I remember sitting in a dusty compound outside Goma, watching a communications officer try to “build rapport” with a survivor using a scripted, twenty-page psychological …
Interviewing Without Causing More Harm
Two Institutions People Confuse
I spent nine years sitting in dusty transit hubs across South Sudan and the DRC, watching high-level policy papers get shredded by the reality of …
Building a Latrine Is the Easy Part
I once sat in a humid briefing room in Goma, listening to a consultant explain a 40-page slide deck on the psychological nuances of how …
Counting People Who Are Moving
I spent nine years in the dust of South Sudan and eastern DRC, and if there is one thing that makes my skin crawl, it …
Restructuring Debt With Many Creditors
I spent nine years watching NGOs scramble to move vaccines across borders while the paperwork choked on its own importance. You’ll see economists on news …
Writing a Number With Its Uncertainty
I remember sitting in a humid, corrugated tin office outside Goma, staring at a spreadsheet that claimed we had “allocated” enough funds for a month …
Debt Relief and Whether Debt Returned
I spent nine years in the back of dusty Land Cruisers across East Africa, watching people argue over macro-economic theories while the actual supplies sat …
The Borehole That Broke in Year Two
I spent three years in South Sudan watching shiny, solar-powered pump installations gather dust and rust because nobody had a spare gasket or a wrench …
Microfinance Twenty Years Later
I spent a decade watching NGOs move mountains of supplies through mud and checkpoints, and if there is one thing I learned, it is that …
Where a Casualty Figure Comes From
I spent most of my decade in East Africa staring at dusty manifests and listening to the static on my shortwave radio, not watching the …