Back to the grind

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Addis Ababa listening to soft jazz play over the speakers and watching Kenyan tourists splash each other in the pool, I can’t help but reflect on the whirlwind that has been the last few months.

I have just returned from 3 weeks on vacation that opened a highly enjoyable week in Scotland and England visiting with family, sampling scotch, dodging raindrops, and taking in the sights.  Following this brief stop, I landed in Toronto on Christmas eve to spend Christmas and New Years reconnecting with family and friends.  I haven’t ever been home for the holidays under such transient circumstances,  and I found it made the time spent with the people I care about all the more meaningful and enjoyable, as contrived as that sounds.  I had some incredible conversations, ate some fantastic meals and shared more than a belly-full of laughs with the important people in my life.  As I get older I find myself valuing these sorts of interactions more and more, especially when they are so often confined to the brief windows of time while I am home.  Now, I`m battling jet lag while waiting for my flight back up to Bahir Dar this afternoon and trying to take it easy this weekend in anticipation of a stressful first week back at work starting Monday.

The Professional

The autumn ended with a crash-bang and a crunch.  The run up to Christmas saw an upsurge in workload as I tried to wind up all of the activities I’m responsible for to keep things running smoothly while I was gone over the break.  Fieldwork had not resumed as of my departure and so work efforts were mostly focussed on planning for next season and hammering out calendars, experiments, and fieldwork plans.

Our program for next year is going to involve 3 major streams:

1. Agronomy field and lab research

This is the stream I am going to be working to design and coordinate.  We want to continue doing field research with farmers to run large scale field tests of proven agricultural best practises.  These field experiments will be on the scale of 100,000+ farmers in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia, and we will be continuing to promote row planting as a means of increasing crop yields and improving farmer food security.  We want to look at what methods of row planting farmers are most willing to adopt, as well as which have the largest impact on crop yields at the end of the season.

The lab research component will involve replicating all of the treatments we are field testing under highly controlled lab conditions.  By comparing field and lab results, we will be able to improve our understanding of the differences in results/impact we can expect when scaling up from lab trials to farmer field trials.  Running lab trials concurrent with field trials also allows us to experiment with planting methods and management techniques that hold promise but are not as widely accepted in the literature or have not been tested before.  We would never want to test these methods in the field with farmers without first trialling them at the lab stage, so as not to expose any farmers to undue risk in participating in our trials.  Farmers First, remember?  Anyway, I spent the weeks running up to Christmas hammering out the different treatments and experiments we want to trial and in the coming weeks I will be digging deeper in the nitty gritty of experimental design. 

How many trials should we be running for each treatment? How big should our lab trial plots be? What should the budget look like for these trials?  Is it best to use a randomized control block design or a split-plot design to get at the answers we are looking for? How many farmers should be in each treatment group?

Questions like these will all need to be answered before we move on to the next stage which will be working to adjust government agricultural training modules to train farmers on the techniques we want to test in the field.

2. Agricultural demo plots and farmer training/logistics

Another staff member who also happens to be my roommate and general partner in crime is going to be handling this stream.  We want to set up model teff plots at agricultural training centres across the region to display row planting and other best management practises so that farmers can observe for themselves the benefits of these techniques.  This stream will also involve coordination of new training development and roll-out to farmers on an incredibly large scale, which will be no mean feat. There will understandably be significant overlap between my stream (experimental design/agronomy) and the training development aspect of this stream.

3. Marketing

This stream is being headed by the only other lovely and talented Canadian working for the organization in Ethiopia.  This is also a new development area for the organization, as we have not done much  marketing/promotion work in the past.  The idea is that disseminating information on best practises in the form of marketing materials (training pamphlets, planting sheets outlining step-by-step best practises, billboards, agriculture hotlines) holds huge potential for making these practises more widespread.  Again, this stream will need to overlap with the others to ensure the content of materials and messaging is consistent across all platforms but it holds great promise for increasing adoption of best practises.

That in a nutshell is going to be my next few months.  I’m excited but anticipate it being quite a lot of work, especially once we get into training development and roll-out stage with farmers.  We’re starting to coordinate things months early which should definitely set us off on the right foot but as with most things here, progress can be frustratingly slow at times.

