All That I Have Met
Conversations with people changing the world. Not the usual suspects. Not the usual questions. New episodes drop the first and third Tuesday of the month. Hosted by award-winning journalist Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson.
All That I Have Met
BONUS: Ebola, Africa, and What DOGE Actually Broke — Meredith on The Atlantic Current
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This is a bonus episode — a guest appearance I made on The Atlantic Current with Vince Martin and Tull McAdoo, reposted here with their kind permission.
They brought me on to talk about the Ebola outbreak currently unfolding in the DRC. We ended up covering a lot of ground: how Ebola spreads and how it doesn't, what the gutting of USAID, GAVI and the CDC actually means for an outbreak happening right now in a remote and conflict-adjacent corner of the world, and why American foreign aid was never charity — but self-interest.
We also talked about Africa more broadly, and the extraordinary gap between what the continent actually is and what most Americans think they know about it.
The Atlantic Current is hosted by Vince Martin, an economist and writer, and creator of Wall Street and Main, and Tull McAdoo of the Irish Politics Newsletter. It's a smart, irreverent show and I loved every minute being with these two.
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Credits:
Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson
Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs
Music: Ilya Kuznetsov
What the international infrastructure provided was not expertise, it was connectivity. The laboratory networks that moved samples from remote areas in Aturi province to testing facilities, the early warning systems that gave governments days or weeks of lead times to supply chains for protective equipment, the communication channels between outbreak zones and the global health bodies able to mobilize resources. The International Rescue Committee had been monitoring five health zones in Aturi Province, not because local doctors couldn't identify Ebola, but because surveillance in terrain that difficult and remote requires sustained external funding. Welcome to the Atlantic Current. I am Vince Martin from Wall Street in Maine, here with Toll McAdoo from the Irish Politics newsletter. That quote comes from an article published this week by a special guest that we're very honored to have, right, Toll?
SPEAKER_03Yes, a very special guest indeed who brings rather unique expertise to the podcast for what we're about to discuss. Meredith Ogil V. Thompson has bylains in vogue, business day, Financial Times Porter, The Telegraph, which will endear her massively to our our Irish listeners, no doubt. She's also consulted with USAID and has also worked for various African institutions. Welcome to the show, Meredith. How are you today?
SPEAKER_00I'm fine, thank you. Excited to be with you guys. Thanks for asking me.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for coming on. Thank you for coming on. So we asked you on specifically because you've written about some very interesting developments in Africa with Ebola over the years and it's reared its head again. So can you give us your initial thoughts on the most recent outbreak?
SPEAKER_00Um, sure. I will preface this by saying I've definitely been in places where Ebola is raging. So I've had up front close personal experience with the disease. The recent outbreak is awful, and it's made more awful because we have an administration here in the States that has basically cut the lifeline to various international agencies that help to track, trace, and contain epidemics like this. So I think that's what's pretty scary about this at the moment, in addition to just the tragedy on the ground of several hundred people as of this morning already reported dead.
SPEAKER_03Yes. Ebola, when you hear that word, it's it sounds less like a pathogen, but more like a death sentence. And made all more worse by Elon Musk, everybody's favorite space monkey, taking cuts, infamous cuts to U.S. aid.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell We would be remiss if we didn't say that he apologized for cutting the Ebola funding and said that when he realized it, he restored it. So, you know, he did seem really contrite there at all.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was a famous quote. He came out and said, Oh, yeah, that was an accident as soon as we figured it out. We went right back to it, which A, like, you know, maybe not a great thing to have an accident about. Like, you know. But more importantly, there was some reporting that came out a couple months after that that actually unsurprisingly, the way he framed the story was not entirely true. They put some things back, but there were overall cuts. And we have a lot of reporting, as you're saying, over the last week. People are talking about there are just substantially fewer resources on the ground there, right?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm not sure I believe him as you say that you know everything was restored. Um, but a lot has been cut and pretty important infrastructure.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell Do we know what what was there in terms of funding for these clinical bricks?
