The Blog Has Moved

Please head on over to the new blog (well, old blog new site), which I've migrated to www.alishagoeseverywhere.wordpress.com for greater functionality and editing ability on slow internet connections overseas. Thanks!

It's the Small Things

I spent a very comfortable first night here in Port-au-Prince last night, which reminded me once again about the value of small comforts and little victories while traveling abroad. One always goes to developing countries expecting a little bit (or a lot) of discomfort of various sorts. Foremost, perhaps, is that there's always a big question mark until you get to your hotel and figure out where you're going to be sleeping.

But before the hotel, airports are the first set of hoops to jump through. Getting through immigration can sometimes present challenges (ask me about my arrival in Niger, for example) but once you've located your bags, fended off aggressive baggage attendants grabbing your suitcase handle out of your hands, hoping to make a buck by providing the unnecessary service of rolling it to your car, and passed through customs, there's always the few minutes of unease as you try to locate whomever is picking you up. For me, it's usually a driver I've never met outside of an airport I'm unfamiliar with, so there are normally several minutes of scanning people holding signs desperately looking for one with your name on it while bombarded by taxi drivers looking for a fare ... because chances are your mobile phone doesn't work wherever you are, and you haven't had a chance to exchange money into local currency, and all your cash may or may not be in large US bills, and it may or may not be the middle of the night when your office is closed - all factors which make getting out of there a challenge if your ride does not await. After a few minutes of idle wandering to possible locations where someone may or may not be waiting for you, ideally you locate your driver and off you go. Fortunately this went smoothly yesterday, but I've had instances where it didn't, and that's really not an enjoyable experience.

And then there's the hotel. Having stayed in more terrible hotels than decent ones, I usually arrive at hotels with a sense of trepidation, despite the fact that I've gotten very good at sleeping in uncomfortable places. Will the sheets be clean? Will the pillows be filled with some disturbingly vague and lumpy substance? Will everything in the bathroom work? Will there be even a few minutes of hot water? Will there be a mosquito net? Will the room be well sealed or will there be cracks around doors and windows to let in all manner of nighttime critters that bite, skitter and slither? How many cockroaches will I have to kill before I go to bed? And above all else, will there be air conditioning that stays on when you are trying to sleep in 90-110 degree temperatures? Favorable answers to most of those are really a pretty good situation. As such, happy to report that I slept well in a clean and decent bed with reliable air conditioning and an insect-free night. Only 30 seconds of hot water for a shower, but all in all, this is more comfortable than most of my digs over the past few years. Haiti wins again!

The next big-little thing: coffee. I've been in so many places where actual, real coffee is not the norm and no matter how long you drink it, instant coffee (everywhere: Nescafe) just never quite cuts it. Coffee-growing countries like Ethiopia and Guatemala have been a solid A+ in that arena, but it's always a little daunting pouring that first cup in the morning at the hotel's breakfast buffet. Being rewarded with the taste of real coffee earns a sigh of relief morning after morning.

Other notable things that add some cheer are, yes, usually food-related. Good local beer available for a couple of dollars is always a welcome source of relaxation at the end of a hot day. When you get tired of the local beer, getting creative with your drinks can be fun, too: Team Ethiopia eventually became so sick of St. George Beer that we concocted a mixture of sweet(ish) local red wine, Sprite, and lemons and oranges. Kind of like the worst sangria you've ever had, but surprisingly refreshing. Abundant tropical fruits are also a delight; it's nice when mangoes, pineapples, dates and avocados cost just pennies for a change, and taste truly sun-ripened and sweeter or richer than ever available in the US. Certain post-colonial spots are also guaranteed to have good bread, from the briefly Italian-colonized Ethiopia's version of focaccia to excellent baguettes found in the middle of nowhere in Francophone West Africa. And finally, nothing quite hits the spot after a long, hot, dusty day in the field than a Coke in a glass bottle, made with real sugar. So this morning, I sat by the pool in the sunshine, watching long-tailed green geckos sun themselves while enjoying a cup of real coffee and a plate full of ripe pineapple and watermelon, and toast with local honey and - rarity of rarities and development worker favorite - peanut butter. Life was good.

