by Jeff Nesbit
The adoption made news across the globe. But, in Malawi, the reaction was much slower. Word of such things often traveled the country by word of mouth. Many of Malawi’s villages had no power and very little contact with the outside world. It was only in the cities, like Lilongwe, that people even grasped the concept.
When Madonna tried to adopt a second child from Malawi—a girl whose eighteen-year-old mother had died, unmarried, shortly after giving birth—a local court tried to block it. Madonna had first discovered Chifundo “Mercy” James at the Kondanani Children’s Village, an orphanage just south of Blantyre, another Malawi city. But Malawi’s high court had overturned the ruling, and Madonna’s new daughter left the country on a private jet for London.
The sign alongside the road intrigued Nash. It took a lot for a Malawian to write such a thing. For those, like Nash Lee, who spent time working in the country, Malawi was really the “warm heart of Africa.” The people welcomed azungus—white people—everywhere in the country. Yes, they were mostly a curiosity, but they were always welcomed with open arms.
Every village adopted orphans when it could. There were care-givers, maternal grandmothers, and others who took on babies whose mothers who had died of AIDS or other afflictions. A person was an “orphan” in Malawi only in the strictest sense of the word. You were orphaned when you were isolated from your community.
The first time Nash had come to a medical clinic in rural Malawi to set up one of his global health projects, there had been kids everywhere. He’d had no idea who was an “orphan” and who was not. He’d pulled a Snickers bar from his backpack and handed it to one of the kids trailing behind him.
He’d watched, fascinated, as the kid stopped, unwrapped it, and then waited patiently as eleven other kids joined him by the side of the road. They’d carefully separated the Snickers bar into twelve roughly even pieces. There had been no fighting—just an easy willingness to share with those in the community.
When you took a bus in Malawi from one place to another, the bus stopped to pick up everyone and everything, including the chickens on their way to an uncertain fate somewhere. As many as fifty people might pile onto the bus. Everyone, and everything, was welcomed. The bus arrived at its destinations along the way when it could, with as many people as it could hold.
This was the “warm heart” of Malawi that Nash had grown to love and admire in his work. It took people awhile to recognize it, though. Americans and Europeans who flew into a place like Malawi, trying to do good and help out, would often miss this sort of thing.
Nash rarely saw this sort of generosity in the United States, a nation that liked to call itself a Christian nation. But here, in Malawi, it was as natural as breathing. Nash always marveled when he traveled to Malawi and other countries in Africa where people lived their faith and beliefs on a daily basis. Most people in America would never recognize such generosity in the face of utter poverty.
In fact, one of the things that always bothered Nash was the way in which even faith-based international relief organizations played up tragedy and despair to raise money for their work in Africa. Yes, there was despair in Africa in the face of hunger, drought, and AIDS—but there was also laughter, warmth, hope, and, yes, even happiness.
Nash was profoundly comfortable living his Christian faith in a place like Malawi. Here, he could simply do good without explanation. He came to help, and he helped. He didn’t need to explain why his own personal Christian beliefs led him to Africa. He was just here to help. That was good enough for the people in Malawi, and elsewhere in Africa. He didn’t need to be a celebrity, and he didn’t need to be recognized for his actions.
Nash didn’t want to judge Madonna, and heaven knew that Mercy and David would have much better lives in London as the son and daughter of one of the world’s richest and most famous pop star icons. But, to Nash, it all sort of missed the point.
The point, as he saw it, was to work from the absolute epicenter of the need—the community. Everything in Malawi, and other African nations like it, revolved around community. Tens of thousands of African villages had legions of volunteers who had dedicated their lives to helping others. Nash’s bond, and life, was dedicated to that community—and to those who served it. He was their connector, one of the azungus who understood how their world really worked.
His very first global health project, while he was still an undergraduate at Harvard, had been a simple one that embodied this world-view. He’d spent the summer going from village to village in rural Malawi, watching closely how the volunteer community and village health workers went about their business.
Those villages were all isolated from the rest of the country—and from the rest of the world, for that matter. There was no electricity, no power, in those villages. When someone got sick, there was no way to call 9-1-1 and ask for an emergency vehicle to show up at your door. You either walked to the clinic to seek medical care—which could take days—hitched a ride on the back of a bicycle, or waited until the nurse from the hospital eventually made his way to your village.
But Nash had noticed there was one thing available to each of those villages. In fact, it was the one thing that was ubiquitous in Africa: the cell phone. If you could keep a cell phone powered, and you had money to pay for service, then you could connect to the clinic and the rest of the world.
When Nash returned to Harvard, he did what came naturally to kids of his generation. He put the word out on his blog, his Twitter feed, his Facebook page, and elsewhere. Help me, he wrote in so many words. How can I solve this equation?
And the answers started to arrive. He borrowed an open-source, text-messaging software platform that had been developed to monitor democratic elections in countries where the media was largely controlled by the government in power. He borrowed another open-source software platform from a system that had been generated at Harvard to create really simple electronic medical forms. And he finished the project off with a third open-source software system created at UCLA that allowed the simple cell phone to plug into a diagnostic kit and test for AIDS, malaria, and TB—right there, at the point of care, in the middle of any remote place on earth.