SPEAKER_00We do. So the US, um we funded about $750 million a year to the WHO. And as a result, I mean that's almost a quarter of their funding. So that's a lot of cuts that have been made. USAID has been wholly dissolved. CDC has been gutted, and the CDC had a very close relationship with Africa CDC. Um, and it was, it has not only been gutted, but banned from coordinating with the WHO. That was something Donald Trump did early on. Gavi has been defunded. They're trying to raise other funds now, but they were the ones who deployed the only Ebola vaccine that existed. This was back in a West African epidemic. PEPFAR has essentially been allowed to lapse. That's, you know, one of probably the most successful programs the United States has ever had. It was a Republican president, George W. Bush.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was George W. Bush's baby, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And I think something that he to this day talks about being really proud of, it saved 26 million lives. That's been totally huge and it's been totally dismantled. Um, the IRC has had to pull back, as you you mentioned in in the beginning, Vince. Really, that is directly related to USAID cuts and other funding cuts. 2,000 scientists from the NIH and other organizations have been fired in the past year. And, you know, just to put the USAID piece alone in perspective, their estimates in the Lancet um has said that USAID has prevented 91 million deaths in the 20 years between 2001 and 2021. That comes from the Lancet. That's a medical journal. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03It's not a somebody posting on an excount.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So this isn't just a politician sort of throwing these numbers out. Um I think what's really important to think about is, and I I really want to make this point, having lived and worked in Africa, having contracted many diseases, including malaria twice and typhoid twice, and been treated by wonderful African doctors, including in Cameroon and Nigeria. Um, this is not a question of the United States, as Trump likes to posture that somehow this is charity or that Africans don't pull their weight. Some of the most prominent epidemiologists, physicians who have been on the front lines of these diseases since they were discovered initially in the 60s and 70s have been extraordinary in helping to identify, track, and trace these diseases. What the United States was facilitating was really a network of systems that allowed the information to be transmitted out to global parties and also to really help facilitate samples getting to labs to make sure that various labs can stay open. Really, we as the United States have learned a lot about the doctors on the ground. So I just want to be really clear in saying that because there is a lot of Western thought that somehow it's about incompetence on the continent. It's not. It's about enormous distances, terrain that doesn't have infrastructure, and things that need to travel.
SPEAKER_03Muriel, can I ask you from the very outset, what are the origins of Ebola?
SPEAKER_00So um what I know about Ebola is that it's zoonotic, which just is a fancy word for meaning it jumps from animals to humans. It's it's able to cross species. And it was first identified, as far as I know, in 1976. But 10 years before that, I think in 66 or 67, there was a phylovirus that was identified in Marburg, Germany, hence the name Marburg virus, that was very similar. Um, I think Ebola was first identified in the state that we know it now in in 76. And it was it was named. It was named for a river rather than a village because the doctors didn't want to stigmatize the village by naming it after a village.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Ross Powell Right. So that initial outbreak killed what 280 people, was it? In Zaire? 251 in uh Sudan, I think.
SPEAKER_00Something like that, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And the first European we're aware of catching us was a Belgian missionary nurse, nursing sister, Miriam Louise Accra. It's quite a deadly disease, isn't it? How how so how is it transmitted?
SPEAKER_00Well, let me just correct you on the deadly. It depends on the strain and it depends on comorbidities. So it is a very deadly disease, but it's not a hundred percent fatal. It can vary anywhere from about 25% to 80% fatality. So, yes, it's a deadly disease, but it's not always deadly in every case. And it's transmitted through, at the risk of being um sort of impolite, it's transmitted through bodily fluids, so saliva, sweat, blood, fecal matter, you know, vomit. And you have to have intimate contact. So, you know, health workers that are caring for someone who's sick and maybe don't know it's Ebola are at risk, as are family members who go to tend their loved ones or even bury their dead. Um, yeah, so it's not airborne.
SPEAKER_03You have to be quite intimate with, I suppose, with a person to get catch it at some level, don't you? What what are the symptoms?
SPEAKER_00Well, they are fever, aches, headache, terrible gastritis, diarrhea, things like that, terrible pain. End stage is hemorrhaging. So it's a hemorrhagic fever, and um that's pretty much any orifice in the body eyes, nose, mouth, ears.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's kind of the the stereotypical American perception of it, right? From some of the shows and some of the the occasional panics that that have come around with this. Because we have uh randomly talked about this several months ago on the pod, and it seemed like it was actually more familiar to Americans, but that's because of Hollywood, I think, more than anything else. It's certainly not because of our country's deep understanding of the continent of Africa by any stretch.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell So the disease disappeared for a long time. Am I correct in saying that? It didn't show up for another 15, 20 years or something like that, does it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, that's my understanding. And there's theories about zoonotic diseases. And having lived and worked in Africa and spent time, a lot of time in Central Africa in rainforest countries. One of the theories is that as humans encroach more on areas that had previously been pristine and like logging, for example, a lot of these outbreaks tend to occur around sort of logging encampments or where human activity has has kind of come up against forests. You know, that's when the virus can jump hosts. My understanding is it went dormant and then it resurfaced again, yeah, about 15 years after the 76 outbreak.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell So this is essentially a direct consequence of an environmental disaster. This we would appear that it's this disease is, isn't it? You know, you're you're cutting back uh habitats there. It's something for people to dwell on when they think about environmentalism uh as a bigger picture, that there's direct consequences to environmental vandalism, isn't there?
