perspective...

Here is a good example on how different perspectives can affect our lives and the lives of others, who have very different perspectives.

Attacks on cholera centres
in Cabo Delgado
Protestors attacked a cholera treatment centre and a prevention team in Cabo Delgado province in the north last weekend, according to the daily Notícias. In the provincial capital Pemba, local people burned down three tents which had been set as a treatment centre. And in Mecúfi, south of Pemba, an anti-cholera team was attacked; a nurse, a driver, and six others were beaten and accused of spreading the disease rather than treating it. (Clippings attached.)
This is a repeat of incidents in coastal Nampula seven years ago, in which brigades putting chlorine in wells were instead accused of putting cholera in the wells, and were attacked. Those protests were studied by Carlos Serra and a team from Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, and published in 2003 in an excellent small book Cólera e catarse. (The full book, in Portuguese, is posted on my website: http://www.tinyurl.com/mozamb. My preface, in English and Portuguese, is attached to this report.)
The shocking finding of the study was that poor people strongly believed that the rich and powerful wanted to kill them. In a climate of distrust and disempowerment, the poor responded violently against outsiders who they assumed were putting cholera in their water to eliminate them.
The study also found that the campaign against chlorine in the water was not a campaign against the state or against modernising, but rather just the opposite. It was a protest against a state which had become distanced from the people, which only appeared before elections, and which increasingly failed to provide services and a better standard of living. It was not against modernity, but against the failure to provide the fruits of development.
And it is notable that the Noticias article on a meeting in Pemba after the tents were burned, there were strong criticisms of the city authorities.

In other words, people in Mozambique sometimes believe that the chlorine tablets handed out by the government, usually a project funded by some Western aid organization, are poisonous and harm, not good. While I'd heard this, along with things like it's America that brought AIDS to Africa, malaria is the white man's ploy to kill Africans, etc., I'd never known it to be take so seriously as to start a riot and act violently towards aid workers. Sigh, the we've all got a long ways to go.