The most interesting (or at least most prevalent) small-talk topic ever

Charles, we're so tired of just seeing pictures of people who are leaving. Seriously, if we wanted to see pictures of strangers in a cafe, we could just go to a cafe. Are you so boring as to have nothing else to share? Come on!

Fine, fine. Fair point. I'm not going to lie. I get a bit lazy on Saturday/Sunday and just try to crank these out as quickly as possible. Can't guarantee I won't still do that this week, but I will talk about something besides people leaving. Something way more interesting. Something to just grab your attention and not let go...the weather [sound of everyone falling asleep].

So the rainy season stepped up into high gear end of June / beginning of July. I've got to say that in general, I've been disappointed. You've got to understand; people build up the rainy season here like it's the coming apocalypse. "Just wait until July. Everything you've seen up to now has been light. The real rain is coming." Well? Don't get me wrong, it does occasionally rain hard. For example, it's really hard to see in the pictures below (and as we've discovered several times, there's no way I can load a video from here), but it's coming down pretty good in the first picture and it's hailing in the second picture.

People were also right that almost everything becomes crazy muddy here, but that's why I bought some crazy rain boots in the Merkato market. Quick side note: While I haven't yet taken a picture (and I refuse to dress up in it just for a picture), I do look rather strange walking to/from work. I'm wearing gray rubber/plastic boots that come up to mid-calf. I wear a white bandanna on my head as a hat, and I wear a blue $0.30 construction mask from Walmart since the car exhaust is just absolutely outrageous here. When you combine that with my beard, I really must be a sight. Ethiopians like to laugh / mock people who are dressed even a little differently, so I like to think of myself as bringing joy to the lives of the dozens of people I pass on the way to and from work :)

The drainage system also isn't fantastic here, so if it rains hard for 20-30 minutes, you can end up with what you see below (right in front of my workplace). The boots become super necessary when you literally wade across the street/river with 6+ inches of water.

Despite all this, it seems rather tame compared to expectations. Some of that may be that (1) it isn't overcast all day and (2) the rain is often pretty localized. I kind of expected the "rainy season" to be something like Seattle weather (or at least the Seattle weather reputation) and it would at least drizzle most of the day and you wouldn't see the sun for several days. There's a reason Ethiopia is called the land of 13 months of sunshine (the calendar here is twelve 30-day months with a 5-day thirteenth month in normal years and a 6-day thirteenth month in leap years). The typical daily schedule during the rainy season seems to be really bright and sunny in the morning, overcast starting around 2-3 pm, rain for 30-60 minutes between 3-6 pm, and maybe a bit more rain about 25-50% of the time in the middle of the night.

I'm also used to Midwestern US thunderstorms where when it rains, the entire sky is black with rolling clouds as far as you can see. Here, you'll frequently see blue sky near you even when it's raining. Below, the building blocks out some of the blue sky, but you get the idea.

Clearly, I'm not the only one confused by Addis weather. For some reason, weather.com always thinks it's WAY hotter in Addis than it is. For example, on July 18, at the time I looked these up, it was actually 62 degrees Fahrenheit in Addis (picture #1), but weather.com said it was 99 degrees Fahrenheit (picture #2). Trust me, it was 62. The strange thing is the first source for picture #1 (what pops up in the Google search results) is The Weather Channel, which powers weather.com (as you can see from the top left of picture #2).

None of this is to complain. It's not a bad thing that there's sun most of the time and that the temperature is always nicely moderate. Just goes to show the importance of appropriate expectations.

To make clear how nice the weather is in Addis, on July 18 (when weather.com mistakenly thought 62 degree weather was 99 degree weather), it looks like it was pretty close to 90-something degrees in much of the US. Hope you had fun with that ;)

Hmmm...what could it be...more farewells?

No SPAs left this week! It's like a miracle. Fear not, the next round of departures is quickly approaching...I know you're all excited because there's nothing more interesting than reading a blog about someone you don't know leaving and seeing pictures of everyone who spoke at their farewell. Real barn burning investigative journalism here.

On the other hand, three people are leaving the Beklobet Branch this week. Elder Horstman, Sister Yodit, and Sister Julianne. Elder Horstman is going home from his mission. Yodit is leaving to go on her mission. Julianne is going back to Europe.

