Hola amigos (as everyone who is trying to sell me things yells at me),

First, HAPPY YEAR OF THE RAT!  The Chinese New Year is upon us (I’m going to Mexico’s Chinatown tonight!), and you know what they say: “Rats sing, they dream, and they express empathy for others”  They also sniff out mines and diseases: check out and donate to the amazing NGO APOPO, which trains sniffer rats to detect explosives and diagnose disease.

Back to my blog.  Sorry for the long lapse in posts. Our group has been traveling a lot including to Puebla, the second-largest city in Mexico, and Oaxaca with amazing natural beauty, but the things that have stuck with me from those places are The Plan Puebla Panamá and the obvious discrimination that the large indigenous populations of Oaxaca and Chiapas experience in land rights and access to education and health resources (good article on Mexican poverty). Oaxaca reminded me a lot of large U.S. cities and cities like Dubai where they have a beautiful, clean tourist and business part of town and then your remember that you’re in a city that has a huge concentration of poverty (in the case of Oaxaca, the second most). Both Puebla and Oaxaca were amazing and beautiful, but there’s another side of them that we don’t see in the tourist parts of the town or that is easy for us to ignore.

Another thought I keep having is the concept of a third world country. In my Jan 17 post, I mentioned a talk by Hans Rosling, a global health expert and data visionary, who debunks myths about the so-called “developing world” using extraordinary animation software. He warns against assuming third world countries have everything worse off than first world countries, that you can group all the third world countries, group all of sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, there are vast differences between each of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa, even within each individual country, and the differences between “first and third world countries” is not that easily defined especially when looking to the used indicators: life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.

In our NAFTA lecture here (we’ve had three talks that have focused on it), a former Mexican Ambassador to France, discussed how when Mexico wanted to be a part of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), that Mexico was “conscious of their reality” and wanted to be a part of GATT, but “needed the advantages given to a third world country”. He then added that today’s Mexican officials need to be reminded of Mexico’s “third world status”.

As the 15th largest economy, but having poverty levels anywhere from 20-40% of the population (depending on what level you use: less than $1, $2, etc.), Mexico doesn’t fit the UN’s third-world designation, but many people within Mexico and outside development authors, describe it as such. I even read a lot about Mexico City in my Northwestern Anthropology class: Third World Urbanization, where the recent work Planet of Slums focuses a lot about the world’s largest slums, the most gargantuan of which is in…Mexico City (at a population of 4 million it’s larger than the City of Chicago!).

Urbanization and the rise of slums is not only a concern for Mexico City, but for the world. According to the UN Chronicle | The State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7, the year 2007 will signal:
….when the world entered a new urban millennium in which the majority of its people will live in cities. It will also see the number of slum dwellers cross the one-billion mark, when one in every three city residents will live in inadequate housing, with no or few basic services.

I’ll leave you with that fact and with the above thoughts on third world designation and global urbanization. I have a problem with making my blog posts too long so I’ll try to post short ones more regularly. Stay tuned as over the next week I will be discussing:

-Mexican Democracy? and the “Poverty Problem”

-Bottom-Up Community Development vs. Top-Bottom International Development (IMF, WB, WTO, Washington Consensus)

-Role of Women in Development and International Feminism

Paz,

Nicky

Other random things I wanted to share:

MSF’s Top 10 Underreported Humanitarian Stories…PLEASE CHECK OUT

Neat article on options for making positive social change in whatever you do:

CHECK OUT THE BELOW (I said some things) and PLEASE CONTRIBUTE:

BBC NEWS: What do you want to talk about?

Are there topics you want to get the world to talk about? What do you want to comment on or find out what others think about?