A unique cultural experience

Food poisoning!

Struck down, finally by what many call a rite of passage here in Ethiopia.  Ate some raw meat (on purpose, I know, I was looking for a unique cultural experience!) in Addis when I was there for an afternoon over the weekend and now things are looking pretty dire.  It struck yesterday morning in the car on my way out to the field for the day, and although I won't go into too much detail lets just say I had to deal with it in what I'd modestly describe as sub-optimal conditions.  Think overflowing pit latrine literally crawling with maggots.  I didn't even know maggots could live in pit latrines.

Anyway, it stuck around all day and if anything the situation has worsened.  I'm supposed to go back to my field site today to test out harvest tools for the upcoming harvest measurements.  The car is booked, and I have had my contact at the research centre bend over backwards to facilitate our doing this this week, despite the fact that he himself is going to be away in Addis.  I've also arranged for some of the managerial staff as well as some of my field staff team to be there.  I don't feel like I can back out.  so I am going to take a bunch of charcoal tablets, hit the road with a roll of TP and hope for the best.  This could be an interesting day :)

Hiccups!

This morning is supposed to be my weekly field officers meeting in Adet. This is a time to touch base with the team at the beginning of the week and also to deliver instructions and training for the field activities for the week ahead.

Since my field team works in such far flung rural areas, getting them all in one place twice a week is no mean feat.  Half of them must drive three hours from Mota to Adet for the meeting, while I and my field coordinator must travel two and a half hours from Bahir Dar. It really is the most efficient way to do things.

Except when something goes wrong. Which in Ethiopia is all too often. This morning when I got into the car with all of my material for the meeting this week, I was informed by my field coordinator that today was the day all the students who live in Mota had to get into Bahir Dar, 6 hours away by bus, to start their semester. As a result there was no space free on the buses my field officers normally take from Mota to the Monday staff meeting in Bahir Dar.  Time for some on-the-fly decision making. 

The bus situation tomorrow looks pretty bad as well, given that many students also didn't make the bus today and will need to go tomorrow.   I decided the most efficient (or perhaps the least inefficient?) thing to do would be for myself and my field coordinator to go all the way to Mota today, deliver the training to the field officers there, stay there overnight, and then backtrack to Adet tomorrow to give the training to the other half of my field staff team. Why do my field sites have to be so far flung? Hoping this hiccup doesn't set the tone for my week.

On the upside, the drive to both Adet and Mota are crazy beautiful.

My drive to work

Cock-a-doodle-doo...my face hurts

Woke up this morning with a burning face and sour taste in my mouth for the second time this week and I’ve finally figured out why.   Last night, the power went out (again) and stayed out all night.  I usually use my fan to keep the mosquitos off but without power it dies so I unfurl my mosquito net.  You’re supposed to carefully tuck it around under your mattress but at 1am when you’re sleepy and lazy, this is a lot of effort to expend, especially when your bed has a bedframe that makes it especially difficult to get the net in place.  As a compromise, I have been unfurling my net and just using it to cover my head, which means that my face is coming in contact with it a number of times throughout the night.  I think the net is treated with some sort of pesticide, which may be what’s causing me to wake up with a case of the face-burns.  This has happened once before this week under similar circumstances, I am only now connecting the dots.  I suppose rubbing one’s face in pesticide for 7 hours will do that?  Lesson learned.

It’s 6am, time to get up and get ready for the car that’s coming at quarter to 7 as the field site in Adet where I’ll be attending the Field staff meeting and touring the agricultural centre where we are running our teff research trials is about 2 hours away.  I hope the power is back by the time we return to town this afternoon.  It’s gone out before but never all night like this.

Week 2 begins...

Sitting alone in a small, dimly lit restaurant constructed out of a mixture of bamboo and wood watching the rain pour down.  I was walking home from work when I was caught in the afternoon downpour, this is what I get for working late.  The rain comes like clockwork every afternoon and if you’re not indoors, watch out.  The walls of the restaurant, like many others in town, are lined with whole cow hides and the restaurant is blasting the standard local Ethiopian music, which I quite like.