Sister Yodit and Elder Horstman gave talks today for their last Sunday. Elder Horstman spoke about his vision for the future of the Church in Ethiopia. He read Doctrine & Covenants Section 135, where John Taylor announces the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith and recounts all that Joseph Smith did for the Church in the 24 years between his first vision of Heavenly Father and the Savior and his death. Elder Horstman mentioned that the Church has been in Ethiopia for almost 20 years. If we all work hard, the next 20 years can see the Church grow exponentially with many more branches and districts and eventually wards and stakes (for any non-members that are confused by the lingo, I know some really nice young men/women with name tags who live near you and would love to come explain...seriously, open invitation). He spoke about the power he's felt when teaching the gospel with members at his side (a necessity here since the missionaries speak only limited Amharic) and both the foreign missionaries and the locals bear testimony together ("out of the mouth of two or three witnesses..."). He also mentioned that when he left on his mission, he waved goodbye to his family and friends and now that he's going back home he's once again waving goodbye to his family and friends.

Elder Horstman served his entire mission in the three branches in Addis Ababa (Beklobet, Megenaana, and Kaliti), which is pretty unusual. Many of the missionaries also spend some time in Uganda, and almost all missionaries at least spend time in the other Ethiopia congregations (Debre Zeit and the three congregations around Awassa). He's a good guy and his family is from somewhere north of Salt Lake. We tried to determine if he lives near where my parents are moving, but I have an unfortunate characteristic where every city in Utah sounds familiar to me but I can't place any of them. I guess that's what happens when you're always meeting members from random small towns in Utah and when half your city names come from the Book of Mormon. Lehi, Jordan River, Nephi, Roy, Syracuse, etc. all sound familiar but I can't tell where any of them are. Basically, I know where Salt Lake City, Provo/Orem, St. George, and Lake Powell are; I locate everything else based on X miles east/west/north/south from one of those places. For example, I know my parents are moving to the north of Salt Lake City area, but I've got nothing more specific than that. Probably means I'm geographically challenged given I spent four years at college in Utah.

I took the missionaries out for dinner on Friday as a bit of a farewell with President Berhane, our Branch President, and Noah, who works with me at ATA. President Berhane's on the far left and Noah's on the far right. In case you can't figure it out, the missionaries are the four guys in their early twenties in white shirts and ties. As you can see from the picture, my phone gives me two options for pictures of people at night (1) zombie (due to the flash off their eyes) or (2) outrageously dark. Thus, I leave it to you to determine which picture works better for you.

Below is a picture of Elder Horstman and me today at church. You'll notice the third member of the picture...the thing on my face. My only excuse is that I got really busy for about 1.5 weeks, and then it (tentatively named "development beard") was too long to shave with my manual razor. The plan now (about 3 weeks in) is to grow it out until I go see my sister Emma around the end of September. We'll see if I can make it that long.

Yodit is going to the Accra Ghana Mission (apparently there's also a Missionary Training Center there). She's been a member for three years, and the branch is really going to miss her strength. Yodit talked about how much Christ loves us, how that is what matters most (1 Nephi 11:17), and that He suffered for all our pains and sicknesses, not just sins (Alma 7:11-13). We need to develop our testimonies such that nothing can separate us from Christ's love and we would never abandon Him (Romans 8:35-39 and John 6:66-69). Yodit said she wants to see all the members and many more of their friends at Church when she returns.

Below is a really good picture of Yodit and Sister Campbell (part of the couple that runs the Church's Ethiopia humanitarian work) and a not-so-good picture of Yodit and me. I blame (1) Elder Horstman who took the picture, (2) the sun that was outrageously bright today, and (3) me for having us face the wrong direction (towards the sun).

Julianne is a grad student from Oxford who had been in Ethiopia for almost a year doing research (I don't remember what she's studying). Her husband is a German Catholic, but he came to church a couple times. We should all feel sorry for him because he's studying politics and law, which frequently feels even more bureaucratic here than in the US. Sorry, no pictures.

At this rate, I'll only ever need to write about people coming and going. Until next week...

Team change, SPA farewells #5 & 6, and apartment turnover

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this or not, but when I started at ATA I was on the new Special Projects team. The Special Projects team is in charge of Public-Private Partnerships and other projects that don't fit anywhere else (cooperative storage, home grown school feeding, etc.). About a month and a half ago, I started transitioning to another team, and I am now pretty much 100% on the Input/Output Systems team. What is Input/Output Systems you ask? The team focuses on smallholder financing, input distribution, and output aggregation and marketing. In other words, how do you get credit to smallholder farmers (SHFs), how do you get fertilizer/improved seed/chemicals to SHFs, and how do you enable SHFs to aggregate their production and sell it. The team's doing some really cool stuff. For example, this year the team is piloting a new input credit model that should allow more farmers to purchase high-quality inputs and significantly reduce loan defaults. For the last few years, there has been no or very limited input credit available for SHFs. Given the dynamics of wholesale input purchase and distribution here (long story for another time), when fewer SHFs purchase inputs, they just sit in the cooperatives' warehouses, which causes the cooperatives to default on their wholesale loans. By increasing SHFs access to credit (and therefore the amount of inputs purchased) and decreasing the amount of cash in the system (which surprisingly enough always seems to get "lost") by instituting a voucher system, the hope is to significantly improve on the current state.

