My last day in the DR and the end of a month of nearly constant travel.  Tired but still sorry to be leaving. Now begins a month of nearly constant data analysis.

This would be a prettier scene without all the electric wires but still

So tropical storm Nate is official and looks to make landfall somewhere in the US on Sunday. Please don't take it from me, check the official NOAA forecast. I don't know if the super hot weather here in the DR has anything to do with Nate, but I can definitely confirm that it is warm here. But how see how beautiful these deep green hills are.

In less than 2 days we've been to the border with Haiti and back, and done 3 trainings for surveyors on how to conduct interviews. It is now 1:30 in the morning and I am wide awake for no apparent reason (well, I guess an apparent reason might be that I am in the Dominican Republic and I drank coffee every time someone brought one to me which is at least 5 times I can count right now). Good to have the last of evaluation trainings behind me. Now just focus on data entry and analysis. This is a view of Lago Enriquillo from the mountains right near the border between the DR and Haiti. Haiti is behind you in the photo. Oh, also  NOAA predicts a 70% chance of tropical storm formation by Sunday.

Selling Moringa in the Port au Prince airport. Someone is mounting an aggressive campaign. I know there are pockets of people around the world who are totally dedicated to socializing the use of Moringa. I wonder how that is going.

Port au Prince! I'm still only in Port au Prince.

Fe foje. Traditionally this was made from discarded steel barrels and has become a well known form of Haitian art. This one happens to be hanging outside my room.

Musical chairs Haitian style

Traffic in Port au Prince at dawn. We tried to get here early to avoid this but here we are. Trying to get to a meeting in a town on the other side of PAP by 10 but doubtful.

The traditional way of sawing a timber log. One person stands below and one above and the saw is patiently drawn through the log lengthwise. You can see the marks where the log will be cut into boards.

An example of the certificates being handed out to program participants who are graduating. After receiving training in various techniques and demonstrating that they are knowledgeable in those techniques, many farmers here have graduated in the past couple of months.

Mayi moulen, milled maize, a popular and very traditional dish here. In this case again at breakfast, although corn may be eaten at any time of day here although people are eating it less often now than in the past.

As of yesterday, NOAA (credit to the good people at NOAA for the image below) is still predicting no new tropical storms in the next 5 days. Plus the next mass demonstration in Port au Prince is not scheduled until Monday (credit to the local rumour mill for that information). So that at least gets me through this week. (and yes, it is all about me...I am prepared to admit that). Getting through this week means completing the evaluations in Haiti, and hopping on a short flight to the DR where we will do the same thing all over again.

"Si Dye vle."

"If God wills."

Farmers crowded around flipchart paper discussing changes in their community over the past 3 years. Among the things that they said (and then wrote down):

"avek tet ansanm nou fe anpil bagay"
"when we work together we can do many things"

Spaghetti for breakfast. A Haitian classic.

Nearly every Canadian or American I have known has the same reaction, "Spaghetti for breakfast?!". I heard a bit once that Chris Rock did about Haitians eating spaghetti for breakfast. Don't know how he's familiar with it. Maybe he is friends with Sean Pean or something.

Anyhow, once you've tried it you won't complain. So delicious...

In addition to hurricanes, the past few weeks, Port au Prince has been plagued by demonstrations against the new budget put forward by the government which would raise taxes considerably. In fact our staff today were concerned about getting through Port au Prince and out to the regions where our household survey's are being conducted. Basically, of the 4 regions where we work in Haiti, 3 of them require travel through the capital. Kind of a bottleneck, but hopefully they get through. If its not one thing its another I guess. Or as they say here,

'deye mon, gen mon'.

'beyond the mountains, more mountains'.

First day of the household survey. So far everything is working like clockwork. It is so great to be working with colleagues who are dedicated, and know what they are doing. This is the team getting the survey sample ready for the field.

In the airport one more time. Headed to Haiti for one week then directly to the DR for one week. Hoping the weather holds out. NOAA forecasts no new tropical storm formation for the next 5 days.

Finally I get to see the mountain. But I had to get on the plane and get above the clouds first. Then I only saw it for about 30 seconds before the pilot banked away. I thought I wasn't going to take pictures of it because I've taken so many before. But there's something about it. So beautiful.

Lunch time in Marangu. Notice the slab meat hanging in the kitchen window.

