Links Of Interest: Hide Your House, Russian Mercenaries, Doctors Without Borders

Some things I've run into recently that may be of interest.  

1.  How To Hide Your House On Google (and other online) maps - street view.

"With the rise of increasingly convenient features such as street-level 360º photos available on Google Maps and other competing mapping services, there’s always a risk your personal data will be captured in a publicly available photo in a way you’d rather avoid—whether than means the outside of your house or the location where you park your car.

If you face this kind of a problem, there’s a simple solution available in many cases—you can ask the mapping service to blur or remove the picture. We’ll going to show you how to do that on the most popular mapping services."

Then it gives you step-by-step instructions.  Doesn't look hard 

2.  Another story I found fascinating - from NewslinesMag. A British reporter, a fluent Russian speaker apparently, pokes around the remains of what had been a Russian mercenary post outside of Tripoli. A story about the Wagner Group.  A couple of excerpts:

"From September 2019, photographs and reports had begun to emerge of Russian mercenaries in Tripoli. They were identified as units from the so-called Wagner Group, a secretive and highly controversial organization of mercenaries that fought first in Ukraine, then in Syria, and later in Sudan, Mozambique, the Central African Republic and Libya.

"Reportedly financed by the Russian catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been sanctioned and indicted by the United States for his election interference efforts, the Wagner Group has been accused of acting as President Vladimir Putin’s shadowy expeditionary force, even though mercenaries are technically illegal in Russia. The group has also been linked to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, from whose ranks its ostensible head, Dmitry Utkin, and other rank-and-file members hail. And yet, as has often been the case with Wagner, beyond such reports and speculation over Wagner personnel’s involvement in the fighting, little detailed evidence had emerged.

"But this spring we obtained a small white Samsung tablet with a cracked screen, protected by a battered brown leather case. GNA fighters said they had recovered it from positions held by Russian fighters in Ain Zara, the area where Haitham had fought. We put it through extensive tests to ensure it didn’t contain some kind of tracking device or malware; we examined it minutely, searching for clues to its users and making sure it was the genuine article. It was."

3.  For a different view of foreigners working in poor countries, we have the group Doctors Without Borders  (MSF French acronym) which saves lives but its local staff says it also  perpetuates colonialism and racism.  I heard this riveting radio show on Reveal the other day.  Decolonize MSF is an organization trying to change how things are done.  It's troublesome.  The organization does a lot of great work around the world, providing life saving care who otherwise might die.  Yet, this radio report is really well done.  It maps out, through interviews, what structural racism and colonialism looks like.  Do go to the website with the audio.  Below is some description from that page.

"The organization, also known by its French acronym MSF, has about 63,000 people working in 88 countries. While foreign doctors parachuting into crisis zones get most of the attention, 90% of the work is done by local health workers. 

In the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 current and former staffers wrote a letter calling out institutional racism at MSF. They say MSF operates a two-tiered system that favors  foreign doctors, or expat doctors, over local health workers. 

On the eve of MSF’s 50th anniversary, reporters Mara Kardas-Nelson, Ngozi Cole and Sean Campbell talked to about 100 current and former MSF workers to investigate how deep these issues run. We meet Dr. Indira Govender, a South African doctor who in 2011 accepted what she thought was her dream job with MSF in South Africa, only to get a front-row seat to the organization’s institutional racism. Even though she’s officially the second-in-command of her project, she says it feels like a select group of European expats and White South Africans are running the show."  

We think of the doctors going from Western countries to help out in poor countries as being better than this and I'm sure many, if not most, are.  But this shows us how blatantly racist some are but also how the separate treatment of foreign doctors and native medical staff institutionalizes the separation between local staff (about 90% of the staff) from those who come to help from overseas.  

Maybe I can believe this troubling story because I've run into this sort of thing.  When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand I got pressed into helping a Thai dentist negotiate with the Israeli construction company paving the highway near the town I was teaching in.  She needed a translator and so I went along.  After it was over the Israeli negotiator offered me a job because he couldn't trust any of the Thais and was surprised that I could live alone with them.  I was shocked by his view of Thais.

And when I traveled home from Thailand I took the long route so I could visit D who was teaching in Uganda.  I'd met him while I was a student in Germany and we'd hit it off and we traveled together a bit in England where he was from.  There, he came from a modest background, didn't drive, and had dropped out of college without completing his degree to start teaching.  In Uganda he lived in this giant compound surrounded by a ten foot wall.  Inside was like a giant golf course - green grass, trees, and cute little cottages scattered all around.  D lived in one and his car sat outside it.  There was dining hall with white table cloths and napkins and there four or five course dinners served by African waiters.  D's main interactions with Africans was with his students at the elite school he taught at, maybe some African teachers (I don't remember meeting any of them), the waiters and other help in the compound where he lived.  Again I was shocked.  But as we talked it was clear that D was socialized to live separate like this.  That's how all the Brit ex-pats, or at least the ones he knew, lived.  He didn't learn any of the local languages because "everyone speaks English" in this recently independent country.  When I'd talk with Africans in the market or anywhere, they would be very reticent, and after a few minutes they'd say something like, "You aren't a resident are you?"   Coming from Thailand where we'd had to learn Thai before even getting to Thailand and living and working completely with Thais, D's situation was hard for me to believe.  This was not the kind of life he' d had back in England.  We had long talks while I was there and that continued for years via letters.  And eventually he visited Alaska and I later visited him in England.  He had some harrowing experiences there and one African he did get to meet was Idi Amin.  But that's another story - his to tell.  

But those experiences were 50 years ago!  I would have thought things had changed since then.  I'm sure they have, but not as much as one might expect.  

As someone who has contributed to Doctors Without Borders I'm forced to think about how to support the good things they do and push for change.  The program talks about a protest group within MSF - Decolonize MSF.  Maybe contributing to them would be the way to go.