Médecins Sans Frontières Planning makes the mission When MSF (Doctors Without Borders) research working in a new location, they take the time to thoroughly vet the mission and define clear goals. They pull in representatives from those locations, ask them for a picture of how things are, and listen. They learn the lifestyle They learn the social dynamics They learn the political structures MSF shows up in crisis situations and pulls out when the crisis has resolved.

I’ve heard about Taiwanese Puppetry from my mom as po-te-hi (boh-deh-hee), “cloth bag opera”, a reference to glove puppetry starting with improvised cloth bags. In the early 1970s, the broadcast puppet series “Shi Yan-wen: The Scholar Swordsman” stole the heart of everyone in Taiwan. She remembers it was a big deal - big enough to the point that many of the songs became well-known karaoke pieces in Taiwan. She lamented that it’s now a dead art, lost to the annals of history.

A crisis summons heroes. We see it in stories, folklore, and mythology. Mild-mannered journalist Clark Kent transforming into Superman. Hua Mulan enlisting in place of her father. Savitri bargaining with death itself. We see it in organizations. Nurses stretching themselves to meet unsafe staffing ratios. Operations Engineers constantly resolving incidents in unpatched, unstable infrastructure. Essential workers enforcing mask and vaccine mandates. These are employees who take on new roles when the system can no longer handle a crisis - either too new, too large, or, worst of all - designed intentionally with a hero in mind.