Traveling in tough places, there are many, many sources of discomfort. One quickly learns to fully and acutely appreciate the brief enjoyment that comes from small sources of pleasure, because with those, for a moment, you're able to say, "Hey, it's not so bad here."

On The Road Again

I know, I know. I've been awful at keeping this blog up during the last year of travels, but it's been nice to have so many of you chiding me for it. So yes, I apologize that you've missed out on Niger, Mauritania and Guatemala - and some fun vacation travel around Mexico and Hawaii, too. I've been chipping away at a travel memoir so maybe eventually I'll put together something cohesive and share some of those experiences.

But for now, you get Haiti.

Traveling to Haiti feels like checking an important box. It's development work central - has been for years, but especially in the post-earthquake years, so along with Ethiopia, this feels like earning a humanitarian aid badge of sorts. (Now all I need are Afghanistan and Sudan, right Mom?)

I'm here doing assessment and design work for a nutrition and agriculture program, subjects which I've done a pretty good job of carving out as a technical niche. Many of you have heard me lament my lack of technical specialization over the years, but I'm still fully enjoying being a "food security person".

Haiti, stunning island that she is, is an entirely different cultural context from anywhere I've worked before. Parts of Africa and the Middle East feel like second nature at this point, but Guatemala and now here are interesting learning experiences for me given how different they are from where I've been before. Yet the big pieces are the same where things like nutrition, maternal and child health, and agriculture are concerned ... the trends are strikingly consistent wherever you go, although discovering the nuances and variations below the surface is sociologically and anthropologically fascinating, to say the least. Digging deep into the subtleties is really the most fun.

I'll be here for just ten days - a few days in the capital of Port-au-Prince on the front and back ends, with a few days up in the north in and around the city of Cap-Haitien in the middle. Ten days is just enough to begin feeling like you're starting to understand things, but I think the mix of recurrent disaster, decades of political instability and classic multidimensional poverty make for a complicated mix to grapple with as one tries to make sense of things.

In the immediate sense, however, it's just nice to be back in the field. I've been "stuck" in the US for almost five months, and that feels like ages without traveling. The crush of a small, dilapidated airport ... throngs of taxi drivers scrambling for your attention ... heat, sweat and diesel fumes ... all such familiar sensations that make me feel like I'm home again despite being in an entirely new and foreign place. I sat outside after dark, amidst potted plants near the hotel pool, and enjoyed dinner (simple slow-fried pork with onions, peppers and plantains) and a few local beers. The idle hum of a generator, punctuated by the chirps of geckos and nearby conversations in English, French, Spanish and Haitian Kreyol, provided a comforting soundtrack that greeted me like the voice of a dear old friend. The acrid smell of burning garbage and the sudden stinging itch of mosquito bites on the thin skin of the tops of my feet were even welcoming in their familiarity. French with hotel staff flowed like I'd never missed a day in speaking it, and the renewed feelings of independence and newness made me feel freer than I have in months. It is lovely to be adrift in the world again.

The Challenging Nature of Field Evaluations

This summer has been an interesting learning experience as my work has been focused on program evaluation. I've done evaluation work before, but mostly from a desk. In Iraq we had local monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff who were responsible for site visits and data collection, and hired local consultants for larger-scale evaluations that included lots of surveys and focus group discussions. This time around I'm actually doing it myself - this is mostly nice, as you have control over the data being collected, but also showed me how much work field evaluations are, and how much I probably don't want to go further down the path of being an M&E expert!

Developing surveys and focus group questions in a new cultural context is tough - particularly if you don't speak the language. The resources at our disposal during the development of our evaluation tools was limited - not much support or review from USAID, or assistance from local staff. Having local staff tell you how your questions are likely to be translated and received is a big help. On the whole, I thought this went well, but sometimes found myself lamenting at the lack of opportunity to pilot our tools.

