She was like, "Well, they borrowed the money, I mean, surely people have to pay their debts." There was something about the way it was just so commonsensical and as an activist your first reaction when you say this you say, "Uh-oh, that conversation, alright. In this case, there was a program that had been put in 50 years before to wipe out malaria in the highlands which had been very successful, people had all lost their immunity but they couldn't afford to keep it up anymore when they had to cut the budget.
But they also did things like withdraw support for mosquito eradication programs, the idea being IMF would set the terms for debt rescheduling and demand various budget cuts. I had spent two years in Madagascar and Madagascar had undergone all sorts of IMF structural adjustment over the years with various confusing effects some of them were actually kind of ironically quite good like the state basically sort of pulled up stakes and left large parts of the countryside because they figure they weren't getting any taxes out of the countryside anyway and people sort of managing their own affairs completely autonomously and that was cool. So I chatted with her and she was talking about her activism and asked me about mine and I was talking about campaigns that I'd been involved with, involved in the Global Justice Movement for many years, about the IMF Structural Adjustment Policies and our effects on various parts of the world. But after a while he introduced me to this person who he said was I'd have a lot in common with, activist lawyer who's involved in a lot of community work and various things like that.
0 kommentar(er)
