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A dose of perspective
- rememberlenny 13y agoThis was absolutely beautiful. Highlighting: FOOTNOTES: PS - We're hiring a senior full-stack engineer. Email chase@watsi.org for more info.
- danielweber 13y agoMaybe it's my browser but I only see a picture, no story. Or is it the picture that's cool?
- Pxtl 13y agoWorked for me on Firefox. It's one of those scroll-down tablety things.
- bittercynic 13y agoHad to allow javascript from d1dh4fomm3d62b.cloudfront.net for the page to work.
- wiwillia 13y agoIt's always amazing to see people travel the world and make an impact. It's easy to be hyper-focused on growth metrics and silicon valley that you can lose sight of the bigger picture.
- sage_joch 13y agoThis post does a great job of showing a simple truth that many people forget: when you genuinely help a person, you are also helping everyone in that person's "sphere". There is a kind of exponential echoing effect when you are good-to.
- pudo 13y agoI'm not entirely sure that as a patient in one of these hospitals, I'd appreciate the (white) girl with a camera strapped to her forehead walking through the place. Trading patient privacy for donations seems like a worse deal than needs to be made here.
- jmathai 13y agoI 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.
- jeffpersonified 13y agoProbably 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.
- gracegarey 13y agoGrace 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 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 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.
- danvoell 13y agoPretty slick storytelling design. Anyone know if this blog is built on top of something (medium/wordpress) or is it custom?
- gracegarey 13y agoThanks! We used https://exposure.so/ https://exposure.so/.
- natch 13y agoAwesome, gave me a great glimpse of something, I'm not sure what you guys are, but it looks cool. Web usability suggestion: Click as I might, I could not find a link anywhere to the Watsi home page. Call me lazy, but I still have not visited it. If there was a link to it I might have clicked on it and gone there.
- aidos 13y agoIn the hopes that you'll get involved https://watsi.org/ 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?"
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- Goopplesoft 13y agoWhy doesn't Watsi open source its code so developers can donate their time?
- gohrt 13y agobecause the website is a trivial part of the operation, and coding it is easier than coordinating drop-in volunteers?
- Goopplesoft 13y agoIs that a question or a statement?
- nowarninglabel 13y agoAs 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).
- daeken 13y agoFor those who don't know (like me, up until a few minutes ago), Watsi has a feature to allow monthly automatic donations: https://watsi.org/monthly https://watsi.org/monthly Currently only 84 people are signed up for it -- let's see how far up we can get that. Edit: Up to 90 in an hour! That's just pure awesome.
- abstractbill 13y agoNice, I had stopped donating for a few months because apparently I'm that lazy ;) Just signed up for monthly donations - I'm #87.
- qeorge 13y ago#89 here, let's keep it going!
- andrewpbrett 13y agoBoom, #88.
- js2 13y agoNow 103. Thanks for the push.
- stirno 13y ago#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.
- abbasmehdi 13y agoLate to the game, sorry Watsi, #108 here. Thank you for doing this.
- pradn 13y agoThe 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!
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- jayzee 13y agojust got an error while trying to sign up for a monthly donation
- gracegarey 13y agoYikes, 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!
- jackmaney 13y agoI immediately stopped reading upon the first sentence: "Our trip started with a RTY (Read This Yo) Level 1,000 text." Look, I like RPGs as much as the next nerd, but there's no reason to purposefully obfuscate what you're trying to say by needlessly throwing in garbage like this. And "Read This Yo"? Seriously?
- benaiah 13y agoI 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.
- jackmaney 13y agoNever been to SF, I'm not sitting in an office, and I'm not drinking a cappuccino. Nice try. In all seriousness, though, I had no idea what Watsi is. This was their chance to tell me about themselves. They blew it.
- benaiah 13y agoLike I said, artistic license taken with the caricature. Hyperbole is the soul of wit, etc. The benefit of HN over other similar sites that shall remain nameless is a very high signal-to-noise ratio - the community tends to have interesting, meaningful, detailed conversations about specific topics. Your post was precisely the opposite of that, and it's a perfect example of this community's biggest problem, one which those of us who enjoy the community here try to combat: a pervading, cynical, nitpicking negativity, often about things completely tangential to the actual topic of discussion, that adds nothing to the conversation and serves only as a way to smugly imply how much smarter/more cultured/less douchey (the irony!) than whoever put together the link. That's noise, not signal. It contributes nothing. Feel free to make your snide comments to yourself, but please don't bring down the quality of discussion here by using this forum to show off your nitpicking skill. If you don't feel like reading the article, then don't take over the conversation about the article with your reasons for not reading it. I apologize for my overly heated language in my initial - I don't have anything against you personally, and my caricature was more harsh than deserved.
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- leandrod 13y agoFrom Conkeror I cannot find any text, only a photogram.