When I was young, I wanted to live in foreign places, find fantastic adventures, and have an exciting life — the clever hero, besting every villain through mere wit and wile. But when my family moved us back to India from the United States when I was 10, my reaction to the changes was more melodramatic than wily. America was home, and I was in exile.

Being closer to my grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins was wonderful and familiar, but school was a daily gauntlet of isolation. I was an outsider who did not fit in. Back in the U.S., school was bright, warm, and cheery. My kind teachers knew my parents. The future was a faraway place, and worries of the future — of getting into college, getting married, and having babies — were conversations that could wait. But in India, questions of whether I was going to grow up to be a doctor or engineer had been asked long before I arrived. Kids in my 5th grade class weren’t just studying math and science; they were learning algebra, geometry, arithmetic, biology, chemistry, and physics — not from one caring 5th grade teacher, but from a string of faceless instructors who waltzed in and out of the classroom in regular 45-minute intervals. The competition for top grades was real and immediate. I was lost, confused, and unprepared for this learning environment.

The bright spot in my day was my English literature class. Not to be confused with English language class, which consisted of a series of mindless grammar exercises, such as fill in the blank: “________ as a cucumber.” In the States, ‘Story Hour’ and ‘Reading’ were my favorite classes. The trials of Ramona Quimby, mysteries solved by Encylopedia Brown, and all of life’s answers in Judy Blume’s books thrilled and transported me. Their worlds were my worlds. In India, we didn’t read full books in literature class, but we did have readers with excerpts of biographical essays about famous dead people. Three of these stories left a deep impression.

First was George Eliot, a famous and popular writer in “his” time, but who was actually a woman writing as a man. Second was the scientist Alfred Nobel who accidentally created a weapon of mass destruction. He grew to regret it and, as a result, set up a prestigious prize for brilliant and influential people, and everyone forgave him. Finally was Albert Schweitzer, whose story left the strongest impression on me. A foreigner who lived in Africa in a nice house, he saved many villagers’ lives as the only nearby doctor. In his downtime, he indulged in his passion for music. Eliot and Nobel gave me hope that you can bend the rules and make mistakes in even the most rigid structures, but Schweitzer gave me a dream of a life I could see myself living.

Stuffed in the middle of those drafty classrooms, pressed close to the nervous sweat of 70 other girls, I began to imagine a future in Africa. A life of art-filled solitude, making a living by being a hero to entire villages. When I returned to the States for high school a few years later, the dream didn’t disappear. If anything, it was reinforced by returning to English classes with full books and reading The Poisonwood Bible, Heart of Darkness, West with the Night, and Things Fall Apart. In college, my world expanded to include Francophone Caribbean with La Lézarde and Traversée de la Mangrove.

When I signed up for the Peace Corps, my normally supportive family resisted. My dad was especially confused. Being from a low-income family in rural India, he’d grown up watching NGO workers pass through, build a well or a pump, and disappear. To him, development was a Western pastime. These foreign “interventions” did nothing to reduce income disparity or improve quality of life. But my dad is a really smart guy who performed exceptionally well in school. A strong-willed grandmother, an interested uncle, and a fellowship to Stanford University were his tickets out of poverty. To him, my interest in living in a village in Madagascar wasn’t noble; it was crazy and ill-informed. Essentially, by returning to open drainage, non-potable water, and limited access to modern health care, I was doing the opposite of what he had done as a young man. But I knew what was best for my life. I knew I was going to save some lives.

Obviously, as everyone can probably tell, that didn’t happen.

When I arrived in the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, it felt just like Bangalore but on a smaller scale. When I got to my village, it was more “developed” than my grandfather’s farms two hours from Mysore. My Malagasy community was nicer, more open-minded, and often more informed on global issues and events than both of the communities in India and America where I’d grown up. I came to teach and counsel community members about family planning, reproductive health, and maternal and child health, but I learned far more than I taught. My doctor and pharmacist colleagues at the clinic I was assigned to opened my eyes to new realities of providing quality health care in low-resource settings.

I realize now that many of those stories I chose to read growing up that were set in low-income countries only featured a narrow demographic slice of a place: the disenfranchised, the struggling, the poor. In many of the stories, especially those with a white protagonist, the country and the people in it were often invisible, or reduced to simple, one-dimensional stereotypes.

