Thanks a lot for the invitation.
It's definitely not my time of the day so excuse me if I'm a little bit…
Right, next the track.
I'm always really happy to speak in front of people
who are dealing with IT and stuff because I'm so much not an IT person.
You saw that I wasn't even able to start my presentation alone.
I'm from CADUS.
CADUS is a humanitarian NGO that was founded 3 years ago in Berlin.
It was founded out of a kind of subculture that is strongly related to the CCC, but
to the musical and festival subculture as well.
What I want to talk about today is our crisis response makerspace in Berlin.
Holger (Levsen) invited me after we saw each other again at Datengarten in Berlin
and he asked if I can make the presentation in english as well.
My english is shit, so please excuse me if I have to search some words
from time to time.
Do you have an idea what this is?
It's a huge truck, it's a medical sign on it, so this is a kind of mobile hospital.
Mobile hospital which you can use if other hospitals are broken down
or if there are no hospitals.
Do you have an idea how much such an hospital would cost you
to buy?
3 millions, 2 millions, 3 millions, 4 millions, hum…
This is a picture of a destroyed hospital in Syria.
You all see a lot of pictures on the TV, stuff like that.
Can you relate these 3 to 4 millions mobile hospitals
to these destroyed hospitals.
Do you normally see in the media that if a hospital is destroyed
then this fancy stuff is deployed to there?
Do you have an idea why?
It's "fucking expensive"?
Something more?
"Who's gonna pay for it?"
"Is help wanted?"
More?
It is a question of safety from time to time.
But on top you have to imagine Syria, war country, dust, heat,
no supply chain, nothing like that, so bringing there
a 4 million mobile hospital might end in two weeks of working and after that
nothing is working anymore because you don't have the technicians
who can repair this kind of stuff for example.
Next example, I'm sure you know.
What it is is a pretty fancy fire truck.
You have them in Germany in all the bigger villages and
all the cities, stuff like that.
If you take a look inside this firetruck,
you see plenty of fancy stuff.
I love this stuff, there is stuff to put out fire, there's stuff to lift things
with hydrolics.
There is normal stuff like shovels and stuff like that.
But if you relate this to pictures in disaster areas,
this is from Haiti, then you see that you have plenty of people
but no equipment at all.
All's pretty clear because normally, after a disaster,
people from all over the world come as fast as possible to the disaster area
the so-called "urban search and rescue teams".
They're coming by plane, so all the fancy stuff that we have
in our societies stays here,
and a few people that typically ???
go to the disaster areas to help the poor people.
You understand this was cynical.
And there's a third example. Have you ever seen what this is?
This is a tourniquet.
A tourniquet is one meter of nylon strap and a little bit of plastic.
A tourniquet is the best way to stop severe bleeding immediately.
We know this since the second world war.
At least it's twenty years it's totally clear and
it's validated, this is the best way to stop severe bleeding.
Spoiler, you won't see this in the media if you see like people in Syria getting hurt
like losing legs after explosions and stuff like that.
Do you have an idea how expensive is such a thing?
One meter of nylon, a little piece of plastic?
Not so expensive, but it goes in that direction:
55 dollars for one of these.
55 dollars for fucking one meter of nylon strap.
And, I don't know, less than 10g of plastic.
The last example, I don't know if you have a pet.
I had a dog, if I would like to, I could add a GPS to my dog
and this GPS would say when my dog is sleeping, where my dog is,
where I can find my dog if it's gone, stuff like that.
But again if you went Haiti directly after the earthquake,
people search for other people in collapsed building
with their bare hands.
So, obviously, we have a lot of technical solutions for everything.
I can look for my fucking dog in Hamburg where it is via my app on my iPhone
but on the other hand, in a disaster area it's not even possible to search for
people who are buried in collapsed buildings.
There are several reasons for that.
One reason: humanitarian work, humanitarian aid is a market.
This is a little bit perverted but it is a market.
It's always a question.
It's not like "Who wants to aid?" but "Who pays for the help?".
"Who gets his share out of the ??? ?"
And you can imagine we have, I don't know, every two or three years a major earthquake
so the market, if you compare it to another business market, is pretty small.
Who cares for the 1000, 2000, 3000 people who die in the earthquake every 3 years?
The next thing: access to the market.
Is it possible to bring things to Syria?
Why should I develop, as a businessman in capitalism,
why should I develop something if I can't reach my market easily?
And the third thing: who are the players on the market.
In humanitarian aid, most players are NGOs.
NGOs are not really interested in developing new things because
if I have an NGO, a classical NGO, then I like the things how they are.
If there is a disaster, I send my people, I make some nice pictures for the media
and I get a little of donations.
I'm not interested in changing things.
If I would like building capacity and local communities
so much that they don't need me anymore after disasters,
then there's no need for my nice wide NGO anymore.
So, these three things together make the situation where you have
a lot of solutions in our communities and in our societies
but you have no possibility to bring this to disaster aid.
We started in 2014 in northern Syria more or less by accident.
We were asked if we could come with a political delegation and make
an overview of the medical infrastructure.
And ever since we were stuck in this region
because we saw no NGOs working there,
because the states were not really willing to pay money for that,
because the northern, north-east Syria is ruled by some Kurdish militias
and these Kurdish militias are too lefty to get money from states,
let's say it this way.
So we saw the situation there and we still had 4-wheel driven truck
here in Germany and we said
"This would be great if we just built out of this truck a mobile hospital."
We had no idea how to do this,
we were really a little bit naive in these times.
We said just like
"It's a nice truck, there's a lot of space in that truck, so let's build it."
"We have an idea, we have a fantasy. We will go with this truck to northern Syria
then we will give it to a local NGO and then they have a mobile hospital
to follow the front lines in their fight against the so-called islamic state."
And one year and a half, two years later, we really were in nothern Iraq,
not northern Syria so far, but in northern Iraq with our mobile hospital.
And it was pretty hard to cross a border to Syria so we had to stay in northern Iraq
So we asked to WHO, the World Health Organisation,
"What can we do right now? We are here, we have a mobile hospital.
Do you see any need for us?"
And they said
"Yeah, guys, if you'd like to, then we would like to send you to Mossoul."
I don't know if you saw in the media, last year,
the battle of Mossoul was one of the most bloody and the most shitty battle
that we had in the past 20, 30 years, I think.
It was a lot civilian casualties and we said
"Ok, let's try. We built this mobile hospital, let's see if it's working."
We were able to work, like, 1.5km behind the frontline with the islamic state
and we were really wondering, we were really surprised, because we saw that
nobody else was working there, because they just didn't have the equipment for that
??? easier to buy a mobile hospital for 3-4 million dollars
nobody had that, and other things were not available on the market
so we were the only ones working there
Over the few months that we worked directly at the front line,
we treated several thousands people with this.
This was actually the moment when the crisis response makerspace was born.
So it was not planned that build up this makerspace, it was just like
we had two workshops in Berlin where we fixed the truck
where we renovated the truck and stuff like that.
After we went to Iraq, we just thought
"This was a pretty good idea and it worked out pretty well."
We were sure there were more problems that had to be solved in humanitarian crisis.
Actually, this first mobile hospital went over the border to Syria one week ago
so it is on ??? should have gone too.
What we're doing at the moment.
We have some lessons learned from this first mobile hospital and
we're developing a second mobile hospital
because the first one was based on old trucks that we could get really cheap
in Germany, but our idea was always
we would like to create opensource blueprints for local NGOs,
so that they can copy our solution that we developed.
With these german trucks, it's not really easy, we can't to an NGO in the Middle East
and say "Look, this is how we build it"
because they can't get the hand on these german trucks