Preparing for missions in difficult places

“ I perform dev and training gigs in hard-to-reach places. In the desert, in the snow, in a remote Asian village or a jungle town in Africa.”

Yes, deliberately indeed.

But I as suspect you may believe, I didn't work for the military.

I worked for NGOs, governments bodies, the UN and WHO, and of course the private sector.

At home I have a fridge, hot water, heating, nobody is shooting guns except in the shows I can stream in HD thanks to fiber while eating an organic avocado.

So it's easy to forget a huge part of the world is not comfortable. But those areas do have a lot of human activity, and some need computers.

In the article I hint about a text message base system to control a cluster of computers. That was in 2000 something, and Uganda was trying to control a big tuberculosis epidemic. The goal was to synchronize all medical outposts. In this country, this meant dozens of very remote places, in the jungle, in the mud, etc.

It could take up to 3 months to gather enough data about all the cultures of each new batch to prescribe the proper treatment. Often too late.

One day the NGO Find decided to attempt to create a system that would link all them using GPRS. So they sent me there. Text messages was the only thing that would be semi-reliable, and locals would plug their nokias on the batteries on their Jakartas (a popular chinese bike that was everywhere) to have them always available, so we used that, and cheap laptops to host the software.

Another time I got hired at the last minute to help with a training to promote Microsoft products in remote places in the hope that once they become a market, they would chose them. When I arrived, the African MS representative gave a speech, a few t-shirts, pocketed the money, and left immediately.

Without the MS expert to take a lead, I didn't have much of a plan. So I trained the entire audience how to use Linux.

Good times.

Want to entertain a bunch of stranded scientists on an island? Give them a Python training, it's part of the budget anyway. Want to prove some legal issues? Lock the expert with an airgap system and let him figure it out.

I get all sorts of offers. Some are questionable, of course.

Once the parliament of Mali asked me to craft some very shady accounting system. I refused.

But I can only tell you about it only because this particular governing body have little power over me today.

I used to be an archeologist and had a checklist of similar preparations before I would head out to the field. However, unlike the article, I couldn't pack two of everything because I had to carry it myself alongside whatever gear, shovels, samples, sieves, survey equipment, etc I had.

A few things I learned though:

* FOSS software was consistently the most reliable stuff I used, as it wouldn't automatically lock itself if it couldn't see the Internet every 30 days.

* You need to be much more thoughtful about the code you write. Think twice, write once.

* Stick to a daily power budget, and cut it in half from what you can nominally afford.

* Prioritize properly. In many cases, the electronics are not the most important thing to be handled. Don't babysit them, go do camp chores and sieve dirt if it needs doing.

Geophysical exploration surveying for one - I've written well over a million+ SLOC and traveled through and over more than two thirds of the 190+ countries on the planet.

Flying million line km grids 80m above ground at 70 m/s, driving, logging drill hole samples, positioning base stations, ground truthing the "new" WGS84 GPS datum against hundred of older paper maps and many many old ellisoids and datums, etc.

It's good to be unfazed by vehicle failures, supply chain breakdowns, political upheavals, coup d'état, unexpected bad weather, wild fires, and so forth.

Suprise nuclear testing was one interesting day on the job.

Drone pilot. Especially in war zones

The knife is probably to deter someone messing with you thinking you're an easy target.

Maybe the Crocodile Dundee school of thought:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSnosk4tWrg&t=10s

A bit above where he mentions checking a bag, he says:

> But in our context, I am not a tourist. First, I need to perform, second, where I go I may not have shops. Or much of anything really.

Just the supplies to stay functional without being able to rely on any local infra (food/water/shelter/medical) makes not having a checked bag challenging IMO.

I'm on-roster with a tech NGO (sounds like he does something similar?) and travel with a duffel that gets checked in addition to my carry-on backpack. Backpack has "here and now" stuff. A change of clothes, lots of socks, laptops, GPS, satphone, granola bars. Basically whatever I need to live for a day or two and get started doing site surveys so I'm not totally useless even if the duffel gets held up or lost.

Duffel gets _everything_(1) that I need to do what I've been sent to do, which gets bulky and usually makes airport security unhappy: Tools (EMT shears(2), multitool, screwdriver, wrenches to assemble VSAT dishes, ethernet crimpers, etc). Food/MREs for half a week of working hard, maybe a small drone if it's legal. Sometimes cable and network equipment if it's a small response and nobody is pulling stocks from UNHRD.

