US Radio Talk Show Personalities to Sudan With Sacks of Hope. I’ve been trying to write an entry about this for more than I week now. I give up. Read it and arrive at you own conclusions.
Month: March 2008
Trauma, kidnap and death (Iraq)
Trauma, kidnap and death: all in a day’s work for journalists in Iraq. I spent a week in Baghdad last year. It was minor, really – from the airport to our compound, from our compound to the green zone, from our compound to the airport again and put. I ate amazing meals prepared by the live-in cook (an IDP) and talked to the Iraq country team. It was the scariest thing I ever did, and it was nothing – absolutely nothing – compared to what the US military and the Iraqi people go through.
This article really resonated with me; the author struggled with the same feelings I did. Like you’re not allowed to be traumatized because your risk was so minor. Which it was. But…
I would, I think, have stayed in Iraq if I wasn’t a mother. We were doing good relief work there, and there was a vivid and immediate sense of why the work mattered. Time magazine has a nice article about the need for more humanitarian work in Iraq. Agron Ferati, who is quoted, is brave and brilliant and I worry about him all the time.
The Cute Cat Theory of technology
The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech. Wow, do I love Ethan Zuckerman’s blog. His approach to blogging is similar to mine, in that he tries to bring together a lot of ideas to improve development practice in the field. He does it a lot better, though, and writes meaty posts full of interesting analysis.
This post, on the use of new technologies, is one of the most insightful things I’ve read in a long, long time.
How I got fired
I’ve got a new post up at Damsels in Success, about getting fired from my first job. It has nothing to do with international development, but I’m pleased with it nonetheless.
I’ve had an odd career trajectory, but it’s one I am generally very pleased with. I think that having had many jobs, and many different kinds of jobs, lets me bring a perspective to international development that someone on a less circuitous path might not have.
Project HOPE’s blog
Project HOPE In the Field is Project HOPE’s blog. It’s a nice effort on their part, in terms of what’s on there. Appealing first-person content, with plenty of action photos. It’s not sanctimonious or stuffy and not gratuitous with beneficiary pictures. It has a donate link after every entry to let you support the exact work you are reading about.
But here’s the thing – it’s hosted on blogger, of all places, using an only slightly modified template. You’d think it was just one volunteer’s effort if not for the official links and pictures. It looks amateurish.
If they are going to the effort of having an official blog, why not incorporate the blog into their main site? It would give people a reason to keep coming back to the site, and I would bet that every visit increases the chance that someone will donate. They must have a web designer; it wouldn’t be that hard to have them build in a blog and appropriate functionality.
It’s a very strange choice. Old-fashioned, and out of touch with how people actually use the web.
Mental health in the rest of the world
Psychotherapy for All: An Experiment – New York Times. The NYT looks at an Indian experiment in providing mental health treatment at Indian clinics. A lot of people believe that illnesses such as depression and anxiety are first-world luxuries. Anyone who’s spent time abroad can tell you that’s not the case.
This is interesting to me because while donors and NGOs are starting to pay some attention to mental health in emergency situations, it’s still very rare to look at mental health in ordinary life. Like dental care, it tends to be low priority. This Indian intervention may mean that is changing.
Business Life – Kabul’s war for talent
The Financial Times discusses recruiting for Kabul. FT often has excellent coverage on the nitty-gritty of relief and development work. This articles talks about the challenges of recruiting:
“Humanitarian-type people are attracted to the disaster circus, but we are beyond that here. It’s not a chronic crisis, but it’s not post-conflict either.”
I am not surprised by the staffing shortage. The world is full of altruistic adrenaline junkies who’ll go to a war zone if they can save people’s lives. It’s also full of warm fuzzy world savers who’ll spend 30 years teaching a village to grow their prickly pears more efficiently. What it’s not full of are people who want to do slow-speed capacity-building development work while also dodging bullets and kidnap attempts. The 50 people who do fit that profile probably all have jobs in Sri Lanka already.
I don’t really know what can be done to improve the staffing for development work in Afghanistan. Pay better, I suppose, but then you run afoul of donors and create an image of a bunch of mercenaries.
It could also point to a issue about the fit between the work being done and the context. Maybe we should move beyond the stereotypes, and trust in community knowledge. Maybe, if no one will go there, we’re doing something wrong and we need to re-think the kind of aid that’s being given.