SPEAKER_00I think that's a really smart assessment. You know, I have a lot of friends who are scientists who work and live in Africa, and it's certainly what a lot of them talk about. Africa, the African rainforest is second only to the Amazon rainforest in terms of really being a massive determinant of global weather. And um, there's been a huge push and sort of an alliance between rainforest countries in Africa to protect the rainforest. And one of the big arguments for a long time before COVID was the danger of zoonotic diseases. And when COVID started, a lot of my scientist friends, I've heard say, you know, this is something we've talked about in closed sessions for many years is the worry of something like COVID. So I think you're spot on. And yeah, there are consequences to destroying habitats and wreaking environmental damage.
SPEAKER_03You've spent so much time in Africa, Meredith. Would you be able to talk confidently about the political consequences of what's going on there at the moment and how the political situation might affect the Congo's response to the latest outbreak? It's a country wrapped with civil war for the last two decades, and that's directly hampering the efforts to fight the disease. Because I I was reading, I think it was Al Jazeera this morning, and it was saying people are attacking these Ebola healthcare facilities and they're demanding they're dead, which I don't think is a good idea considering how it spreads.
SPEAKER_00I can't speak to that because I I didn't read that uh this morning. What we do know is that Aturi is in the northeast of the Congo and the testing labs are in Kinshasa, and that's almost a thousand miles. And I've actually haven't spent time precisely in Aturi, but I've spent time in the east in Varunga, and that's basically where the Civil War has been concentrated for very many years now. And in order to get from one to the other, you're gonna have to cross territory that's under siege. And, you know, so that's a problem. I think also this is just human nature. If you tell somebody they're gonna be really punished, I mean, I have two children and I always said to them, if you tell me the truth about something, I promise, you know, you won't get grounded. And as a parent, you have to stick to that. And it's the same in politics. If you say, well, if you tell us, then we're gonna ban you and sanction you and not give you aid and not have flights from your country, it makes people, I think, frightened to be totally honest. I don't think that's a cultural issue. I just think that's a human response to what's going on.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell In the places where where these outbreaks are happening, for the average citizen in these places, what's their reaction? How does that affect their day-to-day life? Is there any sense of panic, or is this just because there are other hemorrhagic fevers in Africa, this is just kind of something that is is in the background of daily life?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Well, um, I have read that life is completely as normal in Kinshasa at the moment. And I do have friends that live there. I've spent a lot of time there. What I will say is I think that's not so much a blasé attitude towards the hemorrhagic fever, but just that they have a lot of knowledge about how it spreads and where it is and the geography of it all. But I also will say that the current administration has stripped so much aid and by proxy goodwill. When you stop programs like USAID and Gavi, you're also sort of choking the life out of your best goodwill ambassador. So there's that as well.
SPEAKER_02In terms of USAID and all these other programs, that's something we did our highlights and lowlights episode at the end of 2025. I said that was the worst thing the United States did last year. I stand by that. And uh one of the points that I made about Doge in particular was I don't agree with the Republican argument that, oh, you know, it's not our problem, it's not our job to carry, it's not our job to fund all these things. That's uh, you know, let other people do it. I think that's stupid from a soft power perspective, as you're saying, from a goodwill perspective. That aside, the way that they did it, to me, seemed just staggeringly stupid and incompetent. If you're going to sincerely make that argument, then you go to all the nonprofits and you say, right, well, you guys got 12 months. Rubio famously said, he said, Why isn't the United Kingdom funding this? Well, they can't fund it if you cut it, you just silently cut it 48 hours after you took office. They need a little bit of time.
unknownTrevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00And they do cut they they do fund it, and Ireland is one of the biggest funders per capita of international aids. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I I I think it's morally good work, but uh even if you move past that, uh to me, the incompetence of the cuts and the need to just do it instantly struck me as so silly. Having phrased it that way, if I'm asking to play devil's advocate here, is there any credence at all to what Musk and people in the administration said at the time in terms of waste, in terms of not understanding where the money went?
SPEAKER_00Well, um, I'm gonna just start by saying I think it's a pretty f awful argument and it's complete. There you go. I mean, you know, let me just not mince my words about that. And let me also say that having been on the inside of these systems, and I've done a lot of consulting to USAD, mostly just writing reports and helping with RFPs, just because I have a lot of domain knowledge, so that cuts down on the amount of hours that they have to contract me to write something up. Yeah, there's waste. There's waste everywhere in every company in the world. But to put this in perspective, first I want to I want to go through some numbers with you. But in the years between 2001 and 2024, USA provided $131 billion to African countries, or just over.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00That's like a third Elon Musk's net worth, and that was over 23 years.
