Canadian MPs see human face of disease, poverty during visit to Africa

from Canada com

Tia Goldenberg, Canadian Press

NAIROBI, Kenya (CP) - In a hospital in western Kenya, visitors are told the blunt truth about HIV and AIDS: three of the frail people lying there will die before the end of the day. And the next day, three more will pass.

It's a tough lesson for these four visitors, all MPs from Canada. They had spoken with the victims, learned their names. It helped to put a face, rather than a number, on people with AIDS, a scourge that has ravaged the African continent.

As Canadians are inundated with gross statistics about AIDS death rates and poverty in Africa, the four legislators came to the East African country to see the damage done to individuals and to find ways that Ottawa and ordinary Canadians can help.

"You realize that seeing it first hand is a whole different thing from reading the statistics or seeing the pictures," said NDP member Alexa McDonough, one of the parliamentarians sent to the country by advocacy group Results Canada.

The group brought members from the Liberal, Conservative and New Democratic parties to Kenya for a week, in a bid to show them concrete and cost-effective solutions to Africa's greatest problems. The trip highlighted tuberculosis, which is the number one killer of people with AIDS but is curable at an affordable cost.

They visited several of Kenya's sprawling slums, putrid-smelling expanses where most of the urban population lives. They saw the benefits of micro-credit, where even the poorest of the poor can take a loan and create a business. They travelled to countryside hospitals, where they conversed with AIDS and TB patients and were taken to their homes.

And while the suffering played a major part of their trip, Liberal MP John McKay said hope and potential were equally evident amongst these Kenyans.

"From the absolutely remarkable people that we've met, to the people who won't survive another day. That was our trip this week. Bouncing back from hope to despair," said McKay, who is pushing through a private member's bill in parliament which would focus Canada's official development assistance on poverty alleviation.

McKay said this trip to Kenya allowed him to see the people and the programs that his bill, C-293, would actually affect.

A spirit of camaraderie was shared between the four politicians throughout their journey. Political haggling was left behind, and the MPs debated ways every Canadian can help, rather than how the current government policy is dealing with aid.

The challenge now, they all conceded, was how to demonstrate what they saw to ordinary Canadians and make them care about the plight of Africans.

"If people are already struggling to make mortgage payments and buy groceries, foreign aid is probably not going to be a priority for them," said Conservative MP Bill Casey. "If every MP or Canadian were to spend five days doing what we've done, we'd be at 0.7 per cent very quickly and probably more," he said, referring to the UN's Millennium Development Goal for developed countries to commit 0.7 per cent of their Gross National Product to foreign aid by 2015.

And even more important, said Liberal MP Mike Savage, a first-time visitor to Africa, is that Canadian prime ministers must visit the continent during their leadership.

"Understanding Africa is going to be a very important part of understanding the world in the next couple of decades," Savage said on the final night of the trip, which ended Saturday.

"We have got to tackle Africa. The potential is there. We see the hope all the time. And I think Canada has a very significant role to play in it."