Let me also say that getting ALL THE WAY OUT to the communities we visited - poor rural farmers tend to live out in the middle of nowhere - was exhausting. We traveled 40-100 km down two-lane or gravel roads, over mountain passes with lots of hairpin turns and no guard rails, dodged giant trucks barreling down the opposite lane, and avoided hundreds and hundreds of pedestrians carrying firewood, sheep, goats, cattle, oxen and many, many miniature donkeys - not to mention the odd baboon, Ethiopian fox, hyena or hornbill.

Once you arrive, sit anywhere you can find (rickety chair, on a rock, on a step outside a crumbling building) and become the center of attention for a few hours. Talking with Ethiopians is a pleasant experience - they are direct and effusive and happy to share their stories with you. It's tough to watch an emaciated mother of five with a baby strapped to her back walk away from an interview in mud-covered plastic sandals and threadbare skirts, after having just told you how her family's monthly food supplies only last for a week. Solace comes in knowing that hopefully your presence in her village will yield some additional help for her and her family.

Ethiopians have been receiving humanitarian aid for decades. For many, our visit is not their first meeting with foreign aid workers and many of them are exceptionally savvy to the nature of the aid their communities receive. We've had very specific requests for microfinance projects or agricultural collectives from the beneficiaries we've met. When you enter a community skeptical about certain program elements and are repeatedly told that everything's generally being done as it should be, you wonder how accurate your results are - and whether you, as an outsider, are even capable of getting accurate information. At the end of the day, you trust the people you're speaking with and hope the stories they tell are true.

Now that we've completed our evaluation we will share our stories and go, and maybe hear something about the impact it's made on the program or future ones. The findings are interesting and hopefully not just relegated to email inboxes or computer file folders. I plan to follow the results closely in hopes of learning if our findings have made a difference in the aid that's provided to millions of hungry Ethiopians. I hope they do.

So what are you doing over there, anyway?

Lest anyone think we are having a sightseeing and rock-climbing vacation over here, I thought I'd share a little bit about the work our team is doing in Ethiopia.

For the past several years, USAID has funded an emergency food assistance program in Ethiopia. Food security is a big issue here - there are millions of people in this country who have been identified as chronically food insecure - meaning they never have enough to eat. With 85% of the country's population of 80+ million people living in rural areas, most people rely on agricultural or pastoralist activities for subsistence and, if they're lucky, moderate income. People in the western part of the country enjoy greater food security due to more stable and productive crops, rainfall and natural resources. In the central and eastern parts of the country, however, the majority of the population outside of (and even within) major cities ekes out a living by whatever means they can - normally farming about one hectare of land and raising small herds of goats, sheep or cattle.

Farming is tough work here - people still use a pair of oxen and a crude wood and metal plow to till the earth. The land is unforgiving - in most parts, rocky and dry and relatively inhospitable. Ethiopia's topography does nothing to help - everywhere we visit is characterized by massive hillsides, challenging to farm and subject to major flooding and erosion. Every year, families struggle with the weather and the degraded quality of small tracts of land they don't even own. Overfarming, poor natural resource management, poor quality and lack of availability of seeds and other vital farming inputs mean that many of Ethiopia's rural farmers struggle to produce sufficient quantities of food to meet their family's food needs for the entire year. As the months from harvest time stretch on - and the shocks of flood or drought compromise yet another harvest - families find themselves without resources to provide for the most basic of needs.

Relying on the Government of Ethiopia's crop and livestock surveillance systems, USAID provides emergency food to acutely food insecure families - those who need some extra help for 3-9 months out of the year. A typical food ration per person per month includes 15 kilos of cereals (wheat or sorghum), 1.5 kilos of pulses (usually yellow split peas), and 0.5 liter of vegetable oil. 35% of beneficiaries also receive 4.5 kilos of corn-soy blend, a fortified food product directed at children under five and pregnant/lactating women, the most nutritionally vulnerable groups.

