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...