As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.
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.
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[...]
“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.
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.
One of the biggest obstacles to building transitional shelters in Haiti is the amount of debris that is lying everywhere. Do me favour and look down your street. Now imagine that up to 60 per cent of all the houses just collapsed (the percentage of destroyed houses depends a lot on which part of town you are in in Port-au-Prince). Can you imagine how much rubble this would be? From a shelter perspective the problem is that before you build[...]