This is one of those times when Kilimanjaro is not visible. I've been here 6 days and haven't seen it yet. How can I be right next to the biggest thing on the continent and not know it is there? Some kind of metaphor in there somewhere...

Translation apps are sometimes hilarious. I mean, I use them all the time, and they keep getting better and better, but for less common languages they can still be pretty sketchy. So I was working on translation of something a farmer said in one of our focus groups (in Swahili). Apparently the correct translation of what they said was that, "there is an increase in natural vegetation." But what the translation app gave me was "natural diarrhea has rebuked". 

This plant is literally sprouting before my eyes. It's in front of our office in Sanya Juu. It is some kind of cycad maybe? Anyone know? You can see in the centre, white buds. The yellow leaves in the centre were one of those buds yesterday, but today they are leaves about 30 cm high.

Sadly I will not see this plant grow anymore since the evaluation is moving from this office to our office in Marangu for the next few days, and I just follow the evaluation like a wildebeest.

There has to be a better term than "jetlag". It just seems like such a casual way to describe something that affects your entire physiology. For one thing you can be awake and not awake at the same time. You don't know when to eat, and your intestines have no idea what is going on: "is he sending us food now? There's nothing on the schedule for another 8 hours!"

Mostly I have used denial as my main strategy for dealing with it but I am starting to notice some like slips in alertness which may or may not have been there before. Right now for example I intend to read for a while and expect I will be asleep in about 5 minutes.

There has to be a better term than "jetlag". It just seems like such a casual way to describe something that affects your entire physiology. For one thing you can be awake and not awake at the same time. You don't know when to eat, and your intestines have no idea what is going on: "is he sending us food now? There's nothing on the schedule for another 8 hours!"

Mostly I have used denial as my main strategy for dealing with it but I am starting to notice some like slips in alertness which may or may not have been there before. Right now for example I intend to read for a while and expect I will be asleep in about 5 minutes.

My room is hilariously romantic for some reason. I swear this is not photo shopped or anything. This place was highly recommended on the world wide web and its new to me. I'll try any place once I guess.

This is a starling. Hard to really see the beautiful blue colour. So much more striking than Canadian starlings

Planes are beautiful. There is no way around it.

In a few hours I get on a plane. Then sit on planes and in airports for the next 35 hours or so. Mostly at this point, I am just grateful that my stomach is ok. Last night I had a bit of a scare and thought that I might have a really miserable ride home. Bad fish as they say. But all systems are go right now. Funny that you don't think about your stomach when everything is ok, just when it starts to get queasy. Really, I should be elated every single minute that my stomach feels good.

This has been a good trip, and again, I am so grateful to the team here for all the work they did the past 2 weeks. It is very difficult to give a sense of the challenging circumstances under which we had to implement the evaluations here. I could list off a half dozen major things without thinking about it, any one of which on it's own would be a major show stopper. Not least of which is the rugged terrain on which this data was collected. In this photo I hope you get a sense of how the surveyors (seen at bottom of photo) are winding their way up a steep mountain trail to get to an interview. The effort involved certainly exhausted me, and I did probably a 10th of the walking others did.

Field data collection is OVER! You have no idea how relieved I am. The whole 10 days I am coiled like a spring, waiting for something bad to happen (which often does). I think about how we can troubleshoot, adjust, or correct course. This is a self imposed state of mind which results in complete exhaustion once the process is over, which is now--did I mention? The thing is, this time around, probably the worst thing that happened was my fault. I had sent the wrong version of the survey form to be printed. Staff had that printed up a week in advance and were ready with it, numbered and everything, on day 1, training day. About 20 minutes into the training my heart sank because I realized that we had the wrong form. This was a pretty bad moment because I thought that we would just have to go with the incorrect form (which was about 80% right) and just live with it. I didn't see how we would be able to get the new form ready in time. But the amazing thing is, staff here responded. Within a few minutes of realizing the mistake, someone was on the phone to head office (3 hours away) to arrange new printing. Someone else ran to the local office to print up a handful of forms so we would have enough to work with that day. Someone else arranged with a local bus company to get the box of new forms from the capital to our up-country location. Someone else grabbed a projector so we could at least project the correct form on the wall for the surveyors being trained. Someone else got a generator running so the projector would work. It was all very much like clockwork. We actually had very little discussion about it. Everyone realized what they needed to do, and went about doing it. So in spite of it being one of the worst moments, it was also I think one of the best moments of the trip. I think it total we probably lost about 20 minutes of training time, which seems impossibly little to me given, the challenging circumstances that we work under, here.

