Here's the thing...

I know that you probably feel that I am fascinated by either 1) food or 2) latrines. And you would be right. I spend a vast quantity of any given day on one of these two issues and not just personally – but also professionally. When half of your job is finding out why people are starving or ill these two things are bound to come up. So, it should come as no surprise today as I was headed off to our pit latrine and about to walk into a cholera outbreak meeting that I was thinking about toilets. I was thinking mostly about why we have them. I don’t know if you think about this on anything resembling a regular basis but I know that I usually don’t. At home, I don’t know how to turn off the water in my house, much less where it comes from. I don’t know which wires carry electricity to my house in which volts and where it comes from. You get the idea. And neither do I care much as long as it works. In the field, you know about all these things – intimately – and probably a little too muc...

--> In Darfur we had something called ‘Darfur Diet’ and we joked about how it would be great to bill Darfur as a kind of ‘fat camp’ where people could come and lose tons of weight by…well, mostly by going hungry.  The same is true in Southern Sudan but only more so. The humanitarian nutritional indicators are abysmal. I would tell you what they are but the half of you who would know what they mean don’t care and the half of you that care wouldn’t have a clue what they mean.  They’re bad, take my word for it. People still starve to death. And not people, like that giant mass, out there, somewhere people, like our neighbours. Our health team saw twins today that are living about a stone’s throw from where I’m sitting. It’s likely they’ll starve to death within the week. They won’t starve to death because of a lack of food (just like having money doesn’t solve poverty) rather they'll starve for a whole host of horrid other complex reasons that have to do with c...

Apologies for the long absence. I was on a whirlwind trip around the United States. It wasn't until I was sitting back in a hut in the middle of Sudan that I stopped and realised that I was - exactly 5 weeks later - back in the same hut I had been 5 weeks earlier. But the previous week I had been in DC, and the week before that Missouri, and the week before that San Diego, and before that Boston and before that Vermont. So, needless to say, I was glad to be back on old terra firma even if it was the middle of nowhere with our Area Coordinator sitting on the airstrip watching the sun set and being watched by the local Nuer children. A dust storm was sweeping across the savannah to the west and ash from the fires around drifted down on us like snow. It was nice to be back and dealing with concrete problems in life and not whether Obama's rhetoric would translate into some substantive policy or whether LL Bean is going to be bankrupted by bad Christmas sales. In those five w...