BURMA'S INDEX
Percentage of ruling military junta budget allocated to arms: 40

Per capita expenditures on healthcare by Burmese ruling military junta: $1

Total earnings in millions per year for selling natural gas to foreign companies: 40

Rank of Eastern Burma in terms of worst mortality rates for children under 5 in world: 2

Number of years current military junta has ruled Burma: 19

Number of years Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest: 13

Percentage of deaths that malaria accounts for in Eastern Burma: 40

Cost of one insecticide-impregnated bed net to prevent malaria: $5

Average percentage change of malaria prevalence once village implements Karen Malaria Control Program: -68

Cost of one rapid diagnostic test for malaria: $0.80

Number of megawatts of electricity that will be generated by 5 dams that will be built along the Salween River: 10,000

Number of Karen civilians the dam project has displaced so far: 210,000

Percentage of the new energy proposed for displaced villagers: 0

Number of persons needed to test positive in order to consider a village endemic with filariasis: 1

Number of health workers working in Eastern Burma that tested positive for filariasis out of a sample of six: 2

Official estimates of filariasis infections in Burma: 2,000,000

Percentage of villagers in Eastern Burma that were forced to move from village in 2004: 9

Odds of child being malnourished if household was forced to flee from their village in the past 12 months: 3 in 1

beaver fever

• I had beaver fever back in the day. Sorry, I just learned what this word meant and had a compulsion to share that.
  
• I was reading a poem in Harpers about a dog in a bus station written by an Indian poet and there I was, waiting inside a bus station, watching a dog get comfortable and fall asleep in the middle of a crowded walkway, halfway between the stairs and snack stand.