Today a guest post of mine appeared on “Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like”. It’s something I wrote a while ago while still in Liberia and cursing the lack of bandwidth more than once per day. You can read the whole post about the importance of having internet access on SEAWL.
Archive for the ‘Off topic’ Category
Last week the newsletter from Good.is contained an article titled: “Gun Trafficking for Good: How to Get AK-47s Out of Africa”. The idea is to turn AK-47s into cufflinks, earring and other jewellery. I have a few problems with this concept.
I have written about the logistical challenges in Liberia before, however I was not ready for what I found out today. It turns out that the eggs we buy in Sanniquellie are not from here (no big surprise there) or even from Liberia (surprising) but are imported from India (very big surprise)!
You might be wondering why there have been no updates to this blog and whether I have already lost appetite for the topic. The main reason is: I needed a break. Not so much from this blog but from anything that was work related.
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.
I’m probably the last person who doesn’t have an iPhone or Android phone yet – and I also want to keep it that way. At the same time I was always a bit jealous of the connectivity that comes with these smart phones. Then I discovered what I had been looking for all the time: I wireless router small enough to fit into a pocket.
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[...]
This is a rant. If you are not interested in reading rants, mosey along … I love the fact that email is almost instant and free, but I’m wondering whether – at least within big companies – we shouldn’t introduce email stamps. I’m serious. Recently it seems like that for every email I’m sending I’m getting four or five emails back. I’m being buried under an absolute relentless onslaught of emails. And I’m not the only one. I have spoken[...]
