Packing List for Ghana

I'm starting to feel better from the crazy vaccines this weekend. I'm still really tired, and when I sweat I smell like...typhoid, but I think I'm mostly out of the woods.

I'm getting excited about the stuff I'll need to bring. I guess it's the Boy Scout in me--I like to pack for a trip. I'm trying to be well-prepared but also pack light, and do it on a budget. That can be either the perfect storm for a traveler or a very fun activity.

I had a birthday yesterday (yeah, I'm getting old) and had a few bucks of birthday money to blow on fun stuff. Alisha and I decided to go shopping for Ghana stuff. We first went to Missionary Mall to get ideas about what we would need. The prices there were pretty high, so we made a list and drove down the street to Walmart. We were able to get most of the things on our list at Walmart for half the price.

Thanks go out to my Uncle Ben for many of these ideas.

Here's my list so far. It will probably grow over the next two weeks, but hopefully not by much:

Microfiber towel -- like a shammy; compact, absorbent, and much smaller than a cotton towel. $29.95 at Missionary Mall, $3.95 at Walmart.

Crank LED Flashlight -- Small, clips to your backpack, and requires no batteries or replacement bulbs. $10.95 at Walmart. Ghana is pitch-black at night, and even on the grid there are frequent rolling blackouts.

Twin Sheet -- You will probably end up staying in some interesting places. It's nice to have a little control over what you sleep on. $4.99 at Walmart.

Composition Notebook -- I call the oreo notebooks. They're the perfect journal: inexpensive, easy to lug around, and you can get lined, graph, or unlined versions. $.89 at Walmart

Immodium Plus -- when you leave the U.S., plain Immodium won't do. Take them before you need them.

Baby Wipes -- Sometimes you won't be able to shower, and wipes will be your best friend. You also want these around to wipe off the little bags of drinking water before you tear them open.

Universal Adapter -- a must whenever traveling, unless you don't intend on plugging anything into a wall. $18.99 at Walmart.

Culture Smart: Ghana -- I'm looking for a good guidebook to the culture. This one seems to be the most popular. Haven't made my decision yet. $5.43 on Amazon.com

Bradt Guide: Ghana -- Supposedly the best guidebook. $11.59 on half.com

Security Belt/wallet -- I'm on the fence about this. It's a belt you wear under your clothes that holds your money and credit cards. They're kind of awkward to use, but I guess they can keep your stuff fairly secure. $9.95 at Walmart.

Water Purification Tablets -- You can usually buy bottled water anywhere you go (or those little cachets of water), but I figure these might come in handy. I read a list somewhere of all the stuff in the water over there (typhoid, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, raw sewage etc.) and I'm not dying to ingest it anytime soon.

Ghana pt.1: Vaccinations

My Ghana experience has officially started. I'm still in the states, but I'm sick as a dog. I guess fate is giving me a booster shot of reality. I got vaccinated the other day. After a few weeks of phone calls, waiting lists, and a little panic I was finally able to squeeze in to the student health clinic. The nurse rattled off a list of recommended vaccines, had me read a sheaf of laminated information sheets about various diseases, and I made my selection from the menu. It felt like an exotic sadistic restaurant:

"I'll take Yellow Fever, Typhoid, and the new-and-improved tetanus booster."

"Are you sure you don't want Polio? You're at high risk of Polio in Sub-Saharan Africa."

"No, I'll take my chances. I don't have the money."

"Ok. Take the Typhoid pills home and keep them in the refrigerator. Slight pinch. Don't allow them to freeze or get too hot. Don't expose them to light. Don't eat or exercise an hour before or after taking the pill. Don't take antibiotics or steroids for the next week. And go immediately to the ER if you have any reactions. This vaccination contains live Typhoid. Slight pinch again…"

I could tell that the nurse had done this hundreds, if not thousands of times. I'm sure it takes a certain skill to repeat a memorized script while injecting a person with multiple live diseases. I was glad for her nonchalance; it kept my mind off the fact that my body was now full of African diseases, and there was nothing I could do to stop whatever they would do to me in the next week. I shut those thoughts out of my mind long enough to stop by the pharmacy, pick up my Typhoid and four weeks worth of antimalarials and Immodium. I am now ready to survive Africa…I think.

Later on that day I started to feel flu symptoms. I had read on the yellow laminated sheet that 25% of people receiving the Yellow Fever vaccine actually catch a minor form of the illness (and I stress minor--full-blown Yellow Fever kills you 50% of the time). I thought little of it and went to bed.

I woke up Thursday morning with hives on my arms and legs. My skin felt hot and itchy, like I had slept on an anthill. I panicked, downed a few Benadryl, and drove to the Health Center. $25 and ten minutes later I was told to be careful and keep taking Benadryl (thanks doc), and went back home. The hives cleared up and I thought nothing of it. By this time I was having a bad flu. All my muscles ached and I could barely move. No matter what I did my feet and legs were cold. I put on some sweats, crawled under three blankets, and went to sleep.

