Hekima Review No. 39 (Dec 2008)
Many of us are familiar with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), a humanitarian organization created in 1971 by a small group of French doctors. Their conviction is that all people have the right to medical care regardless of their race, nationality, religious affiliation, or political persuasion. The needs of people, this organization holds, transcend national borders. Our increasingly global world is proving them right: the wind of economic recession is blowing across the whole world, leaving no region untouched; the election of Barak Obama to the presidency of the United States of America was a historical earthquake whose seismic waves were felt in every part of the globe. The erstwhile obscure Mama Sara Onyango (Obama’s paternal grandmother) of an equally obscure Kogelo village in Kenya’s Siaya District, has since rocketed to the status of a celebrity. An event transpiring thousands of miles away has transformed her life. Various television stations also beamed images of hordes of men and women from various parts of the world enthralled by joyful hope mediated by the landmark development in the United States.