Next, he’d invited those who’d shown an interest in the project to join him. They did. Half a dozen kids in various science, engineering, and computer science fields from other rich universities like Stanford, Yale, and elsewhere started talking. They crashed all the systems together to create a unique cell phone system that could do what sophisticated mobile health systems could do—but at a fraction of the cost.
Nash had secured a grant from a global health center at Harvard, which paid his travel back to Malawi and allowed him to buy enough text-messaging service for one hundred cell phones for ten years. He tested his pilot. He trained one hundred community workers to use the phones, connected them to donated solar panels to solve the power problem in the villages, and then sent them back out to their villages.
Within three months, the results were in. The number of people diagnosed with TB—and, ultimately, treated—doubled. The reason was simple. When a community health worker saw signs and symptoms, he or she would send a text message to the hospital, which then allowed the medical personnel there to move into action. The communication was instantaneous, and the response was equally quick. Nash had connected one hundred villages to the hospital—at a cost of perhaps $2,000.
And, from there, Nash and his team had taken the NGO and global health world by storm. Everyone signed up for the low-cost, high-impact mobile health solution—WHO, the United Nations fund, UNICEF, Save the Children, Partners in Health. What had started as a project while Nash was studying for finals at Harvard had, almost overnight, turned into a global public health concern.
Nike’s global advertising firm had adopted Nash’s project and created a charity for him and his team to encourage millions to send in their used cell phones for recycling in African villages. They won global health tech competitions. Foundations started giving money. An
d, before he’d known it, Nash was racing around the globe, implementing community-based health solutions as fast as his team could create them. There was nothing the team wasn’t willing to try.
It had all happened so fast that they’d created a name on the fly that aspired to greatness and their game-changing goal: Village Health Corps. Nashua Lee—whose father was an icon of the Democratic Party in the United States, had raised millions for three different U.S. presidents, and had culminated an illustrious career with two ambassadorships to South Korea and presently in Japan—made himself the executive director of VHC more on faith than anything else. Now, four years later, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, Nash was the master of a global public health empire that operated in more than one hundred nations around the globe.
Curiously, though, it was their latest technology twist at VHC that was starting to create highly unusual and mind-bending possibilities. One of their founding partners—an open-source software genius type from Cambridge in the UK—had set about to make the simple SMS, text-messaging system an actual media delivery platform.
The concept, while modest at first, had proved revolutionary. The team had developed the ability to compress and embed video files directly into text messages. Any cell phone equipped with the ability to view videos—and most could now do that—became a mobile TV, of sorts.
Then they’d adopted Google’s operating system for mobile platforms, cut a deal to network through the ubiquitous computing cloud, partnered with Apple for delivery of media, and finished it off with a deal with Nokia to pilot test a new mobile phone.
Once upon a time, America Online had taken its modest text-messaging concept and created an Internet revolution. Other companies like Google and Microsoft expanded that revolution even further. Such technology changed everything in countries like China, which at first could not control the flow of information directly to its citizens through the Internet. They could control the media, but not the Internet.
But, over time, China and others did learn, in fact, how to control information on the Internet. They’d learned how to block searches and displays of certain types of information. They’d also been able to maintain control of information delivered via Internet-like media services on cell phones.
But they could not control text messages, which hide within the data on cell networks. They could not control that one-to-one system of data delivery. And Nash’s VHC team had perfected the art of one-to-many SMS systems, which allowed even the smallest NGO to communicate with a far-flung network. A new form of communication was born that could operate within closed, controlled systems. They called it mVillage.
For the first time in a generation, dictators, despots, and totalitarian regimes could not control or manipulate information that had the ability to migrate and circulate among its citizens. Overnight, mVillage had enabled entire networks to communicate directly to people in countries like North Korea and Iran.
Global institutes, NGOs, and others with a stake in talking to the people in countries where the media was under tight control adopted this new mobile technology. In a very short time, they were bombarding the landscape with video messages and stories that carried truth into places where lies and distortion were the coin of the realm. It was a breathtaking, dangerous world that Nash and VHC had created for themselves and others.
This third wave of information delivery was confounding totalitarian regimes. Once there had been radio and television to the masses. Then there had been the Internet, also to the masses. Now there was IT via single mobile devices, delivered to the masses on a one-to-many basis….
Nash shook his head to focus his thoughts on the present. He was late for his visit with his pastor friend. As he returned his concentration to the road to make sure he got there as quickly as he could, he almost missed the small, global satellite cell phone ringing and vibrating loudly on his belt.
Easing up on the throttle of the motorbike, he slowed enough to pull the phone from his belt to glance at the message. He received so many SMS messages and calls that he’d set his phone to both ring and vibrate loudly only when messages and numbers came in from a handful of carefully selected people.
He glanced at the caller ID. It had just one word—DAD. Nash came to a complete stop on the side of the dirt road. His father almost never called, so it had to be something important. Nash couldn’t guess what it might be, but he knew he needed to listen to the voice mail.
