Some disjointed thoughts that won’t quite grow into blog posts. In no particular order or relationship to each other.
1. I spent my lunch time in our office kitchen, eating some kind of meat soup, potatoes, and carrots. I listened to my colleagues chat in Russian about minor domestic topics. I finished my meal with black tea and sour Russian bread. I’ve spent the last decade of lunches like this. I will spend 2011 the same way.
2. People need narrative to make sense of their lives. If you don’t have a story, your life is just a series of disconnected events. If you help someone find the right story, their life will change. Religious people know this, even if that is not how they see things.
3. I worry about inequality, all the time. I worry that income inequality, in particular, is going to destroy everything good that human beings have managed to build. But I am a health professional, so I focus on inequalities in health and access to health care. It’s what I can do. It is not enough, but it is something.
4. My brother and his wife are visiting from the US for the holidays. I have lost the knack of relating to non-expatriate Americans and I keep forgetting to give them information. They want to know stuff all the time. What’s for dinner? Who will be at the party we’re going to tonight? Expats just assume that either no one knows or it doesn’t matter that much. You don’t really have to tell them anything except the time of the next scheduled event. I am pretty sure my brother and his wife are the normal ones in this situation.
5. I worry about water all the time. We are clearly using up and destroying all of our clean water. What happens next?
6. Some Excel tricks: If you’re dealing with a big spreadsheet full of text, like a workplan or a logframe, it’s always easier to review column by column than line by line. I wish I had learned this years ago. Also, you can spellcheck an excel spreadsheet. And if it has any text in it, you should.
7. Is everything getting worse now that it has been before, or is it just that we have more information about all the bad stuff? Aside from climate change, which is clearly getting worse.
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[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Public Health Reader, Alanna Shaikh. Alanna Shaikh said: A blood and milk post that is maybe a little more personal than I had originally intended http://bloodandmilk.org/?p=1727 […]
Regarding #7, I think a lot of things are actually trending upwards, but those things don’t make the news. Overall wealth and health tend be going up… but of course inequality throws a wrench in all that. Case in point: a video called “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy” — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
Working to rectify “inequalities in health and access is [sic] health care,” though indeed “not enough”—but what is?—amounts to much more than “something.” I often wish, as I talk to my younger son about his quest for a University of California B.S. in Public Health, which he intends to apply to development work, that I had become what you are, a health professional. So please don’t get down on yourself!
I hope number 2 will grow into a blog post someday. I know what you say is true but would be interested to hear it fleshed out from an aid standpoint. Thanks for all you.
Laura is onto something about the value of fleshing out your second “disjointed thought,” concerning the centrality of narrative to our lives, from an aid standpoint. Endless, obsessive rehearsal of a narrative about development as working with equals with whom we cooperate—rather than for pitiful inferiors whom we alone can save—should make up a big part of what we all do. Within certain limits we become what we tell ourselves we are, so we need to get our stories right.
Like Laura and Don Stoll, I would definitely like to see you work more on #2. Development professionals can accept complicated narratives (support big multilaterals to do DRR, so we will be ready when disaster strikes), narratives that are just not convincing to the public (send in the marines). It is on the battlefield of narratives that political outcomes are decided. And we suck.
I link inequality to the donor trend to replace membership based civil society organisations supporting the poor, like farmer unions, by NGOs accountable to the donor.
#4: Or is it just that ex-pats travel in herds, and that the options for diversion are so limited. So if someone tells you to be at such-and-such a place, you will have been there so many times with the same people (and you probably order the same dish every time too) that you no longer have to apply thought to the invitation?