SPEAKER_02In 2024, I I don't want to interrupt, but that's like so that's six billion a year. So that is what, 0.1% of our federal budget?
SPEAKER_00I mean, you had said that in your round. It's a min, it's a rounding era. It really is. That's and a line item. It's not even a line item. In 2024, $12.7 billion, so 31% of all U.S. foreign assistance globally was directed at Africa. Nigeria has lost $600 million in health funding. Botswana depended on U.S. sources for a third of its HIV response. I don't know if you remember this, but Botswana at one point had, I think, up to eight different strains of the HIV virus. It was a real epicenter of horrible explosion mutation of the HIV virus. And it's a small population, it's like two and a half million people. So Africa's CDC estimates two to four million additional, additional deaths in Africa this year as a result of, will die annually as a result of global aid budget cuts. The Institute of Security Studies says that that could push to 5.7 million more Africans into extreme poverty by 2026. So here's what I know, and I'm going to come at this as somebody who's also worked with a lot of venture capital funds and founders across Africa, is that when you strip people of this, this was not charity ever. This was absolute self-interest on the part of the United States. Africa has the largest young population in the world. And you have people between 19 and 30 who, if they aren't healthy, if they don't get job training, if there's not investment in their communities and their countries, you have high rates of unemployment amongst a youthful population that is much more likely to cause political unrest. If you've got a good job and your family is fed, you're not going out and protesting or trying to overthrow a government.
SPEAKER_02That was supposed to be one of the lessons we learned from 9-11. Yes, that the Arab nations had massive amounts of wealth and created a very significant population of young men who were overeducated and had absolutely nothing to do. And some of them made decisions that that Americans quite obviously would prefer they hadn't.
SPEAKER_00Well, there was concentrated bits of wealth in a lot of those countries, and some of them that had no wealth at all. I don't know if you're aware of this. Like I did a project, one of USAID's project is called Yali, and it's young African Leaders. And it was an Obama-era program. It was originally sat at the State Department. It has posts in Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. I've been to all of them. I did a big project looking at how they talk to each other and what a communication strategy should be. The whole point of the Yali program was to train young Africans for leadership positions. So they've got 24,000 alumni and that work that's 700 or 750,000 people strong. It's 60 years of relationship building, and one executive order trashed that. The other, yeah, there's another program called the Africa-America Institute. It was founded in 1953 by two Black American academics. Its original mission was financial assistance and hospitality for Africans looking to study in the U.S. By 1963, hundreds of African students were applying for USAID funded scholarships. Some of those names include President Cyril Ramapoza, Uttara from Cote d'Ivoire, Mbamba from Namibia, Wangari Matai, who's a Nobel Prize winner from Kenya. I can go on and on, the former head of the UN women. These are all graduates of AAI. And do you want to know who funded AAI in the early days?
SPEAKER_03Adam Calgary.
SPEAKER_00The CIA. And then afterwards was joined by Ford Carnegie Rockefeller Foundations, but it was seen as strategic. It was a strategic objective. Having African countries led by people who were educated, who got the resources they need to have their populations educated and healthy, is a plus for the United States. This is not a good thing.
SPEAKER_02That's worth a lot of money, right? And it's worth that.
SPEAKER_00It's a national security imperative. And so to look at it as charity is simplistic and just quite frankly daft. I mean, it is a national security imperative.
SPEAKER_03I may come in there. From an Irish point of view, Minister Neil Richmond, who I have to disclose as a good friend of mine, he's in charge of Irish aid to Africa. And Ireland's one of the few countries to increase foreign direct assistance at a time when you know when other nations are making significant comebacks uh or cutbacks. He has also said that this is not just a case of us giving away money and all that jazz. It's actually there's long term benefits to Ireland because it opens it opens up markets for us. We're not just you know here's here's some free Dosh. You know, you go off and spend it on what you want. There's a do you know there's a self-interest at play here also all the time that you know Well you have n Nigeria being the massive market for Guinness, right? Well yes, then Nigeria is the largest consumer of pints of Guinness in the world, I'd be like, And yeah, Coca-Cola too, you know.
