After listening to a 45 minute piece on BBC 4 called “Haiti and the truth about NGOs” I had to get a few things off my chest.
Archive for the ‘Haiti’ Category
A new “serious game” is trying to show what it’s like to be a journalist, an aid-worker or a survivor in a natural disaster. And it’s not doing a bad job!
While taking the bus to work yesterday, I noticed the woman next to me reading this paper. And I just had to take a photo! As anyone who has working in the humanitarian sector knows, our love for acronyms is pretty ridiculous. In Haiti we even printed the most important ones on the back of t-shirts so that we could look them up more easily. The problem was – most of the changed so quickly that the t-shirt production couldn’t[...]
How useful are Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels for disaster response organizations? I’m looking at the question from three different angles.
“So … how is Haiti these days?” – this is probably the question I have been asked most since I’ve come back. The problem is: the question is misleading because it assumes that it’s possible to make significant changes in a couple of months.
Last year, when I heard about World Humanitarian Day for the first time, my first impulse was that this sounded pretty self-righteous. I mean, where is the World Firemen Day or the World Truckdriver Day? Two professions that are very dangerous and that probably contribute more to people’s lives than most professional aid workers do. Since then I have changed my minds slightly. For one thing, there is never anything objectionable about remembering colleagues who have died. But more importantly[...]
Knowing when to leave can be a difficult thing. Here are a few signs that might indicate it’s time for you to pack your bags and run for the nearest airport.
One of the biggest mistakes that international organizations make is not taking enough time to explain to journalists why thing are complicated and take a long time. But taking that time and investing into communications pays off.