Oh!  The other thing we are hoping to roll out in the next few weeks is a post-harvest survey where we speak to farmers about how much they harvested, despite our not being in the field to observe it directly.  There are definitely statistical issues with the accuracy of self-reported data but we are working hard to develop a survey that gives us as accurate a picture as possible of what farmers harvested from last season.  This will give us more evidence on which to base next year’s trials, and will also serve as a crude means for comparison to fall 2015 harvests.

The Personal

On a more personal level, I’m still getting used to being back.  There has been so much travel over the past few weeks I expect it will take me a while for my head to stop spinning and for my feet to settle in the soil back here in Ethiopia.  At the beginning of each year I like taking time to reflect on the previous one, and to try to set the tone for the year to come.  2014 was a year of massive change and growth for me.  Last January I was feeling isolated and somewhat cut off from the rest of the world while living and working on a tiny island in the South Pacific.  Here, a year later, I have made a number of major transitions both professionally and personally that have landed me in the horn of Africa, continuing to find my feet while feeling challenged and motivated by a job that feels just the right amount of “too hard” sometimes.  I anticipate 2015 is going to be another year of major growth professionally as my employer has turned out to be the type that piles on the responsibility as quickly as I can prove I can handle it.  Personally, I would like to focus on improving my Amharic language skills, on building my social network locally, on getting regular exercise, and on being a source of positivity, compassion and humour to those around me.  Are these goals somewhat intangible and immeasurable? Sure. Do I care? Not in the slightest.

Here goes another one.

What a beautiful morning

I'm up early today to finish up the payroll for my staff team this month, and then work on a thing or two for a 2015 ag trial planning meeting this morning.  Sitting here, looking out my window at the birds flitting back and forth between the passionfruit tree, the mango tree, the eucalyptus tree and the banana trees I can see from my window, I can't help but reflect on how thankful I am for the opportunity to be here and to do what I'm doing with the people I'm doing it with.

This is going to be a 3-day week because I fly to Addis on Thursday afternoon in preparation for a conference on Friday.  Everyone at work has jokingly been calling me "Warden of the North", a far more grandiose title than I think I deserve, but I have signed up to work as the Canadian Warden in the Amhara region of Ethiopia.  All wardens are required to attend an annual conference in Addis and it happens to fall on this weekend.  Unfortunately, this also means that I wont be able to attend the American Thanksgiving celebrations taking place in Kenya with my coworkers but I suppose a free trip to Addis helps soften the blow.

This week I am working to coordinate 6-month evaluations of the Field Managers and Field Officers on my staff teams, which has been interesting to set up.  This system of evaluation combines self-evaluation with a sit-down evaluation session with your direct supervisor and is not the norm in the Ethiopian context.  I provided extensive training to my field coordinators and have set up the roll-out to involve a number of checks and balances to ensure that the evaluations are fair and useful to all involved.  Despite my training the process is not entirely straightforward.  Following their training on Saturday, Field Managers filled out and turned in self-evaluations.  The field coordinator was instructed to look at these and if they seemed inaccurate, to return them immediately and ask them to re-do them.  I made sure to also organize a meeting with the field coordinator on Saturday and took the time to look over the evaluations the FMs had submitted after being trained on how to give fair and balanced evaluations. The first evaluation I saw showed that the field officer had given themselves a rating of `above average`in every single category across the board.  This was something that was explicitly in the training as something NOT to do because it provides us no info on where field managerss think they need to improve or where they think they are doing well.  This was exactly the kind of thing the field coordinator was meant to instruct against, and to look for as field managers were handing in their evaluations.  Neither of these things happened, so after a long re-training session on Saturday, I left the field manager with instructions to go back to the field and re-train the field managers before they roll out their evals to the field officers.

As I said, nothing is straightforward.

