jra's thoughts

Category: Relief Work

  • Shame and Aid Work

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    jra
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    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…

  • When Not In Control, People Imagine Order

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    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…

  • NSA is Spying on MSF

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    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…

  • Same conversation, different venue

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    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…

  • Morning Coffee Notes

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    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…

  • Crowd control in Ethiopia

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    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…

  • Very Happy New Year News

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    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…

  • Hello from Belgium

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    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…

  • A Look at Field Life for Tool Makers

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    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…

  • “squat toilets + leaping cockroaches = unhappy expats”

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    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…