Standing on the boundary between two watersheds, Nyengwe and Mutsidozi. Sometimes watershed boundaries are subtle and difficult to see. In this case, not so subtle.

This mountainside is in one of our target watersheds in Burundi. You can see there are a lot living barriers and planted trees. According to a local leader that we talked to, many years ago, there were local princes who promoted soil conservation and taught people how to install living barriers and plant coffee. They have continued this tradition to this day. This all apparently happened within this leader's lifetime and I am guessing he is about 70. The other interesting thing is that the other side of the valley, ie. where I am standing for this photo does not have nearly as many barriers or trees. The explanation for this did not seem as clear to me. Still, it means there is plenty of room for more planting. It is a long hike down into this valley. Nearly an hour for me to get to the bottom. I was told that I was the first white person (that people know of) to visit that village at the bottom of the valley in this photo. Hard to believe in this day and age, and only the second time in my life that I have been told that. It is not very accessible so I guess it's not out of the question.

A close up flower picture, for those of you that like close up flower pictures.

This was taken at the top of the Nyakazu canyon, which a beautiful spot, and a potential reserve of biodiversity. For all I know, this is some kind of endangered endemic. Maybe an unnamed endangered endemic. Or maybe it is just a common weed. Could be either one really.

Burundi is another one of those places that demands to have its picture taken. This is just what I happened to see over my hotel wall just now.

When we showed up here yesterday to do surveys, it felt a little bit like showing up in the set of an old western movie. One row of houses in the middle of a dusty plain, with a bunch of people, mostly men, sitting or standing in the shadows staring at us and us staring back at them.

Wow! my French is terrible. Two nights ago, I ordered a cheese sandwich for dinner. I got chunks of cheese on a plate and a piece of bread on another plate. Last night I ordered an egg sandwich. I got an omelette. Just an omelette.

Working on survey sample logistics. Figuring out who will be surveyed, who will interview them, and when is probably one of the hardest and most tedious of the evaluation tasks. So critical though to getting good information. If you read any of the analyses postelections and why election predictions were off, improper sampling is often the culprit.

Rutana, Burundi. We started our impact evaluation today. In class training of surveyors in the morning, and field practice surveys in the afternoon. Actually evening by the time we were done. It is cool here this time of year, jacket-worthy. Very comfortable by my view. Entered data from 16 surveys. Only 324 more to go!

It is not often I get to dine with a hippo. But at this restaurant in a small, reedy bay on Lake Tanganyika, hippos quite often show up to get their evening feed. It is very fun to sit at my table and eat fries while the hippo watches the customers from a (reasonable) distance. I'd say this one was probably 20 m from my table. Life delivering the unexpected. Well, somewhat unexpected. I went to this restaurant for this very purpose.

I've taken this same picture like a million times. It is just hard not too. Those hills in the background are where our project is working. Farmers are planting trees, forming community savings groups, building stronger relationships in a society that is long scarred by war and conflict. Maybe you are skeptical. I know it seems unlikely. But then, the best things in life usually are. I recommend you come here and see for yourself. You won't regret it, I promise.

This is rowe which is fermented cassava paste. It keeps for a long time. People say it is healthy too. It does not taste like chicken.

After 2008 here, there was a proliferation of Obama posters, Obama t-shirts, businesses named Obama, restaurants named Obama and apparently, Obama stationary. There is no such similar event this time.

A view from my guesthouse. The barbed wire is not that photogenic granted but is an important part of the story of this photo. These mountains in the background have seen many wars over the years, and you can see the tell-tale signs of that in the architecture here.

I had a chance this afternoon to talk to a local chief who has lived through the Belgian era, Mobutu, wars with neighbouring countries and a host of other experiences. He talked about the past with great fondness, when the forest came right down to Lake Tangyanika, wildlife was abundant, and there were so many fish in the lake that the people couldn't take them all out.

Someone like that has lived more lives than most of us could ever know.

Mexico city from the air. I don't know how someone can look at the air above cities like this around the world and not even wonder a little bit if we are having an impact on the air above us.