Anyway, two more SPAs have bid adieu to the ATA. Thursday was the last day at ATA for two of my roommates: Stephane and Hayoung. Both were former McKinsey BAs (Stephane in Europe and Hayoung in South Korea). Hayoung is going to the MBA/MPA-ID program at Harvard, and Stephane is going to Wharton for his MBA. Stephane was the SPA for the Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation (MLE) team, and Hayoung was the SPA for Core Analytics. It's weird to have your roommates leave, and to make it even stranger, these are the first SPAs leaving who came after me...a bit of a surreal experience.

Since Hayoung, Stephane, and Fabio (my other roommate) were going on a safari to Kenya after lunch on Thursday, we had the farewell Wednesday afternoon. As the senior director for Analytics (which contains Core Analytics and MLE) is currently getting medical treatment in the US, Yohannes (the senior director for Special Projects) spoke for senior leadership at the farewell. Yohannes said some really nice things about Hayoung. She stepped up and helped out the Special Projects team in April when we were drowning a bit. While Yohannes hasn't had the opportunity to work with Stephane, he mentioned the fantastic reputation Stephane has at ATA. After Yohannes, Zegeye, one of the Core Analytics Analysts, and Nigist, the Senior Technical Expert for MLE, spoke about Hayoung and Stephane, respectively, and their contributions.

Following this, Hayoung and Stephane were presented with gifts. Amongst other things, they both got an instrument. Hayoung got a lyre-type instrument, and Stephane got a one-stringed violin-type instrument that kind of looks like a crossbow (good luck getting through airport security with that).

Then Hayoung and Stephane spoke about their experiences and how much they would miss ATA.

Picture of the Analytics crew.

Strangely enough, I was just realizing that the four recent farewells (Caitlin, Sid, Hayoung, and Stephane) were all at McKinsey before. We're losing our numbers advantage! Now, it's just Nadia (Program Manager for Systems), Javier (intern from Stanford MBA), Bobby (Senior Director for Analytics), and me. Pretty soon, the Bainees are going to outnumber us.

While losing two great roommates is sad, on the plus side, their replacements are pretty cool, too. Both are ATA...I know, keeping it in the family so to speak. Max is from DC, was working at a smaller consulting firm before, and is the SPA for the Maize team. Jenn is Canadian, worked at Accenture and the World Economic Forum previously, and is the SPA working with the Administration team. Our apartment has become slightly less representative of the world (before: South Korea, Luxembourg, Brazil, US; now: Brazil, US, Canada) but should still be fun.

SPA farewell #4 and random Addis stuff

Another week, another blog post.

Yesterday (July 5), we had the ATA farewell for Sid Kamath. Sid's a fixture at ATA. He's been here since fall of 2011 and was something like employee #16. He's been involved in several teams (Soil, EthioSIS) and acted as a Program Manager (promoted SPA) to support Analytics, Systems, the CEO Office, and Khalid personally. He's the longest tenured SPA to still be at ATA (though Omondi only arrived a couple weeks after him). Before coming to ATA, Sid was at McKinsey London (where he'll start again in September). For the next couple months, Sid is traveling and working part-time, so we'll still see him around the office a few more times. He's a cool dude and his knowledge will be a huge loss to ATA...you know, when he actually leaves :)

Similar to Caitlin's farewell, several people spoke at his farewell: Khalid (CEO), Sam (the Soil Director), Mirafe (the Chief of Staff to the CEO), Renee (previously SPA in Analytics and now the Program Manager for Cross-Cutting Initiatives), and, of course, Sid himself.

Later that night, there was a party at Sid, Iris, and Nadia's house (Renee is moving in to replace Sid). Eric and Nadia busted out their dancing moves. I have two videos, but they won't upload even with the work internet connection. Thanks a lot Ethio-Telecom :/  Just know that Eric is a pretty freaking awesome dancer. As a not sufficient consolation prize, enjoy this picture of Sid and Angeles.

I've decided I need a "random things I saw in Addis" segment for my blog. I know I had that one post about it, but since then, guess what...I've seen more random things in Addis.

I didn't realize Toyota and Apple did co-branding.

That's right, every day on my way to and from work, I walk past a ping pong table sitting out in the open in this little square near my house. Outdoor ping pong, huh? Turns out college and Addis are not so different (except that it gets way the freak colder in Utah than it ever gets here).