Sometimes whilst blogging I go searching for the right quote to fit my reflections. This quote seemed perfect for today’s story relating to the small Islamic community I am currently working with. I had never heard of Ali ibn Abi Talib, who according to Wikipedia “…. was the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, the last … More Sometimes The Battle …
This cartoon derives from a 2015 article about an anti-corruption exhibition organised by Transparency International Bangladesh. TIB arranges 10th Anti-Corruption Cartoon exhibition at Drik Gallery. It illustrates the user-pays health care system prevailing across the poor world in which health professionals are enriched on the backs of an already impoverished general public. “Without money you … More Catastrophic Cycles
One of the people I didn’t mention in my previous blog is a 32yo woman residing on a little wooden canoe on the muddy water with her husband and three children. I would have said four children only last year her three year old fell off the boat and disappeared. The community men spent days … More Ladles and Jellyspoons
Burnt to a crisp, parts of his clothes fused to his charred skin, his face black and locked in an expression of pain and horror, the patient had been doused in petrol and set alight by an angry boss. Shuttled from health center to provincial hospital and finally making it at impossible expense to the … More Treating Treasures as Trash
She lives in a tin hut in a back alley filled with makeshift shacks stacked beside and atop of each other. Roosters crow, ducks, chooks and skinny kittens peck around for morsels in the same muddy piles of trash, dogs laze in shaded patches, and pigeons coo from a cage. A neighbour is crouched over … More Trash To Treasure
Yesterday I went by tuk tuk to Wat Opot Children’s Community to visit the staff and children and get another fix at one of the world’s most magical places. I will never know how, in a nation so impoverished and challenged, anyone was able to create a place with so few resources, rising from the … More Fifty at Wat Opot and One Who is Not
It’s funny that a country still suffering from the ravages of a cruel and genocidal war which officially ended forty years ago yesterday but which merely seems to be in an evolutionary stage of the same ongoing war against it’s own people, is the place that taught me the most about peace and forgiveness. People … More Peace and Drama
The Kingdom of Wonder is a very flat land. Consequently, any small hill is well known and often named as a “mountain”. One of the first places I visited in Cambodia was perhaps the most well known mountain in Kampong Cham province, where I cycled with colleagues at the end of 2013. During that visit, … More Kingdom of Wonders
I am really not convinced that I would want to work again with an international humanitarian organisation. The subtitles on this photograph from a documentary on Vietnamese history explains why in a single brief sentence. Before I applied to Medecins Sans Frontieres, a friend told me of a mutual acquaintance who returned home to Australia … More Motivations and Mentalities
Sound asleep a few nights ago, a rhythmic knocking sound woke me just before 1am. It took me a while to register that this needed investigating and I eventually peeked through the bedroom blind. I would never have seen the dark shadow hunched over on my front porch had s/he not been making such a … More Outback Law & Order
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