To witness the awe of human beings delighting in their own hands forming the written word was humbling and he understood it profoundly at that moment watching those two, with the ancient land around them,...

If people’s night fears of sorcery – which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets – fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it...

If literacy was natural, the word ‘illiteracy’ would not exist.

Shovels aren’t very glamorous, but they’ve been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5,000 years.

If one could speak two languages well and was raised on tea and baguettes for breakfast,in places where the most mundane daily business on the street is conducted in four languages, where horse carts park...

Les pelles ne sont pas élégantes, certes, mais elles ont tout de même réussi a libérer des communautés entières du paludisme durant les 5 000 derniers ans.

We bought a car years later, and they so generously offered us some of their crappy Bar-B-Que sauce,FREE for their buyers. We looked at it and thought, “This is nowhere as good as the giant...

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane...

It is always worth asking questions, especially in regards to the ingenuity of local marketers around the world. From uncovering the truth cloaked by sly names of regional specialties such as ‘Rocky Mountain oysters,’ to...

Most people around here prefer undead drivers, so I never get a chance to make any money on steady contracts.

To paraphrase Lucretius, there’s nothing more useful than to watch a man or woman in times of contagious deadly disease peril combined with his or her assumptions of financial adversity to discern what kind of...

It’s a lot like the Wild West out here… just with tea shops instead of saloons. Wild West Sahara, that is.

A good plan executed violently today is better than a perfect plan in a week.” In this war of attrition, millions of people will be lost while waiting on researchers to finally emerge triumphant from...

Malnutrition can be as common in poverty as in wealth, one for the lack of food, the other for the lack of knowledge of food.

Wife number one always married with the naïve romantic dream that her husband would never need another wife, believing his earnest promises to her that she would be the only one, that their marriage was...

Les moustiques porteurs du paludisme n’attendront pas poliment jusqu’à ce que les gens se couchent sous des moustiquaires

Despite the real danger of malaria, a wide swath of people of every age and education level and nationality all around the world imagine mosquito nets to be ‘confining’ and ‘suffocating;’ most others refuse to...

Even a little practical working familiarity with cattle goes a long way in Africa, but how many international relations studies include this?

Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.

There’s only one thing worse than a droopy, round, lace-trimmed, too small, too short, mosquito net with holes… the exact same thing in pink.

Though they were not familiar with the expression,to paraphrase the saying, when any country in the Sahel sneezes, the rest of the region catches pneumonia, the men there would have clicked their tongues and ruefully...

When considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against...

Africa is a huge continent; it would take several lifetimes of thousands of researchers testing in hundreds of languages to collect a valid sample of anything, especially IQ. Most Africans do their schooling in a...

If it is considered speaking knowledgeably about malaria by having spent a few weeks traveling into malaria endemic zones and fallen sick from being infected with it, then what is it considered by having lived...

Huh. What a dope! Wait till Mom hears about this. He’s so in trouble now. You know how crazy she gets about malaria.

Every secret of life I know, I learned at my grandfather’s knee.