His father operated in a world that Nash didn’t really understand and largely avoided. But their work occasionally intersected—and was about to again.
07
RAMAT DAVID AIRBASE
SOUTHEAST OF HAIFA, ISRAEL
The plane was as ugly as it was black. The prototype of the plane—built at Lockheed Martin’s infamous Skunk Works—had been nicknamed the “Hopeless Diamond” because it jutted out in strange places and looked like an oversized replica of the Hope Diamond. The actual planes in production weren’t any prettier. They almost didn’t look like they’d fly right.
But Ben Azoulay knew that those strange angles and odd shapes gave the plane its marvelous, almost unexplainable, ability to avoid the most sophisticated air defenses ever built. Even now, twenty-five years after the first F-117 came off the assembly line, those few American pilots who’d put enough hours on the plane to become “Bandits” swore by it as the best plane ever.
Azoulay, a second-generation Israeli Air Force pilot, was the first Israeli Bandit certified to fly the F-117. He was Bandit 1 for Israel. He was followed shortly by the other twenty-three IAF pilots—all rated as Bandits.
When the word came through that Israel, the Camara administration, and Congress had come to terms on a quiet, secret sale of twenty-four F-117s, the new, elite corps of IAF Bandits was ecstatic. They knew precisely what this meant.
The American F-117s were as close to a silver bullet to their country’s Iran problem as they could imagine. Thanks to technical modifications made to the plane by Lockheed engineers, the F-117s could now extend their range without refueling to well beyond the public estimate of 1,070 miles. With adjusted payloads, the planes could now strike any target in Iran, avoid the new Russian air defenses in place, and get back to either Turkey or elsewhere without landing or refueling. Air strikes deep into Iran with F-16s and F-15s were suicide missions. The F-117s made the mission possible.
One by one, the new IAF Bandits piloted the newly acquired F-117s across the Atlantic to the First Air Wing at Ramat David to the north of Israel. There was no announcement, no ceremony, no fanfare. The planes simply arrived, one by one, at Ramat David.
Now, many months later and with enough training in hand, Ben felt that he was prepared for the mission he was about to undertake. His F-117 was one of only four equipped with something the Israel government would deny immediately after the strike. His plane carried a tactical nuclear payload designed to obliterate the entire site and everything in it. But Israel and the four Bandit pilots carrying the tactical nukes would never talk about these payloads and the damage they would inflict. To the world, the damage inflicted by their payload would look quite similar to what might be inflicted by a series of high-explosive bombs.
But Ben had been briefed enough to know that his payload was almost the only way Israel could take out the extensive underground networks of HEU, warhead and missile facilities that had been spread around Iran’s countryside. He tried not to think about the moral implications of dropping a tactical nuke on a target. He had a job to do, one that was at the heart of his country’s ability to protect itself. To Ben, that was all that mattered.
It wasn’t that Ben didn’t care about the implications. He cared deeply. Everyone who’d ever met him knew that he walked securely on the straight and narrow path. He was confident in his God and held strongly to faith, family, and country in a seamless fashion.
For all of these reasons, Ben knew precisely what this mission meant—to Israel, and to the world. And it was precisely for this reason t
hat he would give his life for it, if need be.
As his crew secured the canopy that surrounded him, Ben closed his eyes briefly to say a prayer, touched the Star of David lightly beneath his jumpsuit, then moved his hand to the controls of the Stealth fighter. It was time.
A moment later, the F-117—the silver bullet so recently acquired from the U.S.—was in the air and on its way to Iran.
08
TEHRAN, IRAN
Reza Razavi was beside himself. It was bad enough they’d stolen the presidency from him. But to snatch him from the street and place him under house arrest?
He’d never felt so isolated. They’d stripped the house of every computer and landline. Thankfully, they hadn’t checked for the cell phone he kept in a drawer in the bathroom.
Using the phone, he’d been able to check the mVillage boards for the past two hours. His own house arrest had even been captured somehow and posted on mVillage. Dozens of threads were starting to attach themselves to the outrage building over his house arrest.
“This is madness,” Razavi muttered. He hadn’t been able to stop pacing for the past two hours. He knew what was happening. He knew. He’d heard from dozens of his peers, colleagues, and friends in the opposition movement that had grown by leaps and bounds in recent months—literally from the day the conservative, messianic president of Iran had stolen the election.
The word was everywhere. The president—and the religious leaders he answered to in many small, but important, ways—had made the political decision to enrich enough uranium to test a nuclear bomb. The MMS and SMS text and video bursts were screaming through the cell phone media network that served as the only way for news to escape the borders of Iran.
Thank goodness for mVillage, Razavi thought.
Reza had always assumed it would only be a matter of time before the Revolutionary Guards created some excuse to place him under house arrest. It’s why he’d hidden the cell phone. He and a second candidate who’d run unsuccessfully against Iran’s president, Nassir Ahmadian, had been accused by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of leading a “soft” revolution against the government.