I woke up later that afternoon completely covered in angry, red hives. My skin was raised like a bad sunburn and looked like some kind of map. The itching was agony, and my skin had swollen so much it felt like it could rupture. I popped more Benadryl, made a few frantic calls to the Health Center, and was told to go into the ER. I'm not a fan of the ER. I usually feel like an idiot for going there, and it's so expensive. I decided to wait it out, and sure enough, after 45 minutes the Benadryl kicked in and the hives started to go away.

I woke up this morning with just a few hives and the flu has mostly gone away. I think I survived my first brush with Africa, but it was brutal.

Kiva.org and the Pre-disbursement Problem: Bait-and-Switch or Necessary Evil?

Matthew and Jessica Flannery founded Kiva.org with a groundbreaking idea: combining microfinance and social networking to open up a vast new capital market by allowing individuals to connect and make loans to one another. The human connection was the selling point of Kiva, and the idea was wildly successful. Problems arose recently when Kiva revealed that lenders are not necessarily making loans directly to the profiled individual on the site. Loans are actually pre-disbursed to the applicant long before information is uploaded to Kiva. The capital provided by lenders serves to back the loan, but most probably goes to a different applicant. This issue brings up a fundamental question that all public institutions must answer: is it ethical to mislead people if you are accomplishing a greater good?

Other nonprofits have experienced painful lessons after choosing to deceive the public for the greater good. In 1980, Save The Children, a 90-year-old international organization, was involved in a scandal[1] when funding designated for specific children was reallocated to other development projects. The Red Cross came under fire in 2001, when auditors discovered that a majority of the Liberty fund raised for 9/11 victims was reserved for other general Red Cross needs[2]. The public was not forgiving: after an investigation by then NY Attorney General Elliott Spitzer, Red Cross President Bernadine Healy was forced to resign.

On 2 October 2009, David Roodman posted an article[3] on his microfinance blog about Kiva’s pre-disbursement policy, accusing the organization of misleading lenders by overstating the potential for personal connections on the site. “In short, the person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections created by Kiva are partly fictional. I suspect that most Kiva users do not realize this. Yet Kiva prides itself on transparency.” He follows by explaining that pre-disbursement is a necessary and beneficial policy, allowing Kiva to serve a large volume of customers while bypassing the lengthy waiting period normally required for peer lending.

Despite the logical rationale for pre-disbursement, Roodman’s article caused a large backlash in the internet community against Kiva: many people felt that they had been misled when they visited the site, connected emotionally to a specific applicant, and then made a loan that they believed would benefit that individual. While Kiva claims that they value transparency, site visitors will not discover the pre-disbursement policy unless they do some significant investigation. Visitors who briefly skim the text on the site before proceeding directly to the profiles will view statements like this:

“we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive.”[4]

“Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.”

These claims give the impression that Kiva is attempting to minimize the likelihood of site visitors discovering the pre-disbursement policy. Many argue that Kiva should continue to maintain what they term a minor deception in order to function smoothly and deliver as much social value as it can. These comments overlook a glaring problem: Kiva has eliminated a significant portion of its core selling point, and widespread awareness of this issue may have significant negative ramifications. A New York Times article[5] stated it bluntly: “the direct person-to-person connection Kiva offered was in fact an illusion.”

Many now fear that this problem will eventually spell the end of Kiva, despite the near-universal support that Kiva has experienced. Without the personal connection, donors are better off using services like Microplace, where they can at least make a return on their investments. Many hope that Kiva will find a way to be both transparent and successful, but this may require drastic changes. While Kiva may experience a short-term decrease in capital volume by being completely upfront about the practice, they could avert a systemic failure by reinventing themselves.

A worst-case scenario is most likely if Kiva continues to promote the illusion of peer-to-peer lending. Innovations in the last four years have created a clear public demand for a social-media solution to humanitarian aid, and if Kiva is not able to revive itself with a new model, other organizations most likely will. We can only hope that Kiva will continue to utilize its market position in new ways[6].

---

[1] http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/nonprofit/2009/11/minor-kivaorg-scandal.html

[2] http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/rec.charity.hearing/

[3] http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2009/10/kiva-is-not-quite-what-it-seems.php

[4] http://www.kiva.org/about

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/global/09kiva.html

[6] Some sites like Babyloan.org have even stuck to the direct peer-lending model, despite the delay between application posting and loan disbursement.