Granted, I usually do field networking instead of coding, but the basic idea is the same. Sometimes you have to do the project even if it means sleeping in a house with no roof on an island with no power after a hurricane.

1. Technically, everything short of local transportation. 2. TSA doesn't mind the EMT shears, but airports south of the equator kept confiscating mine.

It's the case for many NGO. Just know that:

- NGOs won't pay nearly as much as the private sector, obviously.

- It's very hard to get in, at least for deployed missions. So do not hesitate to try again and again for a long time.

- Once you are in, it ripples, and you easily get access to many other missions, provided you did a good job. It can be useful to accept something completely out of your main thing, just to get the foot in the door.

- A lot of NGO work is actually not helping anybody. Be prepared to be disappointed. Some is good, but the amount of PR, virtue signaling and scams is staggering. Although many people are under the delusion they save the world. Do it for the experience, and maybe you'll get lucky and you'll do more good that bad, on average. Some days, I'm still unsure I did. But emergency responses are where the most unambiguous good is done.

- If you do it for long enough, you will get hurt. That's just how it is. Sick, wounded, bankrupt... Something. That's one of the prices to pay. E.G: in West Africa, our first Malaria was kinda a rite of passage. We'd joke about it. You can't take pills with side effects for ever.

- You'll need to be pretty autonomous. Nobody is going to take you by the hand. But the cool part of this is that you'll get responsibilities and freedom of action you'll have nowhere else. It can be a curse as much as a blessing, but I loved it.

I did training for the Red Cross to join the rooster. Never been deployed so I don’t have any field experience. I have friends whose whole career revolves around different deployments in hardship areas.

From hearing people that have been in the field it sounds like a total shit show. But also very boring since you get to wait a lot.

You also se a lot of traumatized people which I believe takes a toll on your mental health.

I was surprised by the partying, alcohol seems like the preferred way to cope with the environment.

All in all, the people I have met don’t seem at peace with themselves.

They do, although there are some organizational aspects to consider. Each nation has its own Red Cross/Red Crescent/Red Diamond committee and draws first from its own local roster. Other nations request specific expertise from sister committees from time to time, but it’s pretty rare. The American Red Cross, for example, deploys about 2 dozen individuals to support foreign disaster relief operations in a given year. As I recall that involves mainly people who are really good at setting up comms infrastructure, management experts, and GIS experts.

The ICRC, as I understand it, works more across international lines, but their “technical” experts tend to specialize in aspects of international humanitarian law rather than technology per se.

You certainly can, though, support domestic relief operations for the American Red Cross. Disaster Support Technologies roles tend to have more of a helpdesk flavor than the remote, wild-and-wooly jack-of-all-trades kind of experience that the OP describes. And there are also information and planning functions on large disaster relief operations, where your data analysis and GIS chops might be put to good use.

Those jobs sometimes unfold in austere conditions—think after a hurricane or a wildfire—but they’re extremely well-supported, by contrast to the OP’s missions: you’ll have a safe and dry place to sleep, plenty to eat, the national warehouses will get you the stuff you need (albeit maybe not today), and so forth. The training is thorough and the crowd is mission-oriented. You can even work I&P roles remotely.

It's not as exciting as it look: you spend a lot of time waiting. And then working in difficult conditions. Then waiting. Then something fail and you look for a hack. Then you work. And you wait. And you come back.

I did get into serious trouble once or twice, but over two decades, the average netflix factor is pretty low.

Corruption and nature owning you is surprising the first few times, but after the 50th occurrence, it's just the new normal.

So you'd have to make some talented editing.

The "mission" terminology is common in the NGO world and not everyone is hired as a "coder". Quite frequently these are projects to effect outcomes rather than support billets to be filled by coders. There is a wide spectrum out there, your experiences may vary..

Getting to the north pole is a series of a lot of pretty basic shits, I'm afraid.

Life is mostly mundane, after all. And there is a limit to what you can prepare for.

One day my taxi, or should I say death trap, went fast and furious on a pedestrian in the middle of Bamako. The procedure for the locals at the time was to stone the culprit to death before the police arrive, as anybody with money will pay their way out.

Not much you can pack to help you with that.

And not programming related anyway.

There’s a big difference between doing basic shit in your pajamas from the home office and doing it in a remote location while contending with all of the accompanying complications.