What’s wonderful about story — fiction or non-fiction — is that it answers the complex question, “Who Am I?” in an organized manner. However, when we use stories as means to seek or share knowledge, we need to be conscious of our intent and practice. As human beings, we tend to look for the simplest answer and easiest explanation. We often find comfort in stereotypes and gloss over nuance.

Despite being Indian and having grown up partially in India, I realized too late that my education about the “problems of the world” largely reflected the Western perspective. This is not a unique experience. There are countless warnings against ‘voluntourism.’ There are blogs, reports, and studies by experienced global health and development practitioners calling on the field do more listening and less telling. There are many people doing great development work and following this tenet. But many, I think, would admit to an origin story similar to mine — a bit ignorant of reality, but well-intentioned, and quick to remedy the mistake and shift perspectives.

However, the incomplete Western view of low- and middle-income countries remains. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, in a wonderful TED talk, speaks of the danger of the “single story.” She says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

Another insightful TED talk is The Politics of Fiction by Eli Shafak, who discusses how identity politics affects the way we read and consume to reinforce our preconceived notions. Here’s an especially poignant quote from her talk:

The Sufis say, “Knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance.” The problem with today’s cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge — we know a lot about each other, or so we think — but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves: it makes us elitist, distant, and disconnected.

These days, when I read and write, especially for work, I constantly remind myself that the “family” in family planning, the “youth” in youth sexual and reproductive health, and the “health worker” aren’t just words on a page. They aren’t a faceless blur or an idea. They’re also not one-dimensional victims, crouched in the mud staring intensely into a camera lens, as well-timed flies settle on their faces. These are people who laugh and love and sometimes struggle, just as I do. Just as everyone does. These are humans with complex stories, just like ours. We are not our problems, and we don’t want our existence defined by them.

Last fall, K4Health, in partnership with FP2020, launched a new storytelling initiative called Family Planning Voices (#FPVoices). FP Voices is our effort to help individuals in the global community share their stories of how family planning has had an impact on their work and their lives.

I love our tagline: “Personal responses to a global responsibility.” Every story we add to this collection is another stitch in a tapestry — a complicated narrative filled with triumphs, sorrows, advice, and inspiration. It reveals the shared effort to ensure that every woman has access to both information and the contraceptive method of her choice. In effect, it is a global movement where every voice is considered and valued.

When we use stories to impart knowledge, the responsibility is shouldered by both the storyteller and the audience. The storyteller must tell stories that do not oversimplify its geography, characters, and topic out of fear that his or her audience will not absorb its message. The audience, in turn, must make an effort to hear or read beyond what they already know — remaining open not just to new information, but to new perspectives.

We need more stories about global health and development work — stories that are unafraid of complexity and nuance. Stories that make sense of data and statistics and explain what these numbers mean for individual human beings. Stories that impart the cultural, social, and political context of the communities we work in, without a Western filter. It’s in these stories that we’ll learn about the work that’s already happening, the challenges people are facing, and context-specific ideas that solve real problems. At the very least, and perhaps most importantly, we’ll connect with each other on a deeper plane of understanding and empathy.

Did you find this article helpful? Follow the The Exchange for more useful, step-by-step information on how to better curate, synthesize, and share knowledge.

The Exchange is a K4Health publication. The Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project is supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, under Cooperative Agreement #AID-OAA-A-13–00068 with the Johns Hopkins University.
The contents are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the U.S. Government.

Beyond the Single Story was originally published in The Exchange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project, we believe that knowledge saves lives. Organizations that apply proven knowledge management techniques can improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of health workers and programs. This in turn improves health outcomes.

Knowledge management can be a dry and technical topic that’s tough to get excited about. It can be difficult to understand, and its value can be hard to see. For those who are new to the topic, knowledge management is the process of collecting and curating knowledge, then connecting people to it so they can act effectively.

Sounds easy enough, right? Think of it as a process that helps your team get better organized at work so that everyone knows exactly what they are responsible for and feels confident in their ability to do their job.

We get that knowledge management is a simple concept but hard to act on. It’s easy to get lost in toolkits, databases, repositories, and online courses. The jargon — like “synthesis”, “curation”, “tacit knowledge”, “implicit knowledge” — can create more confusion than clarity. It’s easy to lose sight of the people involved in the knowledge management process.

We want to help you understand what knowledge management is and how to use it in your work.

This is why we created The Exchange.