Today began week two of work, and brought with it the return of almost all of the staff team from their respective New Years breaks.  The office is much fuller, and I was able to put faces to some of the names I have been trying to familiarize myself with over the course of the past week.  I’m terrible with names and have been making a special effort to remember them, but the cultural naming practises are difficult to keep up with.  Names like Ybalta, Hierotie and Antehunegne really have me challenging myself to come up with mnemonic memory techniques to cement them in my brain.  Programs are definitely kicking back into gear as well, and this morning also saw me sitting in on a meeting with the Field Managers and Field Coordinator for half of the Teff farmer trials I am involved in. 

Basically the team is structured as follows:  the District Partners (my team!) work in concert with the Field Coordinators (one for each of the two trial regions, East and West Gojam) to develop trainings and guide the execution of the trial.  Supervised by the Field Coordinator are the Field Managers who in turn supervise and train a team of Field Officers.  These field officers in turn work directly with farmers, delivering training in improved teff planting and management techniques.  The whole system is structured like a pyramid, allowing us to reach as many farmers as absolutely possible with each of the trainings we develop.  In the region I am tasked with focussing on, there is 1 field coordinator and 4 field managers.  These managers each supervise a team of 4-5 Field Officers, who in turn supervise between 100 and 200 small farmers each, spread over two districts.  Overall, this means we are currently reaching about 2,000 farmers in this region alone, which makes up approximately half of our farmer planting trial.  When I say the scope of the project is large, I’m not kidding.  The idea is to continue to scale up to be working with perhaps 10 times as many farmers next year depending on our results and pending government approval.

Our current trials involve promotion of improved planting techniques for teff.  The current popular planting methods have most farmers using broadcast planting, which involves spreading the seed by taking handfuls and sprinkling them uniformly over the soil, or “broadcasting” them.  This technique distributes the seed evenly over the field and farmers will often use 25-50kg of seed per planted hectare.  When the plants sprout, they crowd each other and compete for access to limited soil nutrients.  This crowding means that farmers are getting less bang for their buck per planted seed, as increased competition means less actual grain produced at the end of the season. 

To address this problem, we are running trials promoting row planting methods.  Farmers are instructed to measure out evenly spaced rows within their fields, and to use a low-tech seeding technique (involving jamming a pen ink tube into the top of a water bottle to make a small hole through which seeds can be squeezed in an even stream along the planting line) to seed their fields in uniform rows.  Research has shown this technique to give significantly higher crop yields per planted seeds, as farmers can cover a hectare with 3-5kg by planting in rows (compared to 25-50kg with broadcast seeding). 

The major barrier to adoption of this technique is the fact that it simply takes more effort on the part of the farmer to carefully mark out planting rows and then deposit the seed along them.  Broadcast seeding is quicker and easier and has long been the preferred methodology, but we are hoping to show via these trials that row planting is worth the added effort.  This can be a tough sell, given the average rural farmers’ already incredibly demanding workload but ideally our trial results will speak for themselves.

The government also has it’s own program of row planting promotion, but this has also met limited success.  The idea of this trial is to compare the government’s methods of training delivery to ours, as well as to a control group that received no training and is simply planting using the traditional methods.  Are farmers actually learning from the planting trainings they are attending, and is this reflected in their yields at the end of the season?  There is lots of data to collect and analyze before big question like these can be answered definitively.

The meeting this morning involved a Training of Trainers style methodology.  The idea is to train the field coordinator and managers on the methods they will use to train their respective field officers.  When delivering trainings on things like best planting or fertilization techniques, the field officers would then deliver those trainings directly to farmers.  At this point in the season though, all the fields have been planted and farmers are doing things like weeding and fertilizing.  In order to compare the results from our in-field planting trials, we need to set up a randomized sample of farmers from both the participant and non-participant control groups, and take then take measurements of harvest yields from small sample areas within each plot.  The training delivered tomorrow will teach the field officers how to set up these sample areas within the planted fields of their farmers groups.  By comparing the yields between our methods, the government methods, and the control group, we will be able to figure out which planting technique will allow farmers to spend the minimum amount of money on seed, for the maximum yield results.

