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1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections

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 keep up.

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• diarrhoea has become a completely ordinary and acceptable conversation topic at breakfast
• you have forgotten the door code for your apartment at home and have to ask your tenant
• you get upset if a new member of the team sits at “your” spot for breakfast
• the location of “your” spot on the table has become part of the briefing for new members of the team
• you cannot come up with any non-work topics to talk about, even though you are trying really hard
• 06:15 feels like oversleeping
• you can’t figure out what month it is, but you can instantly calculate the current time at headquarters
• you start counting down to your next R&R less than one week after coming back from your last one
• you introduce people as “he’s the new Edward” or “she’s the new Sandra” –  and nobody understand your reference
• you remember the names of people from three rotations ago, but can’t be bothered to learn the current ones
• you have trouble sleeping in a real bed
• you read an OCHA SitRep and know what all the acronyms and abbreviations mean
• you are genuinely startled when you see yourself in a mirror
• you start feeling tired at 18:00 because that’s when curfew is,  even while on R&R
• you can’t remember the last time you saw a movie that wasn’t on somebody’s hard disk or came on a DVD from Thailand
• your mental image of a romantic evening is anywhere out of sight of latrines
• you can accurately predict who will be in the communal showers before entering
• people think it’s appropriate for them to show you the fungus they have picked up in the shower, even though you are neither a doctor nor a nurse

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this list over the last few months!

Additions are more than welcome

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You’re an aid worker with 10+ years experience under your belt. You earn a pittance but it works for you because you are non-resident at home so you don’t pay tax, you are catered for on assignment so you don’t pay rent,and your mortgage is covered by the people renting your place because you are never there. You can’t hold down a relationship for more than 3 months and you secretly know that despite what you tell him/her it’s really not because you’re only ever there for 3 months… it’s because you can’t live without the independence.

UN convoy in Chad; UN Photo/Olivia Grey Pritchard

Things are ok now but you’re approaching 40. What should you do? What does the future hold? Are you one of the new world order of aid worker gypsies?

Welcome to your future – these are your life options:

Option 1. You go back to a headquarters job. Instead of doing what you want to do, you now advise people who are doing what you used to do. You earn the same more or less as you did before, but your costs of living shoot skywards because you’re now paying tax, rent/mortgage and utilities…

You consider sharing accommodation and, bingo, you’re a student again and like a student can’t afford to do 1% of the things you think you would like to do.

Option 2. You go work for the UN. Keep the job you love and the lifestyle that goes with it. Your salary jumps to levels that used to get you all riled up after a few drinks back when you used to work for “honest”  down-to-earth INGOs. Now you’re cynical about them all and aggressively defend your need to raise a nest egg to plough the way for the family/dog/cottage/brats you’re planning. You’ve done your bit after all. You do this for a while before you realize you sacrificed every dream you ever had in this work and can no longer look yourself in the mirror.

Option 3. You find something suitable in the commercial sector and live happily ever after. This only happens to 1/10,000 aid workers and if you’re a logistician, forget it.

Option 4. You retrain and change course. You take a massive pay cut. Your skills and experience in aid work go unused and unappreciated. You marry someone who will never fully understand where you are coming from and why you are quiet for long periods of time. If you haven’t left it too late to have kids, just remember – dysfunctional.

Option 5. You write your memoirs and someone makes a movie out of it starring Leonardo De Caprio / Angelina Jolie. You become an even more arrogant git, lose all your friends, and make a lot of cash. This only  happens to 1/100,000 aid workers and will definitely not happen to you!

Option 6. You become that lonely, jaded expat sat at the bar in some third world piss pot letching over young locals and making snide remarks.

Option 7. You decide to set up home but not in your own country. Forget moving back to London, Paris, New York, Munich but head for the Balkan Adriatic or one of the emerging Eastern European States before the property developers get there, and develop a serious liver problem.

Option 8. You hit the road along with thousands of your cohorts with visions of huge bands of ex-aid worker families roaming the European countryside in caravans, plastered with “No guns on board” stickers and of course pulled by white Toyota Land Cruiser hardtops and pickups, scratching out a life by erecting latrines and living under plastic sheeting. You take stock count of everything you come across….. and from time-to-time you seek charity.

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The reason this video was made is a survey that British Red Cross commissioned of 16-25-year-olds in the UK. The result:

Even though  85 per cent know you cannot catch HIV from a kiss, 69 per cent of respondents said they wouldn’t kiss someone with HIV.

Or as British Red Cross puts it: “There is safety. And then there is stigma.”

What are your thoughts – both on the campaign and on the topic? Please leave a  comment!

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I really like this video. I love satire and I think this video does a great job of raising awareness for world hunger.

If you haven’t seen it, watch it before reading on. In case you don’t know Sarah Silverman, I should warn you: She is not exactly politically correct…

This is my favourite part:

“I know what you are thinking. If you don’t like it Silverman, TiVo past it. I did - you still see them. Especially ’cause I have a 48 inch plasma high-def tv. (…) [It's] like they are in my apartment, you know.”

The message is: you can switch the channel, but the problem remains.

Where’s the Ask?

But here is my problem with the video: While I like that she is  provoking  everyone by suggesting to sell the Vatican, she doesn’t tell me what I, Joe Blow, can do to help. Because I can’t sell the Vatican (and I doubt the pope watches YouTube).

So, tell me Sarah: Having spoken out against world hunger – what is it you want me to do? Why don’t you tell me? This is frustrating!

I think the end of the video would have been a great place to add something like “Until we get all that money from selling the Vatican, help by donating to <fill in the name of a non-profit of your choice>.” Lame? I don’t think so. I believe that a message like that would have been a great opportunity to raise money to feed people. Too bad, it didn’t happen.

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