Simply put, in this publication we write about the need for knowledge management in global health, the practical ways we apply knowledge management techniques in our work, and the impact our work can have on communities. Our posts are personal and varied. They promote discourse and debate with the intent to engage public health practitioners and reach new audiences.

We hope you find these stories useful and that they inspire you to try new techniques to enhance your learning, share your organization’s knowledge, and benefit your community.

Want to read more about knowledge management and global health? Follow The Exchange for more information on how to better curate, synthesize, and share knowledge.

What is Knowledge Management? was originally published in The Exchange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A big challenge with web content is displaying it in a way that is both inviting to visitors and easy for them to find the information they are looking for. If you’re new to eLearning, instructional design, or web content layout, this is likely an issue you’ve grappled with.

Chunking is a technique that allows you to convey information to your online readers more efficiently.

Online readers don’t read; they scan.

Presenting your content in short, clear, and specific pieces makes it easy for a reader to find the information they need and increases their odds of remembering it.

Here are three ways to chunk your content and improve your site:

1. Just give them the cookie. What’s a good way to get kids to do work? Bribe them with a cookie. What’s a good way to get your online visitors to keep reading? Don’t make them work; just give them the cookie. Visitors will stay on your page if the content they’re looking for is easy to find. Position the main message or important points at the top of the page. Bold key takeaways so the reader’s eyes are sure to catch it. Create subsections or subheadings for content that’s less important but still interesting in case a reader sticks around and decides to scroll down for more.
2. Break it up. Don’t be afraid of paragraphs, but try to keep them small. One-sentence paragraphs are okay. Phrases and fragments within a paragraph are fine, too. If your paragraph is more than three sentences long, you should probably create a new paragraph or delete a sentence. Most important — stick to one idea per paragraph. If you try to do too much, you’ll lose the reader.
3. Bullets are your friend. In the example below, which format is clearer and easier to read?

Any time you see a list within a paragraph, turn it into a bulleted list. Remember to capitalize the first letter of each list item to add that extra ‘oomf’!

There’s more to creating well-synthesized and engaging online content, but these three tips will go a long way. Chunk your content to highlight important information, improve user experience, and keep your readership.

Did you find this article helpful? Follow the The Exchange collection for more useful, step-by-step information on how to better curate, synthesize, and share knowledge.

Cut the Fat. Chunk Your Web Content. was originally published in The Exchange on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the NYT article, “Why Barnes & Noble is Good for Amazon”, David Carr touches on the symbiotic relationship between the last standing mega bookstore and the online behemoth. He proposes that if B&N were to go out of business Amazon would see a drop in sales as the “reduced opportunity to browse the physical artifact [results] in less online buying”.

What if we took it a bit further and just got the two companies hitched?

Let’s skip past the awkwardness of the actual wedding ceremony (Which Big Five publisher would officiate? Who would be on the guest list - indie booksellers and used bookstores, best-selling authors mingled with self-published authors? yeesh. nightmare. gag.)…

Instead imagine a world where you go to a B&N either for a quiet moment in the stacks or in the cafe sipping a coffee while perusing a novel. Maybe you go for a book signing, a book club meeting, or your mom dropped you and siblings off so she can go shopping in peace.

During this time you discover an author or book that’s not on a Top 100 bestseller list, you engage in a heated discussion on whether Game of Thrones is as epic as the Lord of the Rings with some random stranger/future friend in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy aisle, and you run your fingers over the binding of the blank journals on display, testing weights and paper textures before choosing the absolute perfect one to hold your inspiration and creativity.

Then when you're finally ready to checkout you have the option of purchasing the actual book or opting for the ebook version. If you walked or rode your bike and don't feel like carrying your purchase home, you could have them mailed to your home instead.

Really it'd be beautiful. It’d be a relief. You can enjoy the instant gratification and clutter free experience of the eBook without feeling like you're burning down a bookstore every time click “Buy now with 1-click” AND you can still have a physical place to discover books, thumb through pages, and be a part of a community that loves to read as much as you do.

There’s probably a bunch of reasons why this is a terrible idea, but when I think of this fantasy book mecca all I see is a win-win scenario.

My freshman year of college he came to campus and everyone was crazy excited. Still trying to fit in, I bought one of his books and faked enthusiasm for his talk. After hearing about his dad’s affinity for eating rotten fruit, I had to admit the man was pretty funny. Certainly enough to continue my sheep imitation and stand in the very, very long line to get my brand new, never opened copy of Naked signed.

