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Caleb's avatar

I served in Liberia 2018-2019. I was a teacher. I saw and heard a lot of awful things but the HIV murder story you told shocked me.

I was a teacher.

For a while I had a rule in the classroom that anybody in class had to be working. One day I saw a pregnant 14-year old girl sleeping on the bench. She looked so exhausted. I didn't have the heart to wake her up. After that the rule was that you can't disturb the class.

Often students would come to class without a pencil or the money to buy one.

The students often hadn't eaten anything all day.

I saw the same pattern of NGOs throwing out money without understanding the situation on the ground.

I could tell a hundred details and stories like this but you captured the essence of it pretty well.

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Ivan Fyodorovich's avatar

This has given me a lot to think about. Because of the obvious political implications of the story, I think it's important to point out that even if a lot of the efforts at changing peoples' behaviours failed, widespread ART has meant that the life expectancy in eSwatini has risen by 13 years since your time there. Maybe it's fine if DOGE cuts the equivalent of the half-built useless carwash, but they also cut PEPFAR and that will kill large numbers of people and far outweigh all benefit from everything else they do.

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