Marc Silver

If someone were to tell you their job was a burden, you might feel sorry for that person.

So when Consolata Agunga told me, "I feel good because I have the burden of serving my people," I was puzzled.

How can a burden make you feel good?

You can't help but note that of the six winners of the 2018 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, five are women.

"I'm the odd man out," jokes Harish Hande, an awardee for his SELCO Foundation, which works to provide solar power systems at low cost to the poor in India.

From time to time, readers ask us, "How did your blog get its name?"

It's a longish story (here is the full explanation). In a nutshell, goats are a useful animal in the lower-income countries we cover. They can contribute to the income and the nutrition of a family.

We've also learned from talking to goat specialists that goats are curious and independent animals — true to the spirit of our blog, if we might humblebrag.

In late January, NPR global health correspondent Jason Beaubien went to the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh for a series of radio and web reports. It was the week that a plan to send the refugees back to Myanmar was supposed to start. But that program was put on hold because of logistics.

We interviewed Beaubien about his trip.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Liberian elbow bump.

When Ebola overtook the West African country in 2014, many people were afraid to shake hands and embrace in the customary way. That's understandable, because Ebola is spread by the exchange of bodily fluids during body-to-body contact.

So Liberians came up with a less touchy-feely greeting. They bumped elbows.

Here's a fun piece of trivia you might not know: January 4 is National Trivia Day.

Now technically trivia is defined as "matters or things that are very unimportant."

We here at Goats and Soda wanted to mark the occasion with a quiz on some of the facts in our recent stories. Now we can't promise that all the facts are truly trivial ... but they're definitely interesting. See how much you know about a viral YouTube video from Kenya, a new investigation into extreme poverty in the U.S. and much more.

For more details on the answers, check out these stories:

By looking at the number of page views for our stories from 2017, we came up with our most popular stories of the year.

But there are other ways to measure success.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published in 2015 and has been updated.

With a string of devastating natural disasters and record numbers of refugees, 2017 has been a cruel year.

So it's a year when, more than ever, we need World Kindness Day.

The November 13 holiday was made up in 1998. So it doesn't have deep roots in human society.

According to the World Bank, if you're living on $1.90 a day or less, you're living in extreme poverty.

The 767 million people in that category have $1.90 a day or less in purchasing power to fulfill their daily needs.

Most of that money goes for food – only it may not be enough to purchase nutritious food or to stave off hunger. Hundreds of millions of the extreme poor are malnourished.

Their housing may be of low quality. And they may not have enough money for school fees (primary education isn't always free) or health-care expenses.

Oct. 11 is the "International Day of the Girl" – proclaimed by the U.N. as a time to look at the challenges girls face and to promote their "empowerment" and human rights.

What kind of year has it been for girls? We looked at the stories we've done over the past year, and the headlines alone captured both the tragedies and the triumphs. In many ways a horrible year for girls. But even at the bleakest moments, there are stories of hope and triumph.

Here is a sampling of our stories about the world's girls:

The Sprague Fire that's burning in Glacier National Park reached the historic Sperry Chalet hotel building and "rapidly engulfed" it, according to the website for this historic building.

"We are saddened to inform you that Sperry Chalet has been lost," the website now reads.

Sperry Chalet.

I hadn't thought about it for years.

Back in 2000, my family spent the night, and all the memories – the miserable ones and the fantastic ones – came rushing back.

Before "Goats and Soda" was born, I wrote a story for our sister blog, "The Salt" about the world's largest tree fruit. The jackfruit can grow as big as 100 pounds. It's a good source of protein, potassium, vitamin B and fiber. Plus: It's easy to grow in tropical climes. There was even a symposium devoted to revving up production and marketing. So how's that going?

I knew it was time to do a follow-up story on jackfruit when I went shopping in Trader Joe's and saw 20-ounce cans of "Trader Joe's Green Jackfruit In Brine." For only $1.99!

If you're a goat, you sure don't want to catch "goat plague."

The same goes for sheep along with wild animals that are at risk, like antelope and camels.

The proper name for the virus is "peste des petits ruminants" and it is indeed a pestilence. Symptoms include "a high fever, listlessness, eye and nose discharges," says Adegbola Adesogan, professor and director of Feed the Future Livestock Systems Innovation Lab at the University of Florida.