I feel as though a diagram would have been helpful in trying to explain all that, but this is what I’ll be spending about half my time on over the next few months, in a nutshell.  The rest of my time will be devoted to working at an agricultural research facility, helping to coordinate research and gather data on other planting techniques, fertilizer types/methods and management strategies.  

I have the inkling all this is going to keep me very, very busy which, fortunately, is exactly the way I like it...

Finally some pictures

Click to see a larger version of each photo.  I will have to caption them quickly as a thunder storm is moving in and the power will likely go out at some point.

 This is my room!  I use either the mosquito net or a fan every night to keep the mosquitoes away.  I've never figured out why the vast majority of mosquito nets are made in a circle when everyone's bed is a rectangle.

 I definitely need to find some shelves to make it seem less bare.  I brought some pictures from home but I'll also have to look around for other things to decorate the walls with.  If anyone has ideas, feel free to leave a comment.

 This is the street my office is on.  Most main streets in the town are paved, but the side streets are almost all dirt.

 Most afternoons bring rain which makes walking home from work difficult.

 Cows and goats always get the right of way on sidewalks.

 The fact that my garden is packed with fruit trees (banana, guava, coffee, etc) means it's also packed with birds trying to eat our fruit.  This guy was staring me down, daring me to make a move on his guava.

The view from my desk at home is fantastic.

 Food labels here can be hilarious.  This rice looks like it tastes horrendous.

This afternoon I was invited to an incredible Ethiopian coffee ceremony at the house of a friend of my roommate.  It involves freshly roasted coffee, incense popcorn and roasted barley.

Roasting coffee over charcoal is a specially acquired skill.  After the coffee is roasted, the smoke is ceremoniously blown in the face of those in attendance so that they can enjoy the delicious aroma.

Once roasted, the coffee is ground by hand and brewed in a jabena, a traditional Ethiopian coffee pot before being poured into isi, special coffee cups and served in three rounds.  It is thick and strong, sweet and delicious.

Sost...helat...ant....Happy New Year!!!

Yesterday was New Years Eve in the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar, which means today is the national holiday known as Enkutatash, the first day of the new year.  Last night we stayed up late and rang in Ethiopian 2007.  It's also part of the reason this week has been so quiet, since many of the staff took the week off.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect in terms of a celebration for the new year, but my roommates assured me we would do something fun.  As a result, I was really disappointed to wake up yesterday morning with a terrible stomach ache.  I ended up spending most of the morning in bed and was feeling better enough by the afternoon to do some of the reading up on local teff management techniques and general agronomy.  By early evening I'd had enough and I clocked out to spend some time with Brendan and Greg.  I'm still waiting for word on the bag containing all of my shirts, so Brendan was kind enough to let me borrow one of his for the night.  After discussing our options, we went for dinner and then headed to an asmari bet, an Ethiopian traditional bar.  We'd discussed the fact that since it was new years we ran the risk that everyone might be home with their families, celebrating quietly.  We were wrong.

An asmari bet is a bar with traditional dancers and a band playing live traditional music.  People sit on chairs and benches while hired male and female dancers alternate between dancing in front of everyone on stage, and cruising through the crowd dancing with patrons.  People also dance on their own and in groups.  I'm told this is also one of the only places women will go out at night, as most regular bars are patronized almost exclusively by men. It's difficult to describe what Ethiopian traditional dancing looks like, but it's difficult and looks really cool.  Keep in mind that the steps vary from place to place throughout the country, but here in the North it seems it's mostly in the shoulders and upper body.  There's also jumping involved.  All the dancers at this spot were incredibly good.  I'm still working on my shoulder and footwork.

