It's more that you need a robust versatile piece of metal. An ontario rat 7 will cut ropes, wire, wood, but also be a poor man rebar alternative, dig small holes in the ground, decapitate a snake, move things in acid or fire, slice bread, create an anchor, pierce pipes, slash tires, etc. For the form factor, it packs a lot.
But as I say I rarely use it. It's like insurance. Maybe it's more like a totem at this point.
Also my experience with showing off a weapon is escalation. And I'd rather stay very far away from physical conflict. Not for moral reasons, simply because it leads to outcomes I don't like.
- NGOs won't pay nearly as much as the private sector, obviously.
- It's very hard to get in, at least for deployed missions. So do not hesitate to try again and again for a long time.
- Once you are in, it ripples, and you easily get access to many other missions, provided you did a good job. It can be useful to accept something completely out of your main thing, just to get the foot in the door.
- A lot of NGO work is actually not helping anybody. Be prepared to be disappointed. Some is good, but the amount of PR, virtue signaling and scams is staggering. Although many people are under the delusion they save the world. Do it for the experience, and maybe you'll get lucky and you'll do more good that bad, on average. Some days, I'm still unsure I did. But emergency responses are where the most unambiguous good is done.
- If you do it for long enough, you will get hurt. That's just how it is. Sick, wounded, bankrupt... Something. That's one of the prices to pay. E.G: in West Africa, our first Malaria was kinda a rite of passage. We'd joke about it. You can't take pills with side effects for ever.
- You'll need to be pretty autonomous. Nobody is going to take you by the hand. But the cool part of this is that you'll get responsibilities and freedom of action you'll have nowhere else. It can be a curse as much as a blessing, but I loved it.
Getting to the north pole is a series of a lot of pretty basic shits, I'm afraid.
Life is mostly mundane, after all. And there is a limit to what you can prepare for.
One day my taxi, or should I say death trap, went fast and furious on a pedestrian in the middle of Bamako. The procedure for the locals at the time was to stone the culprit to death before the police arrive, as anybody with money will pay their way out.
No, that's understanding you don't replace a complex system with 1000 variables with a solution of 10 variables.
Soil are complete ecosystems. Plants are complex organisms.
You can dumb it down a lot and get very good result for some time, but eventually what made it anti-fragile, à la nassim taleb, will run out. And your alternative is not anti-fragile.
But I as suspect you may believe, I didn't work for the military.
I worked for NGOs, governments bodies, the UN and WHO, and of course the private sector.
At home I have a fridge, hot water, heating, nobody is shooting guns except in the shows I can stream in HD thanks to fiber while eating an organic avocado.
So it's easy to forget a huge part of the world is not comfortable. But those areas do have a lot of human activity, and some need computers.
In the article I hint about a text message base system to control a cluster of computers. That was in 2000 something, and Uganda was trying to control a big tuberculosis epidemic. The goal was to synchronize all medical outposts. In this country, this meant dozens of very remote places, in the jungle, in the mud, etc.
It could take up to 3 months to gather enough data about all the cultures of each new batch to prescribe the proper treatment. Often too late.
One day the NGO Find decided to attempt to create a system that would link all them using GPRS. So they sent me there. Text messages was the only thing that would be semi-reliable, and locals would plug their nokias on the batteries on their Jakartas (a popular chinese bike that was everywhere) to have them always available, so we used that, and cheap laptops to host the software.
Another time I got hired at the last minute to help with a training to promote Microsoft products in remote places in the hope that once they become a market, they would chose them. When I arrived, the African MS representative gave a speech, a few t-shirts, pocketed the money, and left immediately.
Without the MS expert to take a lead, I didn't have much of a plan. So I trained the entire audience how to use Linux.
Good times.
Want to entertain a bunch of stranded scientists on an island? Give them a Python training, it's part of the budget anyway. Want to prove some legal issues? Lock the expert with an airgap system and let him figure it out.
I get all sorts of offers. Some are questionable, of course.
Once the parliament of Mali asked me to craft some very shady accounting system. I refused.
But I can only tell you about it only because this particular governing body have little power over me today.
OMG, thank you so much for this comment! As interesting as the original post was, it pales I comparison with this. I can understand this prep from someone with MSF or rescue team member, but I was specifically interested about software development/tech ops in this context. Stay safe and I hope one day you can write a book or two with this material, this would be epic. Please keep your memos and records. On paper if needs be. And do and verify your backups, lol, PSA for everyone reading this.
I was concerned when I read about trying to infect areas of presumably developing nations with MS. But it was poetic justice that there was corruption all the way down. The Linux that they got was almost certainly in their actual interests.
It's not as exciting as it look: you spend a lot of time waiting. And then working in difficult conditions. Then waiting. Then something fail and you look for a hack. Then you work. And you wait. And you come back.
I did get into serious trouble once or twice, but over two decades, the average netflix factor is pretty low.
Corruption and nature owning you is surprising the first few times, but after the 50th occurrence, it's just the new normal.
yeah. not worried about the waiting part. that can be edited out. also, the adversarial element would make for some good drama.
failing and looking like a hack is what would make the show insanely popular. the only challenge I see is that people might think it's scripted and/or would not have the depth of knowledge to understand why something is happening. both of them can be addressed (so what if people think it's scripted - remember man vs wild? + you could introduce a few "expert" commentators that dumb it down and explain things to the peasants while the action is going on)