Review of Ralph Nader: "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us Now"

Synopsis

In his latest book, Ralph Nader tries his hand at fiction and describes an interesting idea: a handful of disillusioned, elderly billionaires pool their resources to find remedies to not only the problems facing the world, but to the corruption in the political system itself. It begins in 2003 with a fictionalized Warren Buffett who views the disastrous aftermath of Katrina and becomes convinced that the U.S. government has failed its constituents on a fundamental level, and is incapable of ensuring basic rights, not to mention its inability to respond to escalating worldwide problems.

Mr. Buffett decides to tackle this issue head on. He gathers 17 like-minded billionaires (e.g. Bill Cosby, Ted Turner, Yoko Ono, and Leonard Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble) and they form a 2-year plan to fix government corruption, make the media more impartial, and address social issues such as healthcare and pollution. They build an infrastructure of consumer watchdog groups, assemble their own media outlet, and recruit spokesmen and demonstrators across the nation. As this is a Ralph Nader-styled utopia, the end result involves many nationalized industries and substantial unionization, but to each his own…

Neoclassical economics claims that a large group of varied individuals acting out of self interest can actually lead to a situation that is better than the sum of its component participants: each market player utilizes unique talents and inputs through specialization, and by acting selfishly each player inadvertently benefits others as well. Many college students emerge from Economics 101 believing that the Invisible Hand rocks the American cradle, but never stop to examine the costs of unbridled selfish behavior.

There is a glaring problem in a system that runs on rampant self-interest — you have every reason to lie, cheat, and steal, and little incentive to produce real solutions to the world’s problems. There are entire markets built on bait-and-switch tactics: businesses and agencies advertise solutions to problems, but deliver the minimum value for the maximum profit possible. In economic terms, we are a society of rent-seekers.

This theory of non-satiation may not actually be true. Some social scientists claim that many individuals have an ideal lifestyle in mind, and seek to minimize the cost of getting and staying there (for many people, it may not even be an expensive lifestyle.) A corporate analog to this could be a nonprofit entity that aims to change something in the world. It may seek to eliminate war, or just make a better hammer -- the important point is that the organization (1) provides its members reasonable compensation for their contributions, and (2) seeks to make the world a better place. The shifting of focus from profit-maximization to maximized effectiveness eliminates some significant moral hazards, and if our social scientists are correct, this type of organization may fit more harmoniously within our instinctual social preferences.

While opinions on Mr. Nader’s politics, or even motives, may differ widely, I think the concept introduced in this book is powerful, and should be examined by all individuals and the organizations they compose. We can follow the path of profit maximization at all costs; or we can take the time to envision the world we want to live in, and then use our talents and resources to make lasting, beneficial changes to it.

Socially-Responsible Organizations

In his latest book, Ralph Nadertries his hand at fiction and describes an interesting idea: a handful of disillusioned, elderly billionaires pool their resources to find remedies to not only the problems facing the world, but to the corruption in the political system itself. It begins in 2003 with a fictionalized Warren Buffett who views the disastrous aftermath of Katrina and becomes convinced that the U.S. government has failed its constituents on a fundamental level, and is incapable of ensuring basic rights, not to mention its inability to respond to escalating worldwide problems.

Mr. Buffett decides to tackle this issue head on. He gathers 17 like-minded billionaires (e.g. Bill Cosby, Ted Turner, Yoko Ono, and Leonard Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble) and they form a 2-year plan to fix government corruption, make the media more impartial, and address social issues such as healthcare and pollution. They build an infrastructure of consumer watchdog groups, assemble their own media outlet, and recruit spokesmen and demonstrators across the nation. As this is a Ralph Nader-styled utopia, the end result involves many nationalized industries and substantial unionization, but to each his own…

Underlying Theory

Neoclassical economics claims that a large group of varied individuals acting out of self interest can actually lead to a situation that is better than the sum of its component participants: each market player utilizes unique talents and inputs through specialization, and by acting selfishly each player inadvertently benefits others as well. Many college students emerge from Economics 101 believing that the Invisible Hand rocks the American cradle, but never stop to examine the costs of unbridled selfish behavior.

The neoclassical scenario demands some prerequisite assumptions in order to work, one of which is the existence of an impartial regulatory body to enforce civil and property rights. If the referees themselves are utility-maximizing individuals, we have a large moral hazard to deal with. Another assumption is symmetrical information—if both parties understand the design of an automobile, the market will find an appropriate price: but if the manufacturer alone knows that a mild rear-end collision may turn the car into a blazing inferno, the market will probably get the price wrong.

Herein lays the glaring problem with a system that runs on rampant self-interest—you have every reason to lie, cheat, and steal, and you have little incentive to produce real solutions to the world’s problems. There are entire markets built on bait-and-switch tactics: businesses and agencies advertise solutions to problems, but deliver the minimum value for the maximum profit possible. In economic terms, we are a society of rent-seekers.