We hadn't been there more than five minutes before one of the men danced over, took my hand and dragged me up on stage in front of everyone.  They then began demonstrating their incredibly fast dance moves, and motioning that I should follow along.  Some of the dancers looked like they were trying to dislocate their shoulders in the coolest possible way.  Anyway, while we were dancing, the emcees kept up a continuous stream of banter in Amharic, which had the crowd laughing uproariously and clapping.  I think I did okay dance-wise but it was definitely a trial by fire initiation to the  world of Northern Ethiopian traditional dance.  After about 5 minutes I was allowed to go back and sit down, but the dancing continued long into the night.  As midnight neared, people seemed to get more and more excited and the tempo began to increase.  At about ten to twelve, the dancers on stage started going around and handing everyone lit candles.  I briefly considered the fire hazard presented by a hundred and fifty tipsy celebrating young people all waving candles, dancing and jumping in a wooden bar before grabbing my candle and joining in the fun.

A comically large pan with a loaf of bread on it was brought out on stage and cut up and distributed among the dancers who were packing the stage at this point, and then they brought out huge trays of popcorn and turned off the lights so room was dark except for the glow of a hundred candles.  The countdown to midnight took the form of a call and response song, and then it was new years!  Dancers showered the frenzied sweaty, shoulder-gyrating crowd with popcorn for a few songs, and then the celebrations seemed to be dying down.  It was about quarter after midnight, so we switched locations until we found ourselves in another, much smaller asmari bet.  There was one musician, a drummer and a singer whose job seemed to be to freestyle traditional songs about different members of the crowd as they were called up to dance. It really made me wish I could understand Amharic because from the way people were laughing I could tell the songs were hilarious.  After a while though, we'd had enough and decided it was time to head home, so we tracked down a bijaj, the three wheeled scooters that serve as the local taxi fleet, and called it a night.

I really wished I'd had my camera with me, but regardless I will cherish the memory of my first Ethiopian new year for a long, long time.

Scribbled thoughts

Tired after a long day and want to get up early enough to do some work before going to work because I am an animal, but wanted to scribble some thoughts after day 3.

Ethiopia is great, but it is definitely going to be a difficult place to live in many ways.  I've managed to track down 1 of my bags now, but I'm still missing 50% of my luggage.  The other one has been sitting in the airport in Addis for 3 days now, despite there being 3 flights a day from Addis to Bahir Dar.  Also, I wasn't smart enough to mix my packing, so I've now got 10 pairs of pants and shoes, 1 shirt and no deodorant.

Outside, there was just a huge flash of lightning followed by a deafening peal of thunder, it has rained every afternoon/evening since I arrived but the rainy season is slowly coming to an end.  This also means the temperature is deliciously cool at the moment, this evening I could see my breath in the air as I wolfed down injera with asa gulash and shira - ethiopian flatbread made from teff, fried pieces of spiced fish and a spiced thick chickpea paste.  Everyone eats from the same plate, which I love, and if you're with Ethiopians, people will feed each other sometimes.  North America, take notes. Secretly, everyone knows getting fed by someone else feels awesome.  During the day it's warm, during the night it's cool, the temperature is perfect.

The rainy season also appears to be a boon for the shoe-shiners that seem to line ever street here.  They range in age from about 5 to 85, and post up by the side of the road in droves, shining and cleaning shoes for a couple of cents each.  The red mud dirt roads around Bahir Dar become muddy quagmires after a good rain and don't dry out fully until the dry season is over.  This is the worst when it comes to keeping your brand new work shoes clean, but the BEST when it comes to making a living cleaning the mud off people's shoes.

I seem to have arrived at a really interesting time of year, as Ethiopian New Year is this week, according to the Orthodox calendar.  It's on Thursday, which is national holiday, although I currently have a 9am meeting that morning and a 2pm meeting that afternoon because I am a certified SCHEDULING GENIUS.

This week has basically seen me working hard to bring myself up to speed on what this organization does, the projects it is working on in different parts of the country (the field sites I work in are going to range from 2-11 hours drive away) and how they fit together.  Despite this being a small team relative to the operations in other East African countries, there is a ton of work going on. I will spend some time breaking things down in greater detail in a later post, suffice to say we're working to increase the availability of credit for farm inputs to small farmers, improving farmer savings practises, developing new more effective planting methods that improve on existing practises and improve the delivery and dissemination of these practises via existing but under-achieving government sponsored agricultural extension programs.  These last two are going to be what I'm mainly involved with as part of the teff team, but I am spending my first few weeks working my tail off to learn and observe as much as I can regarding all of the programming because I think it will all help to inform my work once I begin to assist with/take on projects of my own.

