1) Chris Blattman with a critical analysis of food riots in Mozambique and another reminder that the simplest explanation is usually not the right one.
2) From my fellow Fellows in Burundi: Simone’s reflections on courage, Gerard’s first day at Kigutu, and Fidele’s story of his own recent experience with health care in Bujumbura. So very fortunate to be here with them!
1) Warning labels for lousy science writing – via Elizabeth Pisani @ The Wisdom of Whores.
2) Andrew Revkin argues that the “top billion” – probably you, definitely me – also need Millennium Development goals to deal with grotesque overconsumption, for our own good and everyone else’s.
3) A reminder from “Lessons I’ve Learned” that life is both easier and harder than you think in Cambodia.
4) Saundra at Good Intentions are Not Enough has some links to organizations working to break the silence on failures in NGO work; understandable but ultimately harmful to doing better work and not repeating mistakes. On the same vein, a recent NYT article on FailFare, as hosted by the World Bank, where NGOs are encouraged to talk about failure in a gentle, casual environment (i.e., finger food and wine).
Filed under: Uncategorized
1) A copy of notes from a conference on the impacts of the Gulf Oil spill on human health.
2) From Duncan Green on the existing climate change adaptation plans of 10 African nations. It’s a busy week, so I’m just starring this one to dig into later.
1) Good Intentions Are Not Enough draws a crisp parallel between business and non-profits, rejecting the donor mantra that paying for overhead is bad. The keys:
Imagine walking into Wendy’s or Burger King (or whatever fast food restaurant you frequent) and insisting that you will only pay for whatever is actually on your hamburger . . . you refuse to pay for staff wages, building rental, electricity, the iconic golden arches . . . In aid it’s the aid recipients that have to deal with the lousy service, bad location, or restrictive business hours because donors only want to pay for what’s on the burger.“
Solution? fund orgs you trust and then, you know . . . trust them.
2) MIT Open Courseware. I just think it’s lovely to have a chance to learn or review without the cost of a course. Requires self-motivation and fast internet, but still . . . My particular poison this week is the Poverty Action Lab’s course on evaluating social programs. But there may be something else for you. Mmm. Knowledge.
3) Jina Moore for change.org with a lovely, brief summary of what it means to be a lesser-known country, in the case of Guinea Bissau.
4) Conflict Health on why the deaths of aid workers mean so much in strategic terms.
Attacks on health workers are not random. The provision of health services, whether by governments or NGOs is a physical manifestation of legitimate governance.
Filed under: Poetry
The bar’s got red lights under the chairs,
swanky, and Frank’s in the hot seat,
undertaker at his father’s funeral
home in Hoboken—tells us these insane stories
about how sometimes they get someone
on the embalming table who’s not really dead.
He says “once you start draining ‘em
it’s too late to go back.”
So it’s possible to die once
and then again, at the hand of your preserver,
some guy from Jersey who’ll tell your story,
maybe amp it up a little for shock value
at a Meat Packing District bar.
Any other time, this might be really disturbing.
But no one can be dead when you’re drinking
martinis, dressed all chic in Manhattan black.
We shriek, cover dark holes in our faces
with our hands, squeal like a bunch of girls
and the undertaker eats it up.
We ignore our thoughts of your sister,
on a table in some grim basement,
the funeral that followed, when someone like Frank,
his face getting flushed now from too much whiskey,
had on a calm suit and an empathetic expression.
We were there in our mourning black,
and youth was nothing to be so boisterous about.
None of that’s real at the bar called “Tonic”
except afterwards, emerging from the dank subway,
arm-in-arm and almost home,
we pass a bouquet of flowers,
cheap carnations chucked into a gutter
by an angry lover, and I remember
how you tossed the last flower
into your sister’s grave in a field in Pennsylvania.
How you stood and watched it fall
all the way in, never expecting
its restless refusal, how it would fly
out of the earth, turning over itself
in the air, always landing in your hand,
needing to be buried again and again.
Filed under: Development, Global Health Corps, Leadership, Public Health, Words of Wisdom
God bless the GHC staff for providing a tiny notebook at the start of training; mine was my constant companion for most of the two weeks . . . paging through it, here were the thoughts that moved me enough to take note – if not to always write down who said them. Quotes have a high rate of human error – I haven’t learned shorthand yet – but the gist is hopefully captured.
Deogratias, founder of Village Health Works: Where people are dehumanized by misery, they are dehumanized and can act like animals . . . you need to address the root causes of misery, not the consequences.
Deo also quoted FDR: . . . the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abudance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Ed Cardoza urged us have a “hermeneutic of generosity” for one another, that is to trust that “every human is trying to be a good person doing a good thing.”
“Be aware of how people survive.” Unattributed – I’m not even sure what session it’s from – but lovely to me.
Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey & Co told us to be “tri-sector athletes” – to be fluent in private, public, and non-profit sectors to work well in any one of them.
Rebecca Onje, Founder of Project Health: Nothing drives me crazier than people elbowing each other out of the way to serve poor families . . . like we’re running out? Like there’s a short supply?
Condoleezza Rice: It is an enriching experience to consider why you have so much, rather than why someone else has so little.
James March, Professor Emeritus at Stanford GSB, on the message of War and Peace: Heroes only imagine that they accomplish things. History is created by millions of little people doing their jobs (well).