With this system in mind - providing assistance to more than 1.6 million beneficiaries per year - we are aiming to answer the following questions:
1. What is the system for targeting food aid beneficiaries? How are they selected? Are they getting enough food to meet their needs?
2. How are families and communities utilizing the food they receive? Are they sharing it? Selling it?
3. How are selected individuals targeted for corn-soy blend?
4. What do individuals and communities know about what corn-soy blend is, who it's for, and how it should be used? How are they using it? Are they sharing it? Selling it? Do they need more information about it?
5. Are people being required to work in exchange for the food rations they receive? What is the system?

To answer these questions, we're visiting 6 different areas throughout the country - two communities in each area. There, we conduct interviews and hold focus group discussions to learn about local attitudes and practices, as well as meeting with local government officials to get their impressions of the situation. We're meeting with about 120 people every week to talk about the above issues. At the end, we've been told by our USAID supervisor, we'll be "the US government's best informed people on food aid in Ethiopia."

We're finding a lot. Due to some sensitivities around food security issues in the country I'll wait to share those until I get back to the US. Ultimately, the food USAID distributes is doing a lot of good for a lot of people. Initiatives like the US government Feed The Future program - which focuses on increasing the capacity of local agricultural systems to provide local solutions to food insecurity - have incredible promise for long-term solutions to these problems. As we can see in the current crisis in this region, ensuring that local systems are in place to deal with natural disasters and shocks like droughts and floods, and to provide emergency food aid when needed, help to keep people alive. The Ethiopian Government has a pretty strong system in place to meet these needs when they arise - keeping them more resilient to the country's famines of the 1980s and 90s and the current crisis in Somalia, now bleeding over into Kenya and Ethiopia. They have done a lot to avoid these situations and learned from past tragedies. Hopefully the international community can help to strengthen these mechanisms in Ethiopia's neighbors.

Hike to the Hole-in-the-Wall Church

When the team and I first arrived in Mekele, capital city of Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, we had a day off. Lacking the inevitable travel fatigue this early into our journey, we decided to use our free time for some sightseeing. We stopped in at the tour office next to our hotel and were advised to take a trip to visit some of the region's rock-hewn churches. As Ethiopia is famous for its ancient Christian churches carved out of rock in myriad ways, we thought this sounded like a good cultural activity.

The highlight, said our guide before departure, would be the Abuna Yemata church, carved out of a cliff on the side of a giant monolith. Skeptically, we asked about the extent of the trek to the church. "Don't worry, anybody can do it," he said.

We drove out of the city in a minibus, down gravel roads winding through the highland plateaus of Tigray. The scenery was beautiful - huge rock ridges and sweeping valleys rich with dark soil and golden stone. This photo, taken from the road, is a typical view in the Tigrayan highlands:



We arrived at the site and met a few more guides ... guides-cum-militia, apparently, as one carried a dull, old axe for protection as he walked along with us, and another stood stationed outside our vehicle to make sure nothing was stolen or bothered. Good, sturdy Ethiopians, these two:



While they looked up for the climb, I'm not entirely sure the rest of us were. Having arrived a week or two prior in Ethiopia, our poor sea-level lungs were still not used to the elevation - 7000' or higher up in these highlands. It's a pretty serious change in altitude when you're not used to it - and that's just when you're standing still. Suffice it to say that looking at the following task in front of us was no joke:



Learning that we were climbing about halfway up the largest rock to reach the church (I know, "What church?!") didn't stop us. Our guides moved among the rocky terrain like mountain goats and we did our best to stumble along behind on the rough paths. As we climbed higher, we were treated to sweeping views of the valley - truly breathtaking (or was the breathtaking from the altitude and the hiking?).



