The poor deserve a better deal
One early July day, I made my first flight to Africa, was delivered with my blue rucksack to a guest house on Ngong Road in Nairobi, and enjoyed my first encounter with a noisy Mynah bird, singing loudly outside my …
Martin Leach
The event that flopped
Have you ever organised an event that flopped? In 1985 I was working for an international development NGO, and I organised a young people's fund raising event in a park in West London. It failed; few people came and even less …
Blog Action Day | The year without summer: conflict and climate change
Crossing the street the other morning to get through the front door of DFID’s London Headquarters, I was suddenly confronted with a new bunch of faces. Normally I do my hour and a half commute just concentrating on getting some work done …
Packing the painting
Don’t you get worried when you are given a leaving present as you are about to board the plane, and your suitcase is already stuffed to the gills with souvenirs? So when a friend gave me a beautiful painting at my leaving do last week, …
Turning the tables on the donors in Rwanda
Who has the main say - donors or recipient countries? Isn't it obvious? Don't donors have all the resources and so control the show? No, it isn’t always like that, and in the last few years there has been a shift towards a more …
Volunteering: risks and rewards
Saturday morning in Kigali felt weird; it was spookily quiet in the streets as the whole population of the country spent the morning doing some community work in their local area - cleaning the street, digging the ground or just …
Yes Minister
Do you think announcements by British Government Ministers make any difference at all to people in Rwanda? If I told the woman in the red cap who walks everyday along the road past my front gate here in Kigali what Douglas …
Healthy Babies in Rwanda
The nurse gently turned the over the little baby in the incubator, checking his condition; she indicated that he was doing well. In the Intensive Care Unit in Kibagabaga District Hospital, Dr Blaize showed us the equipment they have for …
Swallows & survival: Paying for healthcare
OK, let's back to the Swallows - I've got to write about them first, as several people reading this blog have asked me how they are getting on. Four weeks ago, the three baby swallows in the nest on my …
Lighting up time
Have you heard that water flows one way down the drain in the southern hemisphere and the other way in the northern hemisphere? Is it true? I live 1 degree south of the equator, and when I experimented pouring water in my …
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