This post originally kicked off as a response to misreading the Elite Aid post at Tales from the Hood – the idea put forward that we ought not accept non-elite humanitarian aid workers anymore than we would accept non-elite neurosurgeons (or contract lawyers). Disaster response differs from longer range development work pretty starkly in personnel needs among other ways, and I was responding as if the suggestion applied to the latter. Be that as it may, my thoughts:
The first thought I had was that neurosurgeons are expensive – because they are well-trained and because they are rare. The second thought is that, because of the expensiveness, and the rareness, not everyone who needs a neurosurgeon gets one. Far from it. It’s not a model I’d want to replicate with development work.
Which isn’t to say that the solution is to set loose a horde of ill-prepared folks to cut into brains, or, in development terms, to establish, manage, fund and monitor programming. There is a fair amount of work that must be done by people with training and experience. Based on the gaps in the system, it seems like there aren’t enough of them, or there are some serious distribution errors (or, likely, both).
1) Train more people. Not just school.
I’m part of the 20something brigade who threw ourselves into studying development, public health, and related fields in/after college. There are schools to do that, some better than others, both for Americans and folks in other countries. But once we’re finished with school, we need field experience, real work under good mentorship, and that’s harder to get, especially if you can’t self-fund it. My MPH would have been infinitely improved if there were a third year of it with something like a residency program where I was in one place the whole time with academic support. Would be fabulous if said residency would be eligible for student loan coverage, (self-funding is not impossible, but why not reduce the barriers of entry to the field while we’re at it?). Eventually the current crop of capable staff will get tired – they’d do well to help us apply knowledge and learn from experience with a minimum of damage done to projects so we can eventually take over.
2) Is there a role for task shifting?
The post also brought into mind task-shifting, a method used or suggested in health systems where there is a limited supply of the most educated and skilled – straining away tasks that can be done effectively by generalists, nurses, community health workers and others so that the specialists focus their time and energy on the tasks that truly only they can do. I’m wondering if a similar thought system might be brought up to the beleaguered aid elites. What development tasks must be done by highly educated, experienced folks, and what could they pass down the line to mentees, less-educated individuals, and/or short-term volunteers?
Which leads back to the question of what development workers ought to do with this upswell of energy and intention among people who want to engage at less than a career level. Do we have any obligation to direct it, if only so it doesn’t get in the way and do harm? Some future post, perhaps.
The last weekend of Boston, Kirsten invited the roommates to her family’s lighthouse near Chatham on Cape Cod. Such a perfect, summery weekend was not had before or since, I think. The sun was beautiful in seventeen different ways between dawn and starlight. It was warm but not heavy and humid and night required the coziness of hoodies and socks. There are so many individual things that made this trip blessed for me – discovering an unholy fear of crabs, playing taps at sunset from the lighthouse tower, wrestling in the sand, seeing the fireworks displays of all the South Shore towns at once, watching the sunrise, cracking ourselves up in the living room. Walking the shore at sunset with Erinn, I was so overtaken by the deepening liquid colors of the waves, the slow gorgeous curve of the beach, the lights of the shore and the lights of the stars, that the only appropriate response was to sing hymns. The beauty of these people who I have come to love, and the beauty of the natural world called out to me – to say, remember, when you are far away and lonely and frustrated, remember – this is WHY.
In wandering through development blogs, I ended up at this one, and scrolling through found a missive from the blogger’s last day in Goma, DRC. I felt like it captured perfectly the wierdly rooted rootlessness of those who make new homes periodically thousands of miles from their old ones . . .
I rode the three hours to the Kigali airport with B and V, and V bought me a croissant and a water.
But then they left. And I was alone.
Sitting all alone in the coffee shop at the Kigali airport, crying quietly to myself, I pulled out my computer and opened up Skype. An old friend’s name popped up, a wonderful woman I haven’t talked to in months. I double-clicked on her name. And I began typing to her. I asked for stories about her life in Spain to take my mind off of my loneliness. And she told me about love, love, love. We talked about friend love, lover love, and family love. We talked about how damn DIFFICULT love is. And how impossible it is. But how difficult and impossible it is for everyone in the world – every single person. And so I stopped crying. Because I wasn’t sitting all alone in a coffee shop anymore. I looked around. I was sitting next to an old man who kept having to get up out of his chair to chase down his little granddaughter, who kept running hither and thither. I was sitting next to the waitresses, one of whom rolled her eyes and whispered something to the other, just at that moment, and laughed. I was sitting next to a young biracial couple, two tables down, and next to another woman jiggling a screaming baby on her knee. I was sitting in Rwanda beside my friend in Spain.
I do not make life easy for myself. My heart gets broken all the time. Sometimes somethings that would not hurt someone else very much will hurt me a great deal. But I think that this is okay. It is okay to be sad sometimes. I get sad because I love, I love, I love.
Me, too
1. Chris Blattman on why aid is not so depressing afterall. Of note, that we should learn from our failures but only denounce ourselves as idiots when we do them more than once – well, that’s my spin on this:
Failure happens. In all big systems. Hollywood brought us Star Wars Episode One. The private sector brought us Google Wave. Western medicine brought us bleeding. In aid, the state of our knowledge is a little closer to bleeding than web programming. That’s actually what makes studying aid so different: we’re going to learn a tremendous amount in our lifetimes.
2. Belated, but on the good news front, an analysis of Rwanda’s recent success in reducing birth rate. 5.5 kids per woman is still pretty high, but at least heading in the right direction in a densely populated country.
3. William Easterly showing his soft underbelly on the big question: What can I do to end global poverty? The answer: take your energy, learn something specific, accept a small role in a big task. Lovely, true, and needed advice.
