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. ...
Science Friday did an interesting story recently: New research shows that when people perceive they have no control over a given situation, they are more likely to see illusions, patterns where none exist and even believe in conspiracy theories. The study suggests that people impose imaginary order when no real order can be perceived. The first caller reports on how the conditions he experienced working as an aid worker in Somalia showed this. Also, he comments on the rough ride back to normality after suffering a situation with loss of control. ...
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. ...
With apologies to Dave for the title… This morning I see that Jon over at AidWorkerDaily.com has added his ideas to my article there, and asked me to comment. I did, go read it. While I was researching stuff for my reply, I stumbled across these resources on African IT that I’m going to start following: Appfrica: African IT, Industry News and Culture Google Africa
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. ...
Hello everybody, and happy new years. 2008 is going to be really great for me, I have some news to share here to get all those who are interested in my travels back up to date with my life and my plans. First, the most important thing in my whole life… I’ve finally found the perfect girl for me. Her name is Marina, and we’ve been together over a year now. She and I weren’t ready to talk so publicly about our relationship until now, but now the time has come, so that’s the first really great piece of news for the blog in 2008. ...
Hello again after a long time away from writing. Since I wrote last, I took a nice trip around the west coast, then hung around California doing some IT work. Then I moved to Lausanne, Switzerland where I studied French for two months for 4.5 hours a day. I also enjoyed riding my bike a lot, up to 200 km a week, through the Swiss countryside. I moved to Geneva and stayed with friends there during September and some of October. I volunteered at MSF Switzerland’s headquarters, doing special projects for the Logistics department there and continuing my French with a private tutor. ...
I have recently been talking with some folks about IT tools for humanitarian aid workers. I gave a real-world reality check to them, not to discourage them, but to make sure they knew their audience as well as possible. After all, what good is a tool that looks good in demos, but fails with the users? A good step towards avoiding abject failure is to sit with your users and watch them work. That’s not so easy with humanitarian field workers. A tolerable substitute is to collect testimonies from them with the same kind of data, and try to design a system that has a chance of working in the context. ...
Check out the great blogs at MSF Canada. The quote in the title came from Made in Bangladesh by Julia Payson. James Maskalyk is also writing sublime postings. My mom asked me, “How come MSF Canada’s volunteers get to blog and you couldn’t?” The answer is just a matter of comfort level with the new medium. Like all organizations have in the last few years, MSF is currently digesting what blogs mean and how they can be used. It is not much of a surprise to me that MSF Canada, some of whose volunteers work at MSF Holland, would be ahead of the curve on this one. Canada is a small place full of curious people. Of course they are going to experiment with blogs! ...