Team:TU Darmstadt/Project/PnP/TMS
Technomoral-Scenario
First TMS
“Point of View”
- 18th October, 2017: Since on year the first prototype of a prosthesis truck was driving through Sierra Leone. It is the pilot project to see how the trucks are working. Medics could work for 3 months with the truck in Sierra Leone as a welfare service and then report their experiences. Due to the prestige of the project many young doctors want to get the job. They are ambitious but mostly have no deep knowledge about the country. Locals are needed to support them.
Jonathan
Jonathan was driving in his jeep back to town. His mind circled around the last few hours in the village. Today was the first day he saw the prosthesis truck. As a member of the local administration he had to be there to help the team of Amputees Association to communicate with the locals. Also he had to calm down the villagers, because some of them were frightened by this new technology. Many of them were superstitious and didn’t know anything about recent technological advances. So it took Jonathan a lot of persuading to get the older amputees to take their prosthesis. He did a good job and every amputee got his plastic prosthesis. But he wasn’t happy at all. He had examined the prostheses while explaining them to the people. And he soon realized that those prostheses weren’t able to replace the missing extremities. They might help a little bit, but not enough. Most of the amputees thought they would get a perfect prosthesis and were rather disappointed after they had received inferior replacement. He saw the workers, the big truck and this amazing 3D printer. And all this for some cheap, low-quality prosthesis? In his opinion there could have been done a lot more useful with the money, like the construction of a water supply or a school. In order to have a good life the people needed support to help themselves. Sierra Leone was a developing region. But for the people in the western countries the celebration of new inventions and charity balls geared towards media were more important than the actual outcome or the benefit for the people. Jonathan was glad for every help and knew that some people in richer countries really wanted to help. But the way the help finally was often not as good as it could be. With all the items or food they threw at our country they just induced laziness in the people. If they wouldn’t get things for free they would work better and more together and thus increase the standard of living. He knew that this wasthe hard way but he had seen what happened before. People received their gifts and after they were used up the whole situation was the same as before. The prosthesis trucks won’t change the country, he was sure.
Michael
Michael lay on the bed of his hotel room in Freetown watching TV. He was exhausted but very satisfied, because today was his last day of work in Nigeria. Tomorrow he would fly back to England and start his new job in a hospital. The job in the prosthesis truck really wearied him down. He had to drive to different villages in the whole country. This was not only stressful but also dangerous, since the people in some towns got aggressive and the truck team needed the help of their armed bodyguards. “Stupid idiots! We helped them and they wanted to kill us.” But that didn’t matter anymore. Soon he would be on conferences in Europe and telling people what a wonderful feeling it was to help others and do something good for the world.
Bashiri
In his long life Bashiri had seen a lot of things, including the civil war and the Ebola outbreak. But this strange truck was something different. He went there to get a new prosthesis for his missing right leg. After a medic went over his body with some kind of a light, the medic went back inside the truck. After a couple of minutes he returned with a leg made out of plastic. It looked much better than the wooden stick Bashiri had till now. They removed the peg leg and attached the prosthesis to his body. After walking a few steps he soon realized that the prosthesis wasn’t such a big advantage as it looked. It fitted nicely and looked better than his old one, but the difference during walking wasn’t that big. So Bashiri returned back to work and soon had his mind on other, more important things.