Forty-five minutes later, Sedaris was asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up and what my last name was. As he doodled a creepy pumpkin in my book, he chanted, “Jay-ya-raa-jun. Doc-tor Jaya-ra-jun. Dr. Jayarajan I have a banana stuck up my ass.” Then he shut my book and handed it back to me with, “Yup. I see it. I think you'll make a great doctor.”

I may not have ended up a doctor, but I definitely still have a favorite author.

After a brief love affair with all things Sedaris in my early 20's, I kind of forgot about him. A few weeks ago I caught his interview on The Daily Show and was reminded of his existence.

I have a large stack of New Yorker magazines that I've been meaning to read (Read: probably will never read), and after his interview I looked through all their table of contents till I found an article by Sedaris, “Company Man”.

Not too much had changed. Sure he was older and writing about middle-aged shenanigans, which as he'd probably agree, aren't nearly as thrilling as childhood or early twenties shenanigans. Still, his bemused, nasally voice carried me pleasantly through everything that’s wonderful about being a middle-aged married man with a house that has guest rooms.

Then, in the last few column inches he let’s it drop matter-of-factly that the way Hugh, his partner, speaks of his deceased father in voices “still brittle and reverential, full of loss and longing” reminds him of the way he and his sisters used to talk of his mother now deceased for 22 years. Before he ends his story, he pauses mid-tidying of the guest bedroom his sisters used during their visit and takes a moment to hug the sheets to his chest before he does the laundry. All of this is like a heavy punch to the gut.

I'd forgotten that as much as Sedaris has made me laugh, he’s equally made me cry. I might not have found much in common with him before these short inches, and I haven't yet had to experience the kinds of loss he describes, but I know it’s coming. Probably sooner than I’d like.

So unexpectedly, I found myself sitting next to Sedaris on that bed imagining the sheets I will soon hug and experiencing the flashbacks to childhood and family that he likely remembered in those few moments. Long after he moved on to the finish his chores, I still sat with all the nostalgia.

Experiencing Sedaris was originally published in I. M. H. O. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now, this isn’t innovation in the buzz word-y, conference-speak sense. It’s innovation where if you give Gomez-Marquez an ink cartridge, he’ll turn it into a no-prick vaccine delivery machine, or if he picks up a bunch of coffee filters at the grocery store, some of those might become TB drug compliance urine test strips.

Having grown up in Honduras and coming from a family of medical professionals, Gomez-Marquez knows firsthand the limitations health workers face in low-income developing countries. Unlike in developed countries, if an essential part of a medical device breaks, there’s no repair person coming to fix it. In part because of his background, Gomez-Marquez adheres to the Do-it-Yourself (DIY) philosophy and recognizes that health workers in resource-constrained settings around the world are capable doing some of the best DIY work. In order to foster this behavior, he and his team at Little Devices have recently released a product called MediKit, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their own medical technologies.

I had the pleasure of getting an in-depth look at the type of work he does when I attended his micro-lab session at the SwitchPoint conference hosted by IntraHealth in North Carolina. During this short hour and a half workshop, Gomez-Marquez provided us with a list of ingredients: a foot pump, two nebulizers, tubes, a splitter, scissors, and duct tape and told us to create a drug delivery device that would treat not just one, but two patients, suffering from an asthma attack. Before setting us loose, he gave us instructions to not only build the device, but to also create a language for replication.

Of course, once we started playing with the pieces, we completely ignored the second part of the instructions.

It was so exciting to solve the puzzle. We got really into the experience of designing something useful and something that saves lives. But when it came to present our final devices and show off our ingenuity, we quickly realized how important the abandoned second part of the instructions were.

Gomez-Marquez didn’t have each team show off how well their inventions worked. Instead, he asked teams to describe how other teams put the device together. When someone began a description along the lines of “attach one end of the tube to the foot pump”, he’d stop them and ask questions like, “what if your audience doesn’t recognize the word ‘tube’ or ‘foot pump’?”, thereby nudging us closer and closer to the revelation that while we had created these life saving devices using nothing but a $7 foot pump, none of our devices had been designed for easy reproduction.

Gomez-Marquez taught us that it’s not enough to hack the device, but you also need to “hack” the language as well. Device reproduction and design dissemination needs to be able to transcend language, literacy, and cultural barriers. In this case, there was a simple solution — color code the connections between parts with different colored duct tape. So, say you connect the nebulizer to one end of the tube with purple tape and the other end of the tube to the foot pump with red tape, someone who’s outside of the process would look at the device and know to connect purple with purple and red with red. He/she wouldn’t have to know the English words for tube and foot pump.

