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.