Win 10 Upgrades- Apple Laughs

Beware of the Windows 10 April Upgrade.  If your computer is running Avast, disable it before you upgrade.  I did not and it caused my main computer to get trapped in a upgrade-half-done paralysis.  Stuck in a loop with no access to the desktop.  No access to command prompt.  Stuck stuck stuck.

Ring Ring Ring

Ring, ring, ring – and the thread of your discussion goes ping!  We’re discussing a complex accounting issue with my Haitian colleagues, in three languages (English, French, Creole).  Then … a shrill jingle… the phone is picked up.  And poof! The thread of thought is broken.  On another day I was in a personal 1-to-1 conversation with a Haitian friend … a shrill jingle… the phone is picked up.  And poof! A sheepish smile “sorry, I won’t be a moment.”

If I’m honest – after many visits to Haiti, I still get annoyed.  For a people who value personal relations so highly, I wondered why is an incoming call given such priority over face to face conversation.

Oxfam Haiti Crisis and us

HHA team with UK Ambassador and Hospital leadership. Us in our DFID T-shirts. team work. no abuse. May 201

Orgies, sexual favours – all part of Oxfam’s 2011 Haiti crisis. And in South Sudan also.  We were in Haiti in this period too, and also help in South Sudan.  After the cataclysmic 2010 earthquake – Hope Health Action and The Baptist Hospital swiftly repurposed buildings to take in spinal injuries, and later cholera victims.  Working intensely with other agencies and of course, the Baptist Hospital, many lives were saved, though many many more were beyond our reach.  It was a desperate time.  And Oxfam, with its hugely larger funds, backed with UK-Aid was able to reach more. 

Budgets. A life or death matter

Haitian graveyard

I was so pleased with the hospital budget planning, and outcome.  A sudden patient death was a shock. Cause of death – our budget?

This more complicated than you might think. The patient had all their care to date at Hospital Convention Baptiste d’Haiti (HCBH) in Cap-Haïtien in north Haiti. That day the patient suddenly arrived with a haemorrhage.  The doctor prepared for surgery.  Unfortunately when they were to announce start, there was an emergency elsewhere. Another patient was now in surgery and was being anesthetized.  The hospital had one anaesthetist.  So it called upon a sessional anaesthetist as backup.  But they were not available.  HCBH called the government hospital in town, but they could not help.  Then called the Roman Catholic hospital that was not too distant.  They could help.  The patient was rushed off in the ambulance, but it was too late.  They died.

Gained in translation

What on earth has Bill written here?

Lost in translation.  So much is.  The geographic and cultural distance is just so so great.  From my English-English into their schooled Haitian-French to mother tongue Creole thinking.

• From their cash bookkeeping that is authorisation and fraud-control focussed
• into my patterns of management accounting and forecasts. (Quite frankly my financial projections based on their figures must seem to them as just so much fiction. Leaps of Bill’s imagination.)