Jarachik, one of the restaurants/hotels in town is owned by a father and son team from Holland. This week Hank, the father, died of heart failure. It was a big shock to such a little community, and he will be missed. His son has a good support network here, so hopefully he will find the strength to get sorted out in his new life alone (his mother is also dead). ...

It’s just over one year since I’ve worked full time, and I thought it would be fun to make a bunch of lists of what I’ve done in that year. Distance About 33000 miles by airplane, visiting 14 airports Around 6000 miles by car 2000 nautical miles by sailboat 1000 nautical miles on the Alaska Marine Highway (a car ferry) Types of vehicles My Slumbaru Airplanes Buses Taxis Pickup trucks with dead goat without dead goat Boats Wonderland Ferry from Haines, AK to Bellevue, WA Ferry on Lake Geneva Senegalese water taxi Lanchas in Guatemala A camel A horse My hiking boots A zipline Places ...

Apple released the Mighty Mouse today. Leave it to Apple to “innovate” themselves into making a zero button, four button mouse. Yes, they added some space-age alien technology to sense your “clicking” through the shell so that there would BE NO BUTTONS. Because, seriously, the fact that there are buttons on my mouse is the BIGGEST SINGLE PROBLEM in my daily digital life. Idiots. The entire product is captured nicely in this quote (from here): ...

Llegué con securidad en San Pedro ayer por la noche. Mi viaje de San Cristobal a San Pedro era fácil. Me plazco a volver a San Pedro. Es aún más bonito en invierno que verano. No hay mucho lluvio ya, solamente sol y poco nubes. Ayer en la noche, dormí en la hotel Sak’cari. Esta noche, voy a domir en el Hotel San Francisco, porque es mas barrato. En algunos días, voy a moverme al casa de parientes de Juan, mi compañero de trabajo. ...

Well, it turns out things don’t go like you planned when you travel. Who knew? I was feeling pretty smug in Cancun, with my ticket bought, plenty of time to go around and get dinner, then shop for snacks on the bus, use the Internet, etc. Only problem was my watch was two timezones wrong, so I had two less hours than I thought. I feel so dumb now, because there were three things that should have tipped me off. First, the clock in the bus terminal. I ignored it because Mexican clocks are always about 2 hours off. It turns out the clocks that taught me the “always ignore the clocks in Mexico” rule were the ones in the Metro, where the time of day has little to do with getting a train. In a Mexican bus station, the clocks are right. In fact, they are right to the second, like in a Swiss train station! ...

Well, traveling with AirTech was a breeze, except for the having 12 different backup plans part. I simply showed up at the airport 2 hours early (no big deal for an international flight) and the nice lady behind the counter gave me a confirmed seat on the plane in minutes. I’m sure it is not always like this, but it was pretty painless. I am booked on a 20:30 bus out of here, and will arrive in San Cristobal tomorrow around noon. (16 hours… ugh!) That probably means I’ll be too late to get to Panajachel tomorrow, but it will give me plenty of time to arrange my ride to Pana for the next day. I happen to know a great hostel in San Cristobal from last time, so no problem. ...

Tomorrow morning, I am going to attempt to board a Suntrips flight to Cancun using AirTech.com’s standby travel system. So, the adventure begins. From Cancun, I will take an overnight bus to San Cristobal de las Casas. There, I’ll find myself a tourist bus making the trip to Panajachel and then onward via boat to San Pedro. The whole trip will last from early Thursday morning until Friday afternoon, if it all goes according to plan. But it’s likely something will go wrong along the line. So much the better, at least for the stories later. ...

MSF has a culture of civil (and not so civil) disagreement among it’s volunteers, executives, sections, field offices, and so on. To me, this shows that it is a vibrant community of passionate people. The only times in my career when I’ve really gotten angry about something was when I cared enough to fight for it. Because the actors in the mini-dramas of MSF are widely dispersed, they seem to have developed a habit of using written communication to fight their battles. I suppose written communication is the most amenable to translation, too. It’s great for observers like me, because it means that if you can get your hands on the what the organization is saying among itself, you can see how it works, even as an outsider. Try that with Microsoft! ...

I might have just gone too far in my quest to learn ever more about MSF. I came across this article (107 kb PDF). It has interesting details about the internal struggles in MSF’s history and in it’s current operations. Some interesting things: MSF-Belgium was created as a separate legal entity with MSF-France’s blessing. Quickly MSF-Belgium’s differing interpretation of the mission angered MSF-France, so much so that MSF-France attempted to strip MSF-Belgium of the MSF name in 1985. They failed. The 5 current operational sections used to be 6: MSF-Greece was created to be operational. However, in 1999 MSF-Greece was expelled from the MSF movement over its stance on intervention in Kosovo. It has been reintegrated into the MSF movement as of early 2005, but its operations are now done under the authority of MSF-Spain. Government funding dropped from 50% in 1999 to 20% in 2003. That was due to the increased private-donor fundraising power of the new sections (Australia, Japan, USA, etc). MSF-France relies on MSF-USA for close to 40% of it’s operational funds. MSF-Holland has only 20% Dutch citizens in the field. They rely on other sections to make up the other 80%. Internal controls meant to ensure external communications are consistent and do not jeopardize any operations are sometimes (perhaps routinely?) ignored in order to prevent the consultation and coordination process from watering down the message. None of that really changes my desire to work for MSF, but it does explain where some of the friction I’ve heard returned volunteers talk about comes from. One volunteer told me that it’s not true that MSF doesn’t play well with other NGO’s. But he went on to say that MSF-X is more likely to work with Oxfam or GOAL than to cooperate peacefully with MSF-Y! (Take that with a grain of salt, of course…) ...

There’s a fun virtual hide and go seek game that tests your knowledge of geographic trivia. It’s called GoogleEarthing. I won puzzle #12 by recognizing Tombouctou, Mali. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the picture. It reminded me of a picture I saw a few years ago in a National Geographic about how the city is being overtaken by the desert.