| HN Mirror

I was there on a contract with an NGO, funded by the US CDC. The main project was to build a system for collecting reports of suspected epidemic diseases, including but not limited to Ebola, and correlate and track them with lab tests. I quickly realized that odds of actually getting the system implemented was low, so decided to focus on team building and spreading knowledge to my Liberian, Guinean and Nigerian colleagues. We built a pretty cool system with opportunistic sync, eventually syncing data with the MoH DHIS2 system, but obviously politics was the most important thing, and I had no real chance of succeeding with that. They rolled it out for testing in two counties, then the regime changed and it was scrapped. I did my best to spend the US tax money locally instead (I'm a big believer in helping by dealing out cash).

Another project was to build a database of all local health facilities. That would have been quite easy--basically, an Excel sheet would have been good enough as far as I understand, but the problem was that the data didn't exist. Travelling around the country to see which facilities were still operating, and tracking new ones, would have been an amazing experience, but that wasn't in my job description. There was a guy tasked with that, and AFAIK nothing happened on that side of the project during the six months I was there.

On the whole, I got quite a bleak impression of NGO work. There were some seeming to do some good work, and other, more experienced and jaded, "expats" I met gave me the vibe of good luck with that, I guess. One problem is that many NGOs want to be "cool" and high tech, where what could actually help would be to basically be a smart, good spirited renegade hacker implementing as simple solutions as possible, and most importantly working directly with the health staff, lab technicians, and the people actually working the central systems. I was shielded from that, probably for small-scale organizational politic reasons, and was too inexperienced to begin with, to work around all that. It's a strange world in a strange land, and were I to do it again I would go about it quite differently. Basically commandeering what resources I could and not minding the organization I was contracted with.

Ever since, I've looked at solutions using drones, and I found a drone system which would fit the constraints (quite large distances, cooling necessary, fast, energy efficient) but that would take a cool $1M USD just to start. I'm still in touch with a couple of CDC guys who would also like to do that, closely monitoring zipline and other similar systems, but the constraints are different. The US money dried up quickly since--when Trump dropped his "shithole countries" schtick, a lot of Liberians took it as a personal insult, I think.

It's clear to me that the US has a huge part in the troubles of the country, not only it's founding but continuing to this day, but some Americans working for the embassy and other US institutions saw it quite differently.

My native Sweden also has a large presence in the country, having operated LAMCO, a huge iron mining operation as a joint venture between the Swedish government and US steel giant Bethlehem steel. They left as war was brooding, and the vast infrastructure is since taken over by Arcelor Mittal, their only mining operation, I think. The ore is extremely pure, 85-90% iron I think, so it's basically just digging up iron and carting it off by train to the port of Buchanan.

LAMCO built the railway, individual houses for thousands of people, free schools, hospital, free trade schools for adults, as well as a go cart track, five tennis courts, an 18 hole golf course and an Olympic size swimming pool, cooled by pumping water from a nearby river hundreds of feet into the ground. They did this in the 50s! It's unbelievable when you actually see it. People up there in Nimba are still waiting for the Swedes to come back, a persistent rumor, it seems. Mittal is disliked by the people.