Week 1: There's a tortoise in my back yard

I’m wrapping up my first week in the Mercy Corps office here in Addis, and it’s already been such an adventure! I want to rewind a bit and share what I’ve been up to since my arrival here.

I landed in Addis Ababa just as May was drawing to a close after two (unnecessarily frantic on my part) days at the Ethiopian Embassy in DC and 16 flight hours surrounded by small children. It’s been eight years since I lived in East Africa, and at that point in my life my mother, the queen of planning and organization, was in charge of flights, visas, and other expensive and complex logistical arrangements. This has been a great learning experience for me both in the process of planning a trip of this scale and practicing my yogic breathing when I get nervous about how things are going. See, I ended up here on time and everything went smoothly; nothing to worry about.

From the moment we touched down in Addis, so many memories and emotions started flooding back. Ethiopia is in many ways radically different from Kenya, which I love; but there were so many small things that reminded me of home, from the jaundiced airport lighting to the heavy smell of the highland air just before the rain starts. In the last week before I left, I was starting to get nervous about my ability to live on my own in Africa (i.e., sans superhuman mom), but the feeling that I’m not too far from home has helped a lot.

After a weekend spent adjusting my circadian rhythm—which has involved not only the time change but also the fact that it’s light for precisely 12 hours here—and having a lovely backyard BBQ with colleagues from Mercy Corps’ PRIME project, it was time to dive right into work.

The Mercy Corps Ethiopia team put together a scope of work that mandated a hit-the-ground-running start, and I’ve not been disappointed. This week has been filled with the normal orientation activities you would expect, but there has also been a lot of substantive work already.  My work is primarily related to monitoring and evaluation.  Mercy Corps, like most relief and development agencies, puts a lot of stock in making sure that its programs are meeting their goals, and to see where improvements can and should be made.

Big donor governments like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) or the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) often fund Mercy Corps projects, and these governmental agencies typically have specific reporting requirements for implementing organizations. The project I’m assigned to is called CHELBI (short for “Communities Helping their Environment and Land by Bridging Interests,” and a nod to the Chelbi watershed in which the project is located), and it deals primarily with natural resource management (NRM) in one of the most lush and diverse areas of the country—the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (SNNPR).  It’s funded by USAID, and I’ll be working on two reports for the donors assessing the impact of these Mercy Corps NRM activities in that region. I’m hoping to head to Arba Minch, where the program is based, in the next week to start that research. While I’m enjoying Addis, I’m very excited to get out to the field!

I’ve come to realize that eating lunch at the restaurants around the office, in a neighborhood called Piazza, is significantly more affordable than packing a lunch…we’re not in Washington anymore, Toto! There’s a great restaurant just a couple minutes from the office that serves wonderful Ethiopian food (which, if you haven’t tried, is a MUST). Doro tibs (chicken sautéed with veggies in a typical Ethiopian sauce) and wat are two of my favorites—particularly mesir wat, a spicy lentil dish (that I could eat by the bucket) served with injera bread. Yesterday two of my Ethiopian colleagues brought me to Tomoca Coffee, a coffee shop that serves one of Ethiopia’s oldest and most famous brands of coffee. It was so good. It’s brewed much stronger than we weak Americans usually go for and served in a small glass. I opted for the mocha version with plenty of milk and sugar. It was life-changing.

At the end of the workday, I’ve been enjoying relaxing in the very lovely house and gardens of the Mercy Corps staff member who is hosting me. At the moment he’s in the field, so the house gets pretty quiet in the evenings…it’s just the tortoise and me. 

I’ve really enjoyed catching up over Skype with two of my fellow fellows who are on the same time zone as myself—Rachel is in Amman, Jordan, also interning for Mercy Corps, and Meredith* is in Nairobi, Kenya with Catholic Relief Services (check out their blogs!). It is so exciting to hear what they’ve been up to and share some of the challenges and rewards of venturing off on these wonderful and wild experiences. It’s a strange feeling when almost everyone you know is asleep for most of your day, so when I get G-chat messages from Rachel and Meredith checking in on me, I feel a bit closer to home. Thank goodness for the Internet!

I’m signing off for now, but my next post will have updates from the field!

*NB: Meredith has given consent to reference her in this blog only if I mention that her eyes look just as beautiful over Skype as they do in person.