Submitting Material
Please send us any submissions (including photos if you have any) on children’s health issues in Haiti or Bangladesh.
Just to remind you, this is what we’re looking for:
Scientific, technical and professional articles, whether previously published or not;
As-it-happens blogs and texts;
Case studies;
Personal stories;
Editorials;
Profiles of individual people or individual initiatives;
Project reports;
Accounts by visitors;
Articles/columns/responses by healthcare communication specialists to provide a meta-text to the whole endeavor;
Photos with detailed captions;
We hope even to be able to post comments texted in from cell phones.
We encourage writing that includes dialogue, descriptions of places, people and events, and the thoughts and reflections of the writer. Our only stipulation is that each piece must be non-fiction, and must be scientifically accurate on its own terms. The writer may not be able to know the exact truth in all is complexities, but the small, specific part of the truth about which he or she is writing must be accurate.
If your submission is a response to a piece of writing you’ve seen on this website, feel free to paste it in the Comments box.
If your submission is on a new subject, email it to me at: brookes@champlain.edu.
The idea of children’s health, particularly pertaining to disaster situations such as Haiti, got me thinking about the best ways to actually do it.
Here’s the issue: the folks best prepared to do anything seem the last to react, and those who are ready to act immediately seem, with rare exception, to have only good intentions and few actual skills in their medicine closet.
Now that’s not quite fair, I realize. Not all well-intentioned first responders to Haiti were religious missionary types, abducting children to give them an upper-middle-class white upbringing in the States. And – my favorite medical relief folks- MSF did get in there pretty quick along with the Red Cross.
Haiti is not only desperately poor, it is desperately lacking in structure and barriers. Before the quake it had a ton of missionary organizations saving souls and doing some health care too. The government wasn’t strong enough to set its own criteria for who comes in, and were open to everyone. After the earthquake, things collapsed in every way- a free for all in the world of relief work.
As usual, who gets affected first, and most? Children. The most vulnerable, the least able to advocate for themselves. The ones who most need a combination of good intentions and structural solutions.
I understand well the frustration of good folks who want to help, but those seem the very people outside of the international structures which exist to coordinate relief efforts. Meanwhile, bureaucracy which seems by nature or design to strip away any element of passion, plods on requiring endless forms, clearances and insurances before sending organized relief teams. MSF does great work- but who has 6 months to spare from their day job? What we need is an immediately deployable relief corps- the kind which exists at the state level in the US- and do 2-3 week stints within a structured format. Where are those teams? ‘Not authorized by the federal government to deploy’. Hmm.
The tension between perfect and good is unchanged since Voltaire summarized it. Forget about perfect; I fear we settle for mediocre while being too impatient to wait for the good. But is mediocre better than nothing?