Such moments represent

I stumbled across the kind of scene that can momentarily catch you off guard — four teenage girls playing trumpets and trombones in a dirt yard adjacent to a half-built church on a hill, on the edge of a town called Beni. There was something haunting about that sound in that place. Storm clouds rolled in, as they did most afternoons, and the air became heavy. It seemed to keep the sharp metallic notes from floating too far away. I knew the scene had no direct link to the Ebola story I was reporting, but I shot it anyway, trying not to disturb the girls. I wasn’t sure the image would be published, but I felt the moment was still important. These girls wanted to be better musicians and were rehearsing to improve. It's easy to get caught up in the hype and drama surrounding conflict or a catastrophic epidemic, but such moments represent what's happening on the ground as much as any scene more obviously related to the Ebola narrative. It’s a quiet reflection of daily life amid an unfolding tragedy.

Photographer Finbarr O'Reilly, @finbarroreilly, commenting on his photo Democratic Republic of Congo in The Year In Pictures, New York Times, 15 December 2019

TEDx Tysons

My talk about the UN Live Museum for Humanity at TEDxTysons.

The old system is dead

“We are a new generation of artists, makers, supporters, and consumers who believe that the old system through which we exchanged content and money is dead. Not dying: dead.”

— Amanda Palmer, introduction to Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free 

Humility was expensive

“Ford thought of itself as the sort of foundation whose staff did not dictate what its grantees should do but sought out grantees with ideas and methods of their own: that was the social-justice way. But, ironically, this meant that it required far more staff than it would if it came up with its own ideas and hired people to execute them. Coming up with ideas to be executed was the sort of thing that could be done in a meeting at headquarters; but finding small, local N.G.O.s and community leaders and artists and researchers to fund in dozens of countries around the world required offices in those countries, with program staff and administrative staff and maintenance staff and gardeners and drivers, plus money for travel and hosting meetings and all the rest of it. […] Humility was expensive.”

— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016