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!

Picture update!

Follow this link for an album of captioned pictures from my September!

Bedbugs!

I got 'em.  Realized too late after my trip to Lalaibela last weekend that my room had come with some unexpected guests.  Said guests decided to invite themselves home with me, and so I get to spend this weekend spraying down all my stuff and fumigating my room with bug killer in an effort to head off the infestation before it spreads any further through my stuff.  Wish me luck

The past three weeks has felt somewhat like a gauntlet of food poisoning, car break downs and itchiness...

It's definitely a testament to this country that I am still loving it here despite everything.  Perhaps it's the AMAZING food?