Siobhan McDonough, Writer
It’s been a while. As I’m sure I’ve said before, when I started this blog I didn’t have a very heavy workload. And now I have work. But for the next week (?) I have less so I’ll be trying to catch up on the last few months. Many things have happened. Let me begin…
Hello World, Sorry I’ve been failing miserably at these once-a-month updates. I have been thwarted by Real Life, including, but not limited to: moving house, interviewing surveyors, seeing baby elephants, and hanging out on farms (pictured). Right now I am thrilled to be in a room with “tea making facilities”, my new favourite phrase. I…
A year ago, I turned in my senior thesis. Today, I attended a farmer training. I was on farms a couple weeks ago, and I’ll be on farms a couple weeks from now, in and out of farms through the rest of the year. A year ago, I was in college world. Now, I’m in…
Sorry for the lack of posts last week. This week I’m planning to do two, including something more substantial later on. In the meantime, please enjoy these pictures of goats from a trip I took to some farms last week.
On Reddit, there’s something called “low-effort content”, which is exactly what it sounds like. Example: you’re on Hearthstone Reddit and instead of making a detailed and hilarious post using neural networks, you post a screenshot of your game and add a snarky comment to it. “Spiders I Have Known” is low-effort content. Zambia is a…
Rich people in rich countries cannot avoid caring about domestic poverty. In my home country, the United States, people probably don’t care enough about domestic poverty (if we did, millions of people wouldn’t still be living under the poverty line). But most Americans do care (or feel they should care) about domestic poverty. In the…
If you were thinking about getting me some ginger tea for my birthday (happy birthday to me!) but suddenly realized you can’t mail it to Zambia, donate that $5 to one of Givewell’s top charities.* This relates to the topic of this post, so if that seems intriguing, read on. I’ll put a disclaimer that…
I am the proud owner of a beautiful 2002 Nissan March. How did I get here? Why did it take a month and a half? To put this in perspective, if I were a hamster, I could’ve had three litters of baby hamsters in this time period. Well. Buying a car in Zambia is complicated…
I hope these help give a better sense to the broad scope of my life here. Will devote more time to some in later posts. 1. No streetlights. When I learned to drive in the US, I spent my first year and a half driving around without headlights on because I figured I had clicked…
Welcome to my blog! I am Siobhan, I just graduated university, I work at an international development nonprofit based out of Zambia. It was not my New Year’s resolution to start a blog. This has been a long time in the coming—ever since I moved to Zambia and Let’s Go deleted my Morocco travel blog….