Application

This theory of non-satiation may not actually be true. Some social scientists claim that many individuals have an ideal lifestyle in mind, and seek to minimize the cost of getting and staying there (for many people, it may not even be an expensive lifestyle.) A corporate analog to this could be a nonprofit entity that aims to change something in the world. It may seek to eliminate war, or just make a better hammer -- the important point is that the bottom line of the organization is to (1) provide its workers reasonable compensation for their contributions, and (2) make the world a better place. The shifting of focus from profit-maximization to maximized effectiveness eliminates some significant moral hazards, and if our social scientists are correct, this type of organization may fit more harmoniously within our instinctual social preferences.

While opinions on Mr. Nader’s politics, or even motives, may differ widely, I think the concept introduced in this book is powerful, and should be examined by all individuals and the organizations they compose. We can follow the path of profit maximization at all costs; or we can take the time to envision the world we want to live in, and then use our talents and resources to make lasting, beneficial changes to it.

Congressional Earmarks: What Are They?

The process of Congressional earmarking has received heavy news coverage in recent months, as U.S. citizens evaluate the effectiveness of government spending projects. Situations like the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska and Senator Mitch McConnell’s personal charity appropriations have drawn attention to the lack of transparency and potential moral hazards that accompany the earmarking process. The following brief document provides an explanation and history of earmarking, along with a summary of the more significant criticisms of the practice.

Definition

Earmarking is the process by which members of Congress allocate budgeted money toward a specific program or project. They can be added to the Congressional Appropriations Budget or inserted into any bill as line items. Proponents of earmarks claim that they enable members of Congress to intelligently direct funds where they are most needed among their constituents, instead of deferring to the Executive Branch to allocate expenditures in potentially wasteful ways. The process of logrolling, or the inclusion of reciprocal earmarks, allows the sponsor of a bill to solicit support from other members of Congress; in effect “purchasing” a vote in exchange for an earmark.

History

While earmarking occurred as early as 1817, the practice was not widely seen until the 1980’s. The chart to the right shows that between 1996 and 2008, annual earmarks grew from 958 to 14,093. Incidentally, the total annual spending by lobbyists rose from $1.44 billion in 1998 to $3.30 billion in 2008.

Since the 110^th Congress, the earmark process has been more tightly regulated: members must post their earmarks on a website and declare that they have no personal interest in the request. In addition, the OMB and private groups such as WashingtonWatch.com are expanding efforts to catalog and monitor earmarking behavior. The additional transparency and accountability from these efforts

Criticisms

While earmarks total only two percent of the Federal budget, critics argue that earmarks pose a significant moral hazard to the legislative process: lobbyists often give large donations to the campaign funds of members of Congress in order to secure earmarks. Since until recently, earmarks were usually inserted anonymously into legislation, they were also a convenient way to secretly award loyalty or punish enemies.

Since a member of Congress may insert a budget earmark for projects outside his/her geographical jurisdiction, lobbyists who are rejected by officials from one state are often able to secure funding from members in a different state. For example, Congressman Dan Young from Alaska earmarked $10 million to fund the construction of a highway interchange in Florida. Further research revealed that Congressman Young received a $40,000 campaign donation from the developer of the property. Behaviors such as this will hopefully be reduced by recent and future reforms.

On Not Finishing a Book

Are you the kind of person who checks out dozens of books and only reads a few of them? When I go to the library I feel like a hungry man at an all-you-can-eat buffet: I know that I can only eat so much, and I regret that I can't try everything. I still put too much on my plate, knowing that I will throw away half of it, but I just can't stop trying new foods.

I have been chipping away at a fascinating book about a journalist's travels through Iran, and I was very annoyed the other day to receive an email reminder from the library, telling me that the book was due. I felt this pang of regret, knowing that life would move on and I would probably never finish the book--it would go on the ever-growing pile of unfinished projects, partially-read books, and abandoned hobbies.

Just when I was about to sink into one of those bouts of self-pity I had a realization: Do you have to finish a book to enjoy it? Maybe not. I don't have to know someone's life story to have a meaningful discussion with them. I met a guy from Mali yesterday; we had a great discussion for a few minutes and then went on with our lives. He didn't ask me about my third-grade teacher, and I didn't get his position on Kanye West, but I would still call the conversation a success.

I wonder if we're just too hard on ourselves. I think we often forget that Sherlock Holmes and Hermione Granger are not real people--we don't have to become an expert in everything we're interested in, complete every project we begin, or finish every book we check out. There are so many hours in a day, and when you think about it, years in a life.

I was falling asleep last night, going through the frantic "did I forget anything today" to-do list, and remembered my late library books. I thought to myself, "I met a fascinating book the other day." It was okay that I didn't finish it--there were millions of books still waiting for me, and I would probably meet a few tomorrow.