Msf

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 running out. The best of all bad ideas about what to do about this is to make an open market for address space, as though network addresses were some kind of useful piece of property with any kind of useful value. (BTW: When the present econolypse is over, and the next bubble starts, it will be an IPv4 address space bubble. Mark my words…) Address space is bits. We can make more bits… Look! I just made some! But because the value of a network exists in everyone who is using it, not just your implementation of the network, you can’t just add bits in your IP stack and get any benefit. So, while bits are free, and address space could conceiveably be free, because we have a network with limited space, we have a scarce asset. And, of course, what do humans do with scarce assets? We make bubbles! Yay for bubbles! ...

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 UN and not enough on independent actors. Of course, any reader of mine know my biases: I am a cynical humanist capitalist from Silicon Valley (engaged to be married to a practical humanist socialist from Switzerland), who chose to work with MSF due to it’s independence. Because this article speaks to the core of my identity, of course my biases are going to be the key to my understanding of it. ...

(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 - Brussels OCA - Amsterdam OCBA - Barcelona/Athens OCG - Geneva OCP - The mythical Parisian OC, which does not exist as far as I know An OC is supposed to be a reflection of the difference between the hosting section, which has a responsibility to communicate with the people of the country for temoinage and fundraising, recruit, etc and the OC, which has a responsibility to all of the donor sections that contribute to it to get the work done, and report back what got done, so that the donor section can explain to their constituency what got done with the $$. ...

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 a question… what is the variation in pregnancy over the course of a year? Is it seasonal? If so, in which cultures yes and which cultures no? Why? ...

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 ourselves and our staff and were not bad guests anywhere. But it does give you a sense of shame that as an expat you are different: you’re allowed to just go away, and your colleagues can’t. ...

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 is only one voice, and though they are speaking out, the immigrants in South Africa need more people to speak for them. ...

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 not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with military … with militaries of Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but with humanitarian aid organizations, non-governmental organizations, who include the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations. And it also included journalists… ...

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 nice bottle of South African wine. As with everything this century, it’s moved onto the Internet. But the essential tone of the conversation, and the impossibility of resolving the problem remains. ...

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 managed to handle the crisis themselves and MSF just monitored the situation from it’s base in Geneva. ...

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 what my job looked like: the lines, talking to mothers. MSF training didn’t prepare me for crowd control, which is too bad. There are some simple principles, and learning them by trial and error is dangerous and not very much fun (not for the log, not for the medical team, and especially not for the beneficiaries). The basic principle is “calm people are safe, scared people are dangerous”. Everything else follows from there. Keep people informed, and set up your site so that even if they don’t understand or can’t hear the verbal instructions, they can see what’s happening and be confident that they are waiting for something of value, and that it won’t run out before they get it. ...