SPEAKER_00So 230 million people in Nigeria.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I think it's what it's the is it the fifth biggest population in the world or something? So they mad. I mean and export oil, I I mean these things go hand in hand, and uh what we're donating is actually pittons out of our budget. I think Ireland's overall spend it was 0.5% of its budget, 0.05% of its budget. It's nothing, like it's nothing at all. So when the United States uh cuts these things arbitrarily, they're they're playing to a very narrow base. How do I I'm just not sure how I could fairly describe them, but I mean they're they've a one-track mind that think everything outside the United States is terrible and they have no bigger geopolitical strategic thinking going on there at all. It's just you know cut, cut, cut, and we're saving the American people tax dollars, but in reality it's going to cost them much, much more further down the line.
SPEAKER_02There's an oddly widespread belief here that I've seen among lots of people at lots of different times, it's not a Trump-specific thing, that the US spends vast, vast sums of wealth on foreign aid. Like I really think if you did a survey of a thousand Americans and you said what percentage of our budget goes to foreign aid, I think the average response would be like 20%. For some reason, people just have it in their head, and I can't even tell you where it comes from, particularly pre-Trump and even pre-social media, but we just have in our head that we are just funding like the entire world out of, and if we just cut in, I mean, there's a lot of people in this country, believe it or not, who believe if we stopped international aid, we could bounce the budget or get close. Like that's uh we're it we have a budget deficit because we're funding all these people overseas. No, we don't. We have numbers. That's not how the world works. No.
SPEAKER_00And by the way, we don't really do ROI numbers for that. So for the amount of money that 0.1% or whatever it is a year that we were spending on USAID, what's the ROI on that? It's kind of like, you know, it's Americans think the market is the economy. Most Americans don't have investments in the stock market. And yet they've been brainwashed to think when the market is up, the economy is great. And it's the same with GDP. You know, FDR was trying to gauge how bad the economy was being effective. And one of his economists came up with the GDP measurement, but there was caution around that. Like, well, you know, spending goes up, but if more people are spending on healthcare, that doesn't necessarily indicate the society is healthy. So I think we have been fed a lot of rubbish over the years, Vince. And I don't know where this comes from, but I think I do it comes from journal.
SPEAKER_03It comes from the Wall Street Journal.
SPEAKER_02A little bit of that, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Maybe, maybe. You indeed, after the editorial two weeks ago, yeah, that I can believe that. But I think we just look at the wrong figures, and we should be looking at what is the return on investment for you know the the real pittance that USAID was actually spending a year.
SPEAKER_03Now, a man of numbers, I like numbers because they don't lie, Meredith is my question. She just told you that numbers lie. Yeah. Hard numbers don't lie, political numbers don't lie. About numbers, there's about 750 suspected cases, and I think there's about 177 fatalities, is what's been reported. That's probably gone up by the time this part.
SPEAKER_00Gone up a little bit, yeah.
SPEAKER_03So can we trust those numbers?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think we can trust those numbers. Look, I think that the the the CDC and other places that are trying to, that are credible sources, are doing the best they can. You know, when you have to send samples off, I don't know if there's a rapid test for Ebola. My understanding is samples need to be sent off to be tested. I mean, I suspect there's probably a higher infection rate. You're talking about really remote areas, really remote villages. There could be someone who has a terrible headache or a fever who might think they have malaria. But I think that overall we've been pretty accurate, certainly over the last 15 years with numbers. So I I trust them.
SPEAKER_03Yes, okay. Because there's uh some publications reporting that the numbers are much higher. I don't know if they're scaremongering to sell clicks and the like. I feel at the moment there's an element of the media overblowing this at the moment, which might come back to bite me on the backside if it gets out, if it's if it gets into Europe or it gets into North America, wherever the case may be.
SPEAKER_00No, I think what they're doing is underblowing what we have done to dismantle a system that was actually self-serving. We have taken away protections for Americans. Because as I said, none of this is charity. Vince, you and I totally agree on this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And uh I think the media focuses on the wrong thing, and we should be furious with our government for dismantling systems that keep us safe.
SPEAKER_03There's 10 countries know on a watch list, isn't there?
SPEAKER_00Well, if we think about the West African outbreak, which, you know, until the outbreak in Sierra Leone and Liberia, there was and Guinea, you know, Ebola was very much a Central African disease. And that was a bit of an anomaly, and that did spread like wildfire. And it probably spread like wildfire because there's more traffic going through those countries and travel. You know, not as many people are going through a Ture province, um, so or South Sudan. But that epidemic, I think 11,000 people died, and that raged, and it was, and it was the worst by far, and it was in really populous areas, and that was over a period of time. So, and that's a terribly high figure, and it was a horrible tragedy. But I don't I don't think there's any massive cover-up. I just think maybe it's a little bit higher than that now. But for the remoteness that affects us getting accurate reporting or instant reporting also slows the spread of the disease, too. The pendulum swings both ways, but yeah.
