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.