In other news, it is looking promising that we will be able to return to the field before the end of the year.  The exact date is still unknown, and in what capacity is also unknown but that's more hopeful noise than we've heard in a while.  Perhaps next week? This week I will still be in full-on planning mode, exploring the aspects of teff management we want to test next season and then settling on methods for rolling out these experiments in our farmer trials.  It won't be all work and no play fortunately,  as I met some new friends on Sunday.  I am taking eskista lessons from a coworker.  Eskista is the traditional Ethiopian dance that involves lots of shoulder shaking and head-moving.  I am terrible at it but it's lots of fun and a good work out and keeps my life interesting outside of work.  This week, my teacher brought over 2 friends, a german interning at the UN and a dutch master's student both of whom were nice, so we're going to have a movie night on Wednesday night using our projector.  Both of my roommates are out of the country this week in Kenya and Malawi, respectively, so the house has been mighty quiet and it will be nice to have the company.

All right, my team is not going to be happy if their paychecks don't arrive in the mail this month so I had better get to this payroll business.

Pictures from October

Follow the link to check out an album of pictures from my October in Northern Ethiopia.

Hell Week

One of the hardest things about living in the developing world is that things so easy as to be taken completely for granted back home can take hours or days here and that can drive one up the wall.

This week I have had 11 employees quit, been threatened with a class action lawsuit (seriously, we had to meet with a lawyer), and dealt with the plethora of annoying minutiae that come par for the course with life here. I normally have a pretty high capacity to deal with these things but my emotional resources were low and so things that at other times would amount to small annoyances and nothing more, were really difficult to deal with.

Things are mostly better now though. The employees are back, they endured a gruelling 9 hour day of training (add 5 hours of travel time for me to get to the training site and back) yesterday but are now fully trained to take harvest measurements. Harvest has begun, and people are in the fields today. I am taking my first 2 day weekend in a month, as my weekends are normally either 1 or 0 days and I couldn't be happier about it.

Hopefully all the fieldwork/data collection fires are under control for now and I can take some time to breathe. Much as I would love to switch off my phone for the weekend, I do want to keep my ear to the ground in case something goes wrong as it often does in the first few days rolling out a new activity. I am also excited for Monday as I'll be in the field observing my field officers conduct some of their first harvests! Damn, I love my job...

7 weeks in

Things here have been going really well overall and really poorly in a few specific ways.

I feel as though I'm integrating reasonably well into the socio-cultural fabric of Ethiopia most of the time, and work is going really well overall in that I absolutely love what I do and it feels really meaningful to me.

On the downside, I have either bedbugs or fleas that I can't seem to get rid of which really gets into your head. I spent most of my day Sunday boiling every piece of clothing/linen/etc I own in a giant pot on the stove and swearing loudly while repeatedly scalding myself as I tried to ring it out and put it up on the line. I am planning to spend the next few days praying I've rid myself of the scourge because after this, I basically have no other recourse. They win. Pray for me.

Work has been a wonderful mixture of stressful and interesting. This is a crucial time of the season as we attempt to place ourselves in position to collect butt-tons (scientific term) of data come harvest time. This morning I got to watch my field managers receive a training I wrote on the proper protocol for using a hanging scale to measure wet harvest weights (wet harvest=the harvest before it's winnowed, threshed and dried. Think pile of fresh grass instead of pile of dried seed). I still try not to think about the fact that these harvest measurement methods I'm writing trainings on will be used to measure the harvests of over 4,500 farmers, because I'd probably never get it done. Plus, the program is structured such that there are so many checks and balances that it would be really difficult for me to develop anything completely inappropriate to the point that it was being rolled out at full scale. Trainings are drafted, edited, tested, revisted, tested again, revised again and sometimes tested a third time in successively larger experiments to iron out as many of the kinks as possible before they hit the field full-scale. This minimizes the impacts when things go wrong, and most importantly protects farmers from my (occasional) mis-steps.

I definitely struggle at times with the idea of my role here as someone from away in a country where there is so much incredible talent. I love the fact that my organization at its core does seem to have the best interests of the farmers we work with at heart, and that it manages to do that in a way that isn't doesn't feel completely patronizing or imperialist at times. Our approach is based on evidence and research, research to help farmers, which we couldn't do without farmers. As a environmental science degree-holder, I have been really impressed at the rigour with which the scientific method is employed, and the thoroughness of the statistical analysis on the back end of data collection. Having experienced academic fieldwork before, I am no stranger to the fact that experiments done in the real world can never be as neat and tidy or controlled in the same way that lab trials are, and I love that we are doing both in an attempt to further strengthen our conclusions. At the end of the season, if the methods we are suggesting farmers use really aren't better than what they were doing before, the numbers will show that and we'll switch to something else.

