Yay for old friends, economics, and technology! All at once! kc wrote a blog posting with her humble ideas on how to use IP address space tax. Wait… there’s a tax on address space? Yes, because it has become a scare quantity, because people are too lazy to move to IPv6, IPv4 address space is…
There is a really excellent article on aid work in The New Yorker. Though this is pretty much a write-only blog at this point, and I don’t really know if anyone cares, here are my reactions to the article: It is remarkably candid, but… it is too hopeless… because it focuses too much on the…
(Good lord is this a day for blogging. I suppose sometimes the dam breaks and the thoughts spill out…) Today I got a question from Jon: What is OCA and OCP? MSF is getting into the acronym business like everyone else! The simple answer: OC = Operating Centre, or Cell depending on the person. OCB…
Marina is doing a project right now in her Public Health class where she has to make a project proposal (the whole thing, with the Gant charts, the budget, etc) for a Maternal Health project in a fictional health district in a fictional country in Africa. As we were discussing it, I came up with…
This is a story a bit like mine from Chad, though we were not faced with bandits/rebels/soldiers directly. The feelings of shame and regret she has are related to the complicated feelings I had on leaving Chad as well. In my case, we had nothing to be ashamed of — we took good care of…
Something very wrong is going on on South Africa, and the world is missing it: “It is better for us to be here than go for reintegration. The South Africans want to kill us and the government is trying to kill us. Reintegration’s a death sentence. We’d rather die here together,” said Johnny Kaka. MSF…
Here’s a story that’s, unfortunately, not a surprise: KINNE: And over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged…
The dirty secret of aid work… it always comes down to this… the navel-gazing, “why am I here”, “why is it so ineffective” conversation. Usually it happens around the campfire, over a bottle of locally made beer, or perhaps for the lucky coordination team in the capital city, at the nearby expat-only restaurant over a…
Headline from a Scientific American blog posting: Measles is back, and it’s because your kids aren’t vaccinated There was a measles epidemic in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland this year. MSF was thinking about intervening and setting up a vaccination site in Place Ripon, but the corrupt, inefficient, and chronically underfunded local health authorities…
My major job in Ethiopia this summer was crowd control. As a log, I am responsible for setting up the facilities where we work — a little bit of pioneering merit badge, architecture, and a whole lot of crowd control. Here are two pictures from MSF’s interventions in Ethiopia that give you an idea of…