SPEAKER_03Well, you you were seeing there that that was a massive outbreak, the the last 111,000 people. How did it contain that?
SPEAKER_00I don't know how it was contained in every place, but I was in Nigeria for uh in and out of Nigeria and the Gambia during that time. So I do know a little bit about how it was contained there. Um, and it was contained through African competency. So there was initially it was a uh a physician who collapsed in Lagos in the airport. I think it was like late July of 2014, and then 894 contacts were traced, 18,500 face-to-face visits were done. And the infrastructure, and actually, USAID copied the infrastructure that the African countries had been developing, and Nigeria really swung into action. It was declared Ebola free 93 days later. Now, Lagos is a city of what, 21 million people? And the fact this guy landed at an international airport and was taken to a local clinic, and it took 93 days, and all told, you know, it was a a pretty, I can't remember the death rate in Nigeria from that outbreak, but it was pretty low. And they did a really, really good job contact tracing. That's pretty fast to contain a a deadly disease in one of the most populous cities in the world.
SPEAKER_03Yes, incredible. You were suspected of having Ebola at one stage, weren't you?
SPEAKER_00I was never suspected of having Ebola, but my doctor, my doctor was part of the team that treated somebody. The only case that came to South Africa was at Morningside Clinic where my gastroenterologist, Chris Cassinides, was. When I say my brushes with Ebola, I mean it was at the clinic where I was treated. My doctor was part of the team. I was in Nigeria and the Gambia and Congo when there'd been Ebola epidemics. I can tell you that I flew to Congo when I was a reporter. I still am a reporter, but um, I did a piece, I think it was 2002 or 2003, and there was the civil war was still going on, and I landed in Kinshasa. I had flown from Johannesburg, and there was a Chinese national, and I mean there were like 10 people on my flight from Johannesburg, and there were a bunch of Congolese women, all with like, you know, designer shopping bags, because Joe Berg had the place where you would go down and buy your designer clothes. And they were clearly like the wives of ministers or prominent people in Congo, and they all had their Gucci shopping bags. And there was this one Chinese man on the flight, and he was coughing, and they all got their cell phones out and were screaming in Lingala. I can only imagine to their husbands or whoever else, like, meet us at the airport. There's this Chinese guy, and they thought he was bringing SARS to Congo. And I arrive, and literally, um, I've written about this. It was, it was not so funny at the time, but I arrived and immediately I was pulled aside by soldiers and going through the VIP lounge, and they asked me what I was doing, and I was actually doing a report for Kroll at the time, and I just froze and got really nervous, and I said, tourist. And they were like, Yeah, okay. You come with us, because it was just the stupidest. I'm such a bad spy. It was the stupidest thing to say. It was a civil war ranging, nobody's in the Congo, and I'm like, I'm a tourist, I've come to see the bonabos. And anyway, the guys who came back to talk to me, they're, you know, the Congolese were like six foot five and they were like heavily bandoliered, and it was kind of a scary moment. And and Kabila's plane was idling on the tarmac, and everybody was heavily armed. And these guys were walking towards me, and I'm looking at they've got this thing stretched across their face. I'm like, what is that? And they were all walking around with maternity pads on their face because they didn't have so they had like grabbed the nearest cotex and stuck it on their face, at which point I just got the giggles and I couldn't stop laughing. And I was like, you're pointing an AK-47 at me, but you're wearing like a sanitary pad on your face. And I don't even know how to process all. So the more I laughed, the angrier they got. Eventually, you know, my protocol, I was released into his custody. But I remember turning to Joseph and said, Really? You guys have like Ebola and you care about SARS? Like there's all of this ruckus about SARS? It's like you have Ebola here, you know. And but SARS is much more contagious than Ebola. So everybody was, you know, dressed up in their codex. I don't know what to tell you, but that's uh that is a true story.
SPEAKER_02What's the short version of your history in Africa? How did you wind up there? It sounds like you spent years and years there, is that true?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I zigged when I should have zagged, Vince. You know what I mean? So I wound up there because I wanted to take a year off from university and I applied to two programs. One was in East Africa, and it was with Scott Fisher and Wesley Krause, Scott, who would go on to die on Everest, taking Sandy Hill Pittman, but they have this Mountain Madness was their company at the time, and I thought I'd go climb mountains and go to East Africa. The other program I um applied to was in the Antarctic, was to go and work as a reporter in McMurdo during the Austral summer, and I got into both, and my dad was like a hands.
