July 2006, these faith leaders launched the Inter-Religious Campaign against Malaria in Mozambique (IRCMM), a national interfaith collaboration against malaria. Supported by their partners, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency and the Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation at the Washington National Cathedral, they formed TAM.

With the three-year, $2-million (U.S.) grant, TAM launched activities in two districts in Zambezia, Mozambique’s most populated province, this past month. More than half a million pregnant women and children lack bed nets in Zambezia. When one of us visited villages in rural Zambezia with the TAM partners in May, we met Mozambicans who were desperate to buy nets and who would pay up to 100 meticals (approximately $4) to get one — a large sum of money for people living on less than a dollar a day.

However, the Mozambican government mandates that nets cannot be sold on the market — rather they must be made available at no cost. The policy also requires that these lifesaving nets are provided solely to mothers giving birth in institutions, not at home. This effectively precludes women from accessing bed nets before delivery, when they and their unborn babies are most vulnerable to malaria. It also disqualifies women who live too far from health posts. Although a limited black market exists along the Malawian border, Zambezia alone needs more than 527,000 nets.

Drawing on a broad range of potential actions with the help of faith communities at the international, national, provincial, district, and village levels, TAM will work with the Ministry of Health and other existing anti-malaria campaigns to mobilize faith infrastructure to increase education, awareness, treatment access, capacity, funding, and advocacy against malaria. Mozambique’s faith leaders are well-poised to carry messages from their congregants to the Ministry of Health where they may be able to support beneficial policy changes.

In one village hidden beyond miles of forest and brush, cut off from roads and too far from the nearest health post, they had lost 30 people to malaria in the first four months of the year — half of them children. But that village alone has five houses of worship! When such resources are brought to bear on worldly problems like malaria, we may be turning the tide from taking lives in the name of God, to saving them.