After gaining about 1500 feet, we reached the end of the path - and looked up to a sheer, creviced rock wall. I wish I had thought to take out my camera - and I would've had I known what I was getting into. With the help of our nimble and experienced guides, up we went, hand over foot by the small holds in the rock, up one cliff and then another, until we were perched on the side of a giant rock monolith. Here is a break before the last scramble - you can just about see the church entrance up above the bushes:



After our final ascent, we tiptoed around a 2" wide ledge around the side of the cliff to reach the entrance to Abuna Yemata church - basically a small cave carved out of the side of a mountain 1500 feet in the air. The priest awaited us.




Inside the church we found original 4th century frescoes, telling the story of the original nine Syrian apostles and an Ethiopian prophet who delivered Christianity to Ethiopia. Persecuted by Muslim rulers in the 4th century, the first Ethiopian Christians carved hidden churches out of rock and mountain, creating a small and hidden faith that grew suddenly with the rise of the Axumite kings. The bible pictured below is written in the ancient Ge'ez language.




Despite the grueling and dangerous climb, the trip was fantastic. Between the views and the glimpse into Ethiopian history, it was one of the more unforgettable parts of my Ethiopia experience.

No blogging in Ethiopia ... or is there?

"Hello after a long hiatus" seems to be a common theme of this blog, no? When I arrived in Ethiopia I found that Blogspot was blocked. The Ethiopian Government is, shall we say, quite involved in internet communications in country - so some websites are limited. However, after a month and a half, it now seems that I can access my blog - so here we go with another catch up!

I've been in country for six weeks now and it has been a great experience thus far. We spent our first week at the US Embassy learning about US Government operations here, particularly an overview of USAID but also information about the State Department and some other key agencies. I'm part of a group of 18 interns (17 still standing, with one gone home due to some combination of altitude sickness, heart problems and schistosomiasis), mostly grad students, mostly in international development programs but with other fields represented including public health, business, communications, public administration, etc. It's a great group and we're having a lot of fun.

I'm part of a team of four working on an evaluation of a USAID emergency food assistance program. Emily (masters in Foreign Service from Georgetown), Mary (masters in International Development from Johns Hopkins) and Rocco (masters in Public Administration from University of Vermont) are fantastic teammates - I'm lucky to be paired up with them and really enjoying having such a talented team.

Our first week also included development of an evaluation methodology and data collection tools (surveys, focus group discussion guides, etc.) to prep for our weeks of fieldwork. It also involved a crash course in the program we're evaluating, food aid in Ethiopia, and USAID's strategy for food assistance programming ... and meetings with five NGO partners who implement the program (CARE International, Save the Children UK, Catholic Relief Services, Food For The Hungry and the Relief Society of Tigray) to prepare for our visits to each organization's sites. Suffice it to say that we had very full brains after week one!

In late June we headed out for a month of fieldwork. We started in Ethiopia's Tigray region, in the north of the country. After a week's work around Mekele city, we headed south for a week in the town of Woldiya (a glorified truck stop) and continued on to the city of Lalibela, home of Ethiopia's famous rock-hewn churches. After an extra week in Lalibela to do some initial data management and report writing, we headed back to Addis Ababa for a week at the Embassy for briefings.

Saturday, we head off for another three weeks in the field, doing additional site visits and data collection in the Oromiya region, Dire Dawa municipality, and the Southern Nations, Nationalities & People's Region (SNNPR) in the south of the country.

It has been fantastic to travel throughout the country, meeting emergency food aid beneficiaries and learning about the way the program is helping them. Ethiopia has been well known for its food insecurity in past years, and the recurrence of bad weather and persistent spikes in global food prices continue to take their toll on poor farming communities. The food USAID is providing helps people to survive times of severe food shortage, and we are learning a great deal about how the program works and how beneficiaries are using the food they receive.

That's it as a brief overview - I'll do my best to play catch-up on the details of the past few weeks as long as I maintain blog access!