Really, then, it all comes back to knowledge management. You know how to make a life saving device and you want other people to know how to make a life saving device — use colored duct tape. Easy and simple to understand and adopt. This is knowledge management at its best. This is knowledge management when it works.

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This post was originally published on K4Health.org on May 7, 2013.

What does duct tape have to do with health? was originally published in Think. Write. React. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Normally, I don’t like talking to stylists. We rarely have anything in common and an hour of small talk is exhausting. But this day was was different. I got lucky and was paired with a Hair Designer named Janet Stephens, who it turns out is also a part-time hairdressing archaeologist.

Her story of how she became an authority on ancient roman hairdressing was absolutely fascinating. One day she was in the Walters Art Museum waiting for her daughter’s music lesson to end. The museum curators must’ve been doing some rearranging or cleaning, and had brought the busts from the Roman Empire exhibit down from the high shelves and had exhibited them as standing displays in the center of the room. In this presentation a 360 deg view of the heads was possible, and Janet found herself examining the intricate hairstyles carved into the back of the busts’ heads.

Intrigued by the varied designs, she went home and tried to recreate them on manikins. But she couldn’t quite get them right using modern hair dressing tools. Still she wasn’t discouraged, and continued researching the topic, going as far as connecting with experts in the field of roman archaeology, and translating ancient Latin texts herself. In one text, she translated a line that used the Latin word for “sow” in the context of hair dressing. The academic community had interpreted this word as “to sow” in the figurative sense. However, since she wasn’t researching from the perspective of an academic, she took its meaning in the literal sense and found herself back at the manikin, literally sowing braids of hair into intricate designs using needle and thread. In this method, she was finally able to recreate ancient Roman hairstyles.

It turns out her research was groundbreaking. Before her discoveries not much research had been done on Roman hairstyles and there wasn’t much documentation available. The prevailing thought had been that Roman hairdressers had depended on wigs. Since the ancient art of wig making has been mostly lost to human memory, stylists had been attempting to create these hairstyles using modern tools and never quite getting the right look.

Anyways, she now has a series of Youtube videos that teaches people how to recreate ancient Roman hairstyles, and her findings have been published in a few academic journals, including the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

Watch one of her instructional videos below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs9fLwm-9-k]

Hairdresser by day; Archaeologist by night was originally published in Think. Write. React. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every year Fall shows up. Yes it’s a season. It’d be weird if it didn’t. Probably catastrophic even. But every year the season’s arrival also marks the flu season’s arrival. But unlike Fall, who actually has quite a few redeeming qualities like boots, scarves, dresses and leggings, the end of 110 deg temperatures, the Flu sticks around like a bad rash through winter and bumps up against spring.

Knock on wood. I rarely get the flu. I might have a bad cold that convinces everyone that I’m spraying death germs around, but never anything so severe that it can be described as the flu. But what I do get every year is a bad case of the guilt trip. I never line up and get a vaccine shot into my arm. Ever. I just don’t want to.

I think one year a coworker physically dragged me from my desk, marched me down the hall and sat me down in front of a lady with a syringe and I still bitched and moaned and whined during and after until people wanted to kill me. I used to rant and rave about how we might not even be getting vaccinated against the right viruses, or how it doesn’t matter if I get it, everyone else did and so by default I’m safe by herd immunity. I think I’ve even managed to convince other people not to get vaccinated. I’m a really horrible person.

The thing is though, I know better. I went to public health school. I know why flu vaccines matter. I know the math behind predicting epidemics. I even know how to put it on a map with fuzzy colored blobs. There is just no logical, rational reason why I don’t get the vaccine.

I really do hope the rest of the world is more responsible than me. While news outlets were slow to pick up on the flu trend, and the CDC merely set the risk levels at “moderately severe”, Google trends track data on the search inquires related to the flu that predicts the number of doctor visits for flu related symptoms could exceed those during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009.

Individuals most at risk of infection include children under age 5, adults over the age of 65, and pregnant women. If you can’t find any vaccine near you, at the very least be prepared by stocking up on some Tamiflu.

I’m lazy, but I really hope you’re not was originally published in Think. Write. React. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.