Bed time.

Early birds and worms and all that...

It’s 6am and I’ve been up for about an hour.  The sun is rising over the mango, banana and guava trees in the garden and it seems the birds couldn’t be happier about it as they flit around singing their heads off.  I can see already today is going to be a cloudy one.  The weather cools down quite a bit at night here!  It was really pleasant for sleeping, although I know we’re heading into the cooler season so I’m thinking I will probably need to invest in some more blankets for my bed.

All things considered I slept really well last night, curled up under my mosquito net.  Awoke at 5am to the call to prayer, which immediately took me straight back to my time in Indonesia, but considering I was in bed shortly after 9:30 I still felt rested and have been unable to get back to sleep.  I’m excited for my first day of work!  I’m planning to use the time before breakfast to continue reviewing material on my organization.  Also, someone has left a “Peace Corps Amharic Language Training Manual” in my room which I plan to take full advantage of.  At this point all I can say is thank you which is amasagobina…I think.

There is lots still to do to get settled in, but none of that seemed to matter much this morning as I took a steaming hot shower and reflected on how huge the small things can be in an unfamiliar place.  Despite the lost luggage, and minor inconveniences of not having a phone or internet set up yet, something about that shower made me feel incredibly grateful.  It’s a feeling I plan to try to carry with me throughout the day.

Leaving on a jet plane

It’s around 4pm on Saturday afternoon and I’m cruising through the sky at 927km/h at an altitude of 10,058.  The air temperature outside is a chilly -48.0 degrees Celcius, yet the cabin of the plane is only slightly chillier than is comfortable.  When you break it down and think about it, the entire idea of a simple transatlantic plane flight boggles the mind.

It has been an incredibly frenetic past few days.  The lead-up to a big departure like this one always is, but this was an especially ridiculous mixture of appointments and errands, punctuated with some really fantastic quality time spent with friends, family and loved ones.  At the end of the day though, everything came together and I made my flight.  I have actually really been looking forward to a 17 hour chance to pause, catch my breath, and take a personal inventory in the calm, transitory junction between unemployed schmuck-titude and working stiff-titude.

My flight is packed with children, and families it seems.  I may be reading farther into this than I should, but given the enthusiasm and volume with which parents seem to be gleefully playing with their kids, I expect that I like Indonesia and Thailand, Ethiopia is a country that highly prizes children.  Also, despite being on a Boeing 777 with loads of other passengers, many more people than I would expect seem to know each other.  There were so many warm greetings in the check-in line with people exchanging hugs, hearty back slaps and handshakes.  Again, I don’t want to read too far into anything up front (strongly held assumptions can be so limiting, especially when trying to learn about a new culture and environment) but I have the suspicion that personal social networks play an integral role in daily life in Ethiopia.  I quietly made a note that focusing on building my own personal network, both socially and professionally, will be an important thing to focus on in my first few months. 

With the best of intentions I borrowed a friends library card a few weeks ago and spent three hours digging through the stacks at the University of Toronto Library for everything I could find on the agricultural sector, teff, political history, and rural economics in Ethiopia.  Then, I convinced a friend to head up to the cottage with me for a few days of solid reading/literature review.  I got through less of the material than I had hoped to, but it served as a decent primer.  Current reading goals are to learn more about the nature and sociopolitical legacy of the massive famine that took place there in the late 70s and 80s.

It’s getting dark.  My computer says it’s supposed to be 4:30 PM in Toronto, but we’re just about to pass over England on an arcing route south toward the equator and I should probably try to get some sleep.  Jet lag is going to be loads of fun to deal with, I can tell already.  I’ve also got quite a few documents still to go through regarding organizational policy, protocol, and the onboarding process in general to familiarize myself with what to expect starting at work on Monday.