Anecdotally though, at this point I think we are going to get some really interesting harvest results. Heading to the field these days you can see an incredibly marked difference between row planted and broadcast planted fields. Row planted teff is much taller, with thicker stems and the stalks are absolutely loaded with teff heads. Broadcast planted fields are shorter and the stalks are thinner, I suspect due to overcrowding and soil nutrient competition. Interestingly, the downside to tall teff with fat seed heads is that the row planted fields experience "lodging" to a much greater degree than broadcast fields. Lodging is a fancy term for when plants topple over. The combination of late rains and heavy seed heads mean that lodging is the number one problem facing teff farmers generally. With the taller row planted stems, lodging is posing a major problem and I am a little worried it will impact our results because once the teff falls over, it will begin to rot if the head stays in contact with the ground and the grain will be lost.

This year we haven't focused too much on fertilizer application in our trials as altering the planting method appeared to have a higher potential impact on yields. That said, improved fertilization in teff is a major research area at the moment as it gains in popularity on the world stage. We have been recording the types of fertilizer farmers use on their crops (the most common is called DAP, which I believe stands for diammonium phosphate, providing nitrogen and phosphorus needed for healthy growth in low-fertility tropical soils). I haven't heard that over-fertilization is a major concern, know that teff is generally quite hardy, able to survive in both waterlogged and drought-prone conditions. One of the programs being worked on by another team at the moment is attempting to assess the rates of fertilizer use in rural parts of the country, because the government wants to know if it's recommendations are being implemented as widely as it would like but the results aren't in yet.

With all this data coming in, I don't envy the jobs of our overburdened data entry team, but I like to think they secretly all love their jobs as much as I love mine.

Bedbugs Part 2

Still got 'em.

Two and a half weeks and three full cans of bug spray later things aren't looking good over here, bedbug-wise.  They're the worst!  I don't ever see them, but I'm getting eaten alive in bed, and I suspect a lot of my wardrobe is infected as well.  Round two of the war begins this weekend, I plan to buy a giant cauldron and boil every single thing I own while simultaneously spraying down my room AGAIN with bug spray.  Desperate times, desperate measures, folks.

In other news the past couple of weeks have been difficult because I'm struggling to retain my field staff in the face of massive government pay hikes.  Walking the line between the organization not wanting to pay staff more than it needs to to retain solid workers and remain competitive in the job market, and the perception that the staff have of us as an uber rich foreign NGO determined to pay them less than we ought to while padding our pockets, ultimately at the expense of farmers is really distressing. I can see both perspectives, but it really doesn't seem as though the staff are able to do the same.  The organization's original response was accepted joyously in one of the regions where we work and was rejected outright in my region at a staff meeting the same day.  The staff literally walked out of the meeting where the announcement was made on Monday, and the worry is that with harvest coming up, people will begin misreporting data collection or not showing up to work in protest during the most crucial data collection time of the season.  Tomorrow is definitely going to be dedicated to formulating/revising the plan and trying to put out these fires before they grow any bigger than they already are.  I think it's do-able but will require careful orchestration because going back and forth with staff like this can continue much longer, and it's killing morale.

Road rash

I’ve just avoided a pretty major incident and I am fairly shaken up.  I am in the mountains, somewhere between Adet and Mota in the Amhara region of Northern Ethiopia.  One passes very few other cars out here, the main traffic on this route are shepherds, mostly young children, and their herds of oxen, goats and donkeys.  The route is strewn with large rocks and potholes as it wends its way through valleys and hilltops, affording absolutely spectacular views.

This was the location in which my notoriously unreliable 4x4 decided to pull one of its signature moves and break down.  I haven’t been driving in Ethiopia, partly because the nature of the laws here mean that if I as a foreigner hit someone while driving, or even got into an accident, there would be serious ramifications both for me and for my organization.  As a result, they have opted to lease two cars and drivers, place them on 24 hour retainer basically for the numerous trips staff like me need to take to visit field sites, staff meetings and trainings in far flung areas.  I spent 3 days last week in the field, and I’m expecting to spend 4 days this week supervising and supporting my staff as they use marking sticks to set up harvest boxes in farmers’ fields in anticipation of the coming harvest in 4-5 weeks.

