A dose of perspective

Nice, I had stopped donating for a few months because apparently I'm that lazy ;) Just signed up for monthly donations - I'm #87.

Now 103. Thanks for the push.

#100 here. Watsi does great things for people and I hope to help as much as I can.

Edit: Its up to 115 people now. Glad to be a part of this community.

Late to the game, sorry Watsi, #108 here. Thank you for doing this.

The vanity of having a low number got me to consider signing up, and the joy I foresee in getting the progress emails sealed the deal. I put in $5 a month, and hope to add more when I graduate!

I didn't know about that - thanks for highlighting. #123

133 :)

In the hopes that you'll get involved https://watsi.org/ :)

Watsi is a wonderful glimmer of hope. I don't particularly have the money for it, but I've made 4 donations over the last couple of weeks. It's easy, you just read the stories and think to yourself, "do I really need to buy that coffee this week?"

I imagine the Watsi team (Grace in this case) has earned the respect and trust from both the hospital and patients to walk through with a camera like that.

In my limited experience visiting West Africa, there's rightful skepticism of expats but once you build trust they're very warm to you. The level of trust you have as a foreigner is sometimes higher than a local. My sister moved to Burkina Faso a year ago. She's not white (Indian) and no one there knows she's a doctor since she doesn't have her license yet. The locals trust her medical advice based entirely on the fact that she's an expat.

I'm not sure how different Kenya is from West Africa and realize the Watsi team was only there for a couple weeks but I think the same applies considering their comittment to the area.

Probably a lot of room for discussion here, but I think it's problematic to conflate this documentary trip with Watsi's general practices for dealing with patient information – doesn't appear that they gave out any of their patients' personal information in this piece, and they generally do a great job limiting the amount of information listed on any given patient's page.

Of course, there are a lot of health care needs that are by nature private or could endanger the patient well-being if it became public that some procedures were done. I believe they have an anonymous fund that receives a percentage of all donations to attend to just those types of issues.

If any information on any patient should be given out is a bit of a different question.

Grace from Watsi here. I totally understand where you're coming from based on how the post is written - our fault for being hyperbolic. Of course, we would never walk through a hospital and record people without their explicit permission.

Patient privacy is something we take really seriously. It is so important to us that Watsi funds cases regardless of whether or not the patient wants to publicly share their story with the world (https://watsi.org/faq#how-does-watsi-handle-patient-privacy) so that patients are never trading privacy for access to healthcare. More info here: http://blog.watsi.org/post/62445601517/patient-privacy

That said, what I've learned after talking with dozens of Watsi patients is that the overwhelming majority of them feel compelled to share their stories. They hope it will enable more people to access the healthcare they deserve.

I recently dropped 70k rupees on elective surgery. If the girl with the camera paid for my surgery I'd be happy to let her film the whole thing.

I've had medically necessary surgery done also. If this girl or her org were to pay for that, and all I had to do was fulfill stupid racial stereotypes on camera while being mocked by silly foreigners (or something equally offensive), I'd be thinking "yay, I can walk again!"

Now being a bunch of do-gooder western types, I'm sure Watsi actually goes to great effort to maintain patient privacy. But even if they didn't, patient privacy is really a small price to pay for important medical interventions.

Worked for me on Firefox. It's one of those scroll-down tablety things.

Had to allow javascript from d1dh4fomm3d62b.cloudfront.net for the page to work.

because the website is a trivial part of the operation, and coding it is easier than coordinating drop-in volunteers?

As a developer for Kiva, and with some knowledge of Watsi's systems, I can probably answer this question, maybe I'll write a blog post about it actually, but the short of it is, the amount of effort involved for Watsi is going to be almost invariably greater than the reward gained from community contributions. (There's more to that but too much to fit into this format).

That said, take in to consideration that Watsi is quite likely using a bunch of the open-source software you are already familiar with. You can contribute to these projects, and thus indirectly be contributing to Watsi.

What I would like to see is non-profits sharing a list of the open-source software they are using (perhaps even weighted to what piece is most important to their operation) and thus giving eager developers such as yourself a roadmap towards helping them. (Bonus points for ability to reference specific bugs in said software, but that's somewhat rare).

Thanks! We used https://exposure.so/.

Yikes, sorry to hear that. What was the error message? Feel free to email me - grace at watsi dot org - and we'll sort it out.

Thanks for wanting to sign up!

I immediately stopped reading this post about a fucking medical charity serving poor people in Africa to nitpick on a tiny stylistic choice that mildly confused me for about a quarter of a second while sitting in my air conditioned SF office sipping a cappucino so that other well-to-do Western assholes would give me invisible Internet points...

Oh, no, I didn't. That was you (with some leeway to artistic representation). Out of everything there, this is what you wanted to talk about?

EDIT: The title of this post is "A dose of perspective". Think about that for a sec.