Best of Year One in Laos
It’s been just over a year, and 132 blog posts, since we moved to Laos. To celebrate that milestone, today I’ve drawn together some of the best of this last year’s blog posts. Unless you’re independently wealthy and have way too much time on your hands (or you’re bedridden and desperate for entertainment) I doubt you’ll want to read all of them, so I’ve put them in categories for easier browsing. I’ve also marked a couple of my favorite funny posts with a double asterisk like this ** for those just looking for a laugh. Thank you all for tracking...
Read MoreResilience Research Report – The Executive Summary
Here is the Executive Summary of the Report I introduced yesterday: Building resilient managers in humanitarian organizations (plus some photos from Cambodia, just because). The research report is available for purchase from the People In Aid website. Background, and purpose of the research In the last decade there has been increasing interest in the level of stress, trauma, or violence experienced by humanitarian workers, but relatively little focus on the other side of the coin – qualities that promote resilience and thriving in these challenging environments. People In Aid, through this...
Read MoreResilience Research Report – The Introduction
Resilience is a defining theme of my life at present – last week’s chapter for the distance learning course I’m writing was on personal resilience and this week’s is on organizational resilience. In April, I’ll travel to Bangkok to spend a week working with the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma as they bring together journalists from around Asia for a week. Guess what I’ll be speaking on… Yup, resilience. And back in November I completed a research report for a very cool organization in London, People In Aid, on Building Resilient Managers in Humanitarian Organizations. That...
Read MoreLessons learned about Laos, parenting, and development work, in Phonxai
On Monday, Mike and I plus the friends we have in town at the moment (Mum, Dad, and three little boys aged six, three, and 8 months) traveled up to Phonxai so that Mike could inspect a school in progress. This was an all day endeavor that involved renting a landrover and spending more than six hours traveling – about five of them on dirt roads. As always when I travel up to the villages here in Laos, it was illuminating. In no particular order, here is a summary of things I learned or relearned on Monday. 1. Northern Laos is lush with mountains and winding dirt roads dug into the side of...
Read MoreWhen Helping is Hard (Part 4): Money, It’s Complicated
It was about a month after we returned from Viengkham that Mike received his first phone call about the case of Lahela, little orphan girl. You can read the start of this story in the post titled: What price a child’s life? After eight days in the hospital in Vientiane, no one seemed to be all that much closer to figuring out for sure what might be wrong with eleven-year-old Lahela. All the tests had come back negative, but the doctors had now circled back around to thinking that she might have Japanese encephalitis, after all. All that the medication she’d been given in Luang...
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