SPEAKER_02You're embarrassing the hell out of me. I was in I was in college, and there I I had choices to do things, and I the choices I made when I was a college are very, very different. Yeah. Oh, no.
SPEAKER_00Well, I've made really poor life choices since, Vince. So that's fair enough. Yeah, I caught up. Really bad life choices. But anyway, I decided to go to East Africa and I fell in love. I mean, I t I've written this story, so it might be a bit trite now, but you know, when I was little, I was allowed to watch one hour of television a week, and I always chose Wonderful Worlds of Disney and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and that added up to an hour. And, you know, I was kind of like a lonely weird kid who wrote in her journal all the time. And I just always thought Africa seemed cool because you had these big families and everybody came together and it was beautiful and there were wild animals. Yeah, so I got there and I kind of fell in love with the continent. I went home and I wrote like a hundred letters to every editor of every publication on the continent of Africa that I wanted to go back and work there as a reporter. And I then I ended up doing it the old-fashioned way. I went to a dinner party that the PR to the UN from South Africa gave and met my husband. So I just set the woman's movement back, having been so intrepid and cool. Like, how did I get there? I got married. And he was South African, and so his visa was expiring. He had an H1B, that controversial visa that everybody's complaining about these days. Yeah, he was going back to South Africa. His each H1B was expiring, so he said, Let's, you know, marry me, but we're gonna have to do it in South Africa because I gotta leave America. So that's how about that? How about that?
SPEAKER_02Your your initial perception of Africa being a child and and seeing it as as being, you know, kind of exotic and unique and beautiful and all these sorts of things. Americans, I think, have just an abysmal, abysmal sense of that continent. Do you think it's the same in Ireland at all? I mean, again, you you know, the Irish the Irish Army has done a lot of peacekeeping there and humanitarian missions there and stuff.
SPEAKER_03So it might be a little better, but it's in Ireland we have a we have a long history in Ireland aid and outreach you know, uh over the years. Uh Irish missionary priests and nuns are probably one of the first people to arrive in Africa with aid, to be perfectly honest. But I mean they were coming with a cross as well, also, they were looking to so again it wasn't thirdly, you know, uh out of the goodness of their hearts, you know, to convert or die, maybe perhaps. But um no, we have a long history, a very long history with Africa. We've a long history of peacekeeping, particularly in the Congo. There was a very famous incident in Kinsasha. Uh they made a Netflix movie about the fact you know, 120 soldiers held out against 10,000 rebels in the Congo at the time, and Swedish and Belgian mercenaries. Jamie Dorian played the lead character in it, and uh I actually had a relative to her that thing as well, also, in Kinsasha with the Irish Army. Yes, we have a long, long history there, and our footprint there is actually quite big for a country our size. We punch above our weight, I suppose, diplomatically in Africa compared to other countries because we've a long history of and there's an element of we were a colonised country also. We're able to go to African countries and say, look, we've been there, which we've been we we were colonized as well. So we we know what you're going through here, you know. So there's that there's that kind of uh diplomatic shtick as well, for want of a better word. So yes, we are also largely ignorant of what goes on on the continent. You know, the United States isn't unique in these things either, you know. We're fade. Hey, hey, hey, we don't say things like that on this podcast.
SPEAKER_02The United States is unique and exceptional in all things.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I'll be getting off now.
SPEAKER_02Yes, you should have heard me talking about Donald Trump a couple episodes ago. I almost blew the whole damn thing up.
SPEAKER_03Yes, I'd steam coming on my ears.