Our driver/amateur mechanic hard at work under the hood, examining a battery short-circuit that sent smoke billowing under the hood and into the car as we were driving.

I love going to the field. The car that takes me there though, is another story all it’s own.  I am bumping down the road in what was once a regal and majestic Toyota 4x4, designed to traverse the even the bumpiest back roads this fair country has to offer, and believe me, this is a hotly contested title.  Nowadays though, it spends most of its time struggling to live up to the title of “functional brown car”.   Over the years these roads have ravaged this car in ways I’m only just beginning to understand, and as a result, it breaks down. Constantly.  The roads ain’t getting any smoother, and the car ain’t getting any younger.

The pace of life in rural Ethiopia is slow, a breakdown often draws onlookers.  The driver is fixing a broken axle with a piece of twine.  Following this roadside repair, we managed to make it about another 4km before losing steering because the twine gave way.  I ended up flagging down a public a bus back to Bahir Dar that day.

It also doesn’t help that we seem to have managed to track down the Ethiopian equivalent of a young Michael Schumcher and hired him on as the driver.  Want to get where you`re going in half the time? He’s your man.  Want to drink from a water bottle or coffee mug on the way? Hire someone else because if you do that in this car you’re going to get most of whatever you’re drinking down your shirt.

Anyway, the car broke down. Again, with smoke billowing from below the hood.  We had overheated in the middle of nowhere and had no water with which to cool the engine and continue on our way so we had to wait for it to cool on it’s own.  This was no mean feat considering it was a hot sunny day.  The driver tracked down a kid (they seem to be everywhere, even in the most rural areas here) and sent him to find a water body and fill a container to help us out.  While the kid was gone, he spent about 15 minutes peering under the hood with comical intensity while furrowing his brow and scratching his head periodically.

 

"While the kid was gone, he spent about 15 minutes peering under the hood with comical intensity while furrowing his brow and scratching his head periodically."

The child returned, the engine was doused, and we were set to continue on our way, but the car wouldn’t start.  This is another common occurrence.  The driver went to get out of the car again to see if the engine was still the problem, and that’s when it happened.  In his haste to pop the hood, he had forgotten to engage the parking brake so as soon as he took his foot off the brake and stepped out of the car, we began to roll backwards down the hill.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have had the experience of sitting in a car, on the side of a mountain steep enough to have switch-backs in the road that was beginning to coast uncontrollably backwards downhill but I wouldn’t recommend it.  I shouted the driver’s name in a panic and he immediately realized his mistake and went to get back into the moving car, fortunately he hadn’t closed the door and was able to jog beside the car for a ways and then jump in.  He slammed on the brakes and we skidded to a halt, terrifyingly close to the edge of the road. There were about 2 metres between the edge of the road and a steep drop-off.  I remember thinking that if you could design some sort of amusement park ride that gave people this same experience, it would beat the fear instilled by the hightest, fastest roller coaster.  As I said, I was pretty shaken up but overall none the worse for wear and we continued on our way to the beautiful town of Mota without incident.

UPDATE: This post was begun September 23, when the incident took place but the road was too bumpy to write and I haven’t really had a chance to get back to this post since. I really don’t have time now, but I wanted to finish it up.   On the way home from Mota that same trip, we had no car troubles, although the car stalled twice once we got back to Bahir Dar and had to be push-started again by yours truly.  The organization has since switched to another driver and car.

I'm up early this morning to drive out to visit a farmer in Bahir Dar to test out some methods for taking 10x10cm sample counts of teff stems and seed heads.  We are hoping  this data will correlate to harvest weights (actual teff produced at the end of the season).  The idea is to roll this out in a small scale way next week to iron out any kinks and then scale up the following week, but it has been raining a lot lately which makes the teff quite delicate and with the teff at a very mature stage at this point, farmers may be understandably resistant to letting some schmuck tromp around in their field taking stand and head counts.  We'll see!