Do you watch CSI? I used to. I've found I can't watch it any more. It's become
so graphic it makes me physically sick. The only other TV show that makes me
sick is that one with the 2 ladies who go in and clean houses. Grosss. I had to
turn that one off too.

Sherry

Well, 'much' doesn't mean a whole lot. Sure, there are many wars in
Africa. They are often a result of colonialism and the artificial
boundarys drawn, especially those in the settlement after WW I. That may
or may not mean much today to westerners, depending on your opinion on how
much responsibilities the descendants of those who drew the boundaries
have today. And aid workers usually had a free pass in such wars; that's
why the killings in Iraq are so shocking to those in the field. Until very
recently, aid workers were active except right in the heat of the
fighting, and some aid groups even specialized in sending people to those
places. Other common causes include economic systems which are often very
badly skewed towards producing cheap export crops - coffee, cocoa, etc. -
often at the expense of growing food to feed the local people. Then you
get fights over what the best approach is to solve this problem - the IMF,
which can control access to money, often takes a free market approach,
which can cause devastating poverty in the short term and increase the
already large divisions between rich and poor in developing countries. But
the local governments are not rich enough to provide a saftey net for the
poor - and tend to be either extremely oppressive or unstable in order to
deal with the problems caused by extreme disparity in wealth among their
citizens. These problems are often worsened if there is obvious corruption
among the rich and powerful, and, as so often happens, often for historic
reasons, the rich and powerful mostly belong to a different ethnic group
than the poor and weak. (See above about the artifical boundaries that
often combined rival ethnic groups into one country.) Then you get foreign
aid. Sometimes aid is provided by people who simply want to help provide
food or medical care for the poor because their moral beliefs tell them to
help the less fortunate. But when countries get into it, so do politics.
People in many countries think their governments give far more, and far
more effective aid than in fact they do. Governments sometimes provide aid
only to the countries or factions they support politically. Or they
provide types of aid which support the donor country's economic ideas -
for example, supporting megaprojects like dams to try to start an
industrial economy rather than small projects like village wells which
support the present economy (and I should mention the influence of
urbanization...). Or they give and take - they give tied aid, which must
be spent on, let's say, not the cheapest or best tractors for the
receiving country, but tractors manufactured in the donor country. So much
of the money spent on aid is not used wisely, and a lot doesn't even reach
the donor country.

Poverty in Africa (and in much of the world) is a big, complex issue, and
wars are only part of the reason. In some cases, the wars are the result,
not the cause - as when one ethnic group fights another over scarce wealth
or resources.

I should have labelled this a rant. I could also go on and on, but I'll
stop now.