For now, main goals for this week are to remain grounded and to roll with the initial integration-punches while staying focussed, organized, and on-task my first week. I am braced for the initial high of excitement at the novelty of landing in a new place and beginning to establish myself but want to try to maintain a healthy amount of perspective and try to see things as clearly as I can starting out. Lofty goals? Perhaps, but what’s the harm in aiming high.  I’m incredibly excited to begin.

Brief reflections on my first day in Ethiopia

It’s 9PM Sunday September 7th here in Bahir Dar and I’m completely beat, having forced myself to stay up until a reasonable hour to try to beat out my jet lag.  I would love to collapse into bed but wanted to scribble down a few first impressions while they were still fresh.

Ethiopia is beautiful in many ways.  It’s lush and green, even more so than usual given that the rainy season is just ending.  On the streets, very little English is spoken, and it definitely seems as though I’d be wise to put in some time up front learning the language.

I’m living in a spacious 4 bedroom house with two other staff members, both of whom seem really nice.  We spent most of the day together chatting, laughing and getting to know each other. The house has a beautiful garden and is in a walled compound with a 24 hour guard and barbed wire fencing around the perimeter.  I am told this is par for the course here, despite the fact that this area is quite safe given its proximity to a major oil depot which is heavily guarded.  Ethiopian food is great, as expected.  I’ve had it many times back in Toronto and that was one aspect of life here I was really looking forward to.  Injera here is much more sour than the injera in Canada though, I’ve been told that’s because the teff flour in Canada all has to be imported, so it is usually mixed with wheat flour which cuts the sourness and lowers the cost.

The airport lost my bags.  I was told they would be sent on the evening flight but they never came, I will have to look into this tomorrow as I wasn’t smart enough to pack a change of clothes in my carry on.  This week is Ethiopian New Year so the office will be closed from Wednesday through Sunday.  Also, most of the rest of the team are all away for various reasons at the moment so my two roommates are the only foreign staff on the ground.  People should start trickling back in next week, but the expat staff team here is currently only 7 in total.  Can’t keep my eyes open much longer, I think it’s time for bed.  Excited to go into the office for the first time tomorrow…zzzz

Ready or not...

Here we are again, it seems though I can hardly believe it myself.  I depart for Northern Ethiopia in four days to begin a two year contract with an organization that works with small farmers and regional governments in East Africa.  It feels as though I've only just touched back down in Toronto following 18 months in Indonesia, as friends and family are only too quick to point out.  Summer has slipped by with incredible speed, but looking back it was truly one of the best I've ever had.  Being unemployed was a mixed blessing, providing just enough stress to keep me motivated on the job search, while also pushing me to take advantage of the free time to truly soak up all that Toronto had to offer.  Concerts were seen, frisbees were thrown around parks, dance floors were torn up, lakes were jumped in, and all the while I tried to stay present and grounded in my appreciation for my network of incredible family and friends.

And yet, here we are again.  I first applied for this position in the spring at the suggestion of a friend who thought I'd be a good fit.  The hiring process was an incredibly thorough one involving a number of phone interviews as well as a trip to Africa over the course of about 4 months.

So lets set up the opening scene, the details as I currently understand them are as follows:

I am being hired to work on the government services team of a social enterprise in East Africa, the main mandate of which is to reduce hunger and poverty for small farmers in the region.  Founded in Kenya, the organization now has full scale operations in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania with pilot projects in a number of other countries in both East and West Africa, one of which will be the team I am joining in Ethiopia.  Programming focuses on different locally appropriate crops depending on where it is operating, and so my team will be focusing on tef (Eragrostis tef), a staple grain in Ethiopia.

I have been going back and forth about whether or not to try to keep a blog during my time away, especially after my attempts to do the same while living in Indonesia fell by the wayside partway through due to a potent combination of internet difficulties and laziness on my part.  I am hoping the availability of internet will be more consistent in Ethiopia, and still think there's inherent value in recording and sharing my experiences with anyone who might find them helpful.  For myself I also see it as an opportunity for self reflection and analysis, and as a way to share stories of the strange fruit, both metaphorical and literal, that I come across along the way