And that's just the beginning.

Shhh, we just can't talk about that.

Omigosh: We. Just. Don't. Do. That.

If you haven't guessed, we're talking about taboos.

Taboos are part of every culture, every family, every circle of friends.

We're planning to explore taboos in an upcoming series of stories. We'd like to hear from our audience about taboos they've encountered in the world of global health and development.

So tell us: What global taboos should we consider? Share your ideas in the tool below.

Would you rather raise your kids in Europe or Africa?

That's the question that Carl Manlan faced. Carl, who's from the Ivory Coast, and his wife, Lelani, who's from South Africa, started their family in Geneva, Switzerland, where they were working at the time. They have two children, a daughter named Claire, born in May 2012, and a son named Liam, born in September 2014.

Geneva is a great place to raise kids, Carl says. "Lots of opportunities to stimulate kids outside of the home, playgrounds for kids. You don't really find that in most cities in Africa."

Do trees grow from seeds that goats eat and later expel?

That is a question that has long bedeviled ecologists.

Let's say it's a small seed. The goat will swallow it, poop it out and a tree could sprout.

But what if it's a sizable seed? It probably wouldn't make it through the goat's digestive tract intact. And so ... no tree.

Refugees make headlines. Internally displaced people don't.

Maybe their plight eludes the limelight because, unlike refugees, they don't cross international borders ... or seek to enter the United States or Western Europe, where people debate how many of them to let in ... or undertake harrowing voyages across the Mediterranean.

And maybe it's because of their official label. "Internally displaced persons" (also known as IDPs) sounds vague and a bit confusing, as if they were lost inside themselves.

Some schoolkids might be happy if their school were knocked down.

Not in Nairobi.

On May 15, a group of primary school students sat at desks in the center of a main road to block traffic. Along with their parents, they were protesting the demolition of their school, the Kenyatta Golf Course Academy, over the weekend.

"Water was the biggest thing," says journalist Tim McDonnell of the scene at the refugee settlement of Palorinya in northern Uganda. Since December, 146,000 South Sudanese have crossed the border, fleeing the violence of the civil war. And without enough water to drink, they would quite literally die.

With his skill as a psychiatrist, Dr. Hussam Jefee-Bahloul is reaching out to the troubled people of his Syrian homeland, offering guidance for health workers who work with mental health issues in a population traumatized by war.

And with his love of words, he tries to capture his longing for his homeland in poetry.

In truth, there is no way to come with a 100 percent accurate count of all the health workers who have died since the conflict in Syria that began six years ago this month.

That's because it takes a lot of checking to verify a death — Physicians for Human Rights, for example, wants to know the victim's name, job, the location and date of death and the cause of death. And they want three sources who can back up the account.

On Wednesday morning, a Red Cross staffer in Afghanistan pushed his vehicle's panic button.

Three Red Cross vehicles were heading to meet up with a convoy of trucks carrying "winter feed" — food for livestock — in the remote northern province of Jowzjan in Afghanistan. The plan was for the Red Cross staff to help distribute the 1,000 tons of feed, which is critical for farmers. In the winter, there's nowhere for their animals to graze.

It is a very attractive truffle.

It's made of the usual ingredients — cocoa butter, sugar, chocolate — with a not-so-typical addition. Thirty grams of dried tomatoes from Nigeria.

And it was served at the World Economic Forum last week in Davos, Switzerland, with a very specific goal in mind: "to raise awareness on food waste and hunger," as stated in a press release.

That's a big job for a bonbon — and it's the reason for the tomatoes.

When Kennedy Odede was a kid, he lived on the streets of a slum in Kenya.

He'd grown up in tough circumstances. His stepfather was violent. There wasn't enough food to go around. He wasn't sent to school. A friend convinced him he'd do better out on his own. He'd have his freedom, he'd be able to find his own food.

So when he was around 10, Kennedy left home. His new world was a world of violence. He was caught up in gang fights. He remembers being stabbed in the arm: "I still have the scar," he says.

When people see our blog for the first time, they usually say something like this: How on earth did you get that name? Goats and Soda?!?