SPEAKER_00I do listen. I do listen. I will say that for my initial foray living in Africa. Well, one, I moved to Johannesburg, I got married, I worked at the local paper, the financial paper business day. You know, I don't know if I would describe South Africa as typical of Africa, but I started traveling a lot all over Africa, covering stories and but it wasn't until probably 15 years after I really was living and working on the continent that I really started going to West Africa. And that was a conscious decision because I think a lot of people who do claim to know Africa have been on safari, or they've been to Cape Town, or they've visited vineyards, or you know, they've been to Kenya, they've been to Tanzania, maybe they've been to Botswana, South Africa. And I thought, well, if I'm gonna talk to people about how much I love Africa, it's sort of disingenuous if I haven't spent time everywhere. So I went and spent a month in Chad and I spent a month in Cameroon. And then I really did start. I worked for two years for the presidency and um president in the Gambia. I've worked in Senegal, I've done a lot of work over the years and spent months at a time in Nigeria and in urban areas. So these are it wasn't a safari. And what I will say is that life is sophisticated and it's also poor. Like you have both, much the same way you would in New York or Washington. In fact, driving into Washington, D.C., there are more homeless people in the nation's capital than anywhere else that I see, and and there shouldn't be. You know, Nigeria I know really well. You've got the Yoruba and the Ibo. I mean, these are these are civilizations, the Benin, who have valued education for thousands of years. They have history of learning and language and art. And it's only by being on the ground you realize like what meatheads we are, basically. Like we, I mean, my son just graduated from law school two weeks ago. And I was laughing with him because all of my Nigerian friends are texting me, like, oh, that's so great, send Nicholas our love. But it's very much a Nigerian mother will start her sentence with my hus, my son, the doctor, my daughter, the doctor, the lawyer, whatever. It's like, you know, the old trope about a Jewish mother. That's totally Nigerian, you know, it's how educated they are, how accomplished they are. And it means something. And if any of these families scrape who are climbing out of poverty, entering the middle class, their priority is education. It's not going and buying a new pickup truck, it's educating their children and they value it. And there are so many groups of people all across Africa that are that are defined by their education, their family values, their art, their literature. So, you know, I guess I could have an entire show about this because I think Americans are really uneducated about how incredibly sophisticated Africa Africans are.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that brings me to a thought there about the virus and how it's defeated. That of course there's a certain degree of heroism involved from the nurses and the doctors and the frontline workers, but it's the administration that defeats the virus, isn't it? Not apocalypse, but probably paperwork of some sort, you know, uh guardrails and measures in place that uh only a sophisticated administration can defeat.
SPEAKER_00I can tell you that when I was in the Gambia and Nigeria and traveling back and forth during that West African epidemic, there were measures everywhere. You couldn't get off an airplane without someone taking your temperature. You filled out forms everywhere, you weren't allowed through to public venues, to hotels. These are people who live not just with Ebola, which thankfully isn't a big presence in people's lives, but with malaria, with typhoid, with other diseases where they're very live to symptoms. They take treatment very seriously, they take contagion very seriously. And I'm not cavalier about these things. And I'm a mom and I have two children. I wouldn't have been traveling back and forth if I thought I was really at risk for anything. I'm not somebody who thinks, oh, well, you know, I want to go into the danger zone. I don't. I'm a mom and I have two children who I love very much. And, you know, of all the traveling I've done, it's all been carefully considered and really well supported. And I've been sick in these countries too. You know, I was treated for typhoid and malaria at a local clinic in Lagos. And by the way, my doctor trained at Weill Cornell, my Nigerian doctor. Wow and was fantastic. And so I've had really good experiences with doctors on the continent, people who are able to do so much with so with so little and who are super professional.
SPEAKER_03Well, I this is must be a first for us, Meredith, that le you know, closing a podcast on a very positive note.
SPEAKER_02That's right. Yeah. Everybody leave, quick, miss.
SPEAKER_03It's tull sober, I wonder.
SPEAKER_02Um I think that is a great place to end. It's really wild that you're saying, you know, this wonderful doctor who was uh educated in the United States. That gets right back to the point that we started with, right? That this money, the money that we uh have spent and hopefully we'll spend again, is not charity. It's not useless, it's not uh it's not. being given away. It has very, very real world positive return on investment, as you put it. And again, I I mean I'm speaking personally. We just don't we don't know. We we really don't know in America about uh life in Africa. And then so it's just been so fascinating to hear about some of those aspects of it. Really do appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Well thank you so much for having me on and um I follow you guys and listen to you and love your podcast. So it's been really fun talking to you today. Thank you.
SPEAKER_03Well Meredith, you're still a journalist as you said and I forgot to point out you are an award-winning journalist there in Virginia and what's your Substack called so anybody that subscribes to us can go find you?
SPEAKER_00It's my very long name well I mean you can find me by my name but it's all that I've met coming back to Africa I was asked once to speak to the team that ran one of the sovereign wealth funds in Botswana. I had an hour to club together this speech and I thought oh my goodness I I really don't like public speaking and I get really shy about it. And anyway it's a line from a Tennyson poem that I really love and I think can apply to all of us. You know you're just a sum of your experiences in a way so all that I've met. Yeah. Anyway thank you guys so much I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03Meredith you have been a ray of sunshine into our very deeply cynical podcast.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for coming hardly cynical.
SPEAKER_03I think pretty accurate thank you very much to Meredith and her expertise that she brought from Africa to the podcast and Tull from the Irish Politics Newsletter.
SPEAKER_02And I'm Vince Martin from Wall Street in Maine. Thank you as always bye bye
