SPA farewell #2 and Iron Chef Addis #3

All right, another week / another work Saturday broken up with a blog post. I also need to try to make it to the giant market here, so this will be (somewhat) brief.

SPA farewell #2 happened on Thursday (April 4). Frances Low has been the SPA for the Soils Program here and then for the Fertilizer Blending Plants Project. ATA is helping 4 cooperative unions to build fertilizer blending plants in country. This way, once we finish our extensive soil mapping activities this year, the plants can import/domestically buy raw materials and create customized fertilizers for each area based on soil needs and crop being grown. My new roommate Fabio is replacing here on this project. The fertilizer blending plants and the EthioSIS soil mapping are definitely two of the super cool things being done at ATA.

Frances has been here about 6 months. She was at Bain before in Chicago and is going back there after a couple weeks of travel. This may be the last departure at least for a month or two.

Frances receiving a farewell present during the roof farewell party. The Director for Soil is Sam Gameda, who is on the far left in the blue and white striped shirt. Hezekiel Tasse is the Program Manager for EthioSIS soil mapping and fertilizer blending plants and is just to the left of Frances in the first picture and just to her right in the next two. Sam gave a very heartfelt speech about Frances and all her contributions.

Frances talked about ATA and how it stands apart as an organization that pushes to really get stuff done.

On Friday (April 5), I went to the third rendition of Iron Chef Addis put on by the SPA community (plus other friends). Major props go to Sarah Hewitt (SPA for Gender) for putting this all together.

As someone who has spent way (read: way, way, way, way, way) too much time watching the Food Network, it’s pretty awesome. This is the second I’ve been to since I got here. Eric Couper (SPA for EthioSIS soil mapping project and ICT – Information and Communications Technology) is the reigning champ from the first two iron chefs (they do things here based on the pickup basketball premise of winner gets to keep playing), and he was challenged by Iris Shim (SPA for Maize). They get intense about this here (see the trash talking email below sent out by Nadia, who was one of Iris’ sous chefs), which I think is great. This was even more prevalent this time as Iris used Sid and Nadia (her roommates) for her sous chefs. Since Sid lost to Eric in Iron Chef #2 – Battle Pineapple, Iris and her squad were out for blood.

As usual, I was intrigued by the competition aspect, enjoyed watching, had no idea what people were cooking (as you’ll see from my lack of descriptions below), and didn’t eat any of it.

There is one more ingredient to my description of this event…our secret ingredient…the theme on which our chefs will offer their succulent variations. Friday’s secret ingredient was…(wait for it – yes, that’s a How I Met Your Mother Reference in the middle of a long Iron Chef America reference)…HONEY! So now Addis, with an open heart and an empty stomach, I say unto you in the words of some Japanese actor’s kind-of uncle: “Allez cuisine!”

Pre-battle trash talk from Nadia (in email form…what a consultant):

Subject: which of these is not like the other?

Yeah, I went there. IRON CHEF ADDIS: rise of the underdog/return of the asian victor.

Nadia Viswanath

Sarah Hewitt - Addis Iron Chef Chairwoman

The venue - this was held at Catherine, Elise, and Nicky's house. It's really nice. I think this might be the nicest kitchen I've seen in all of Addis.

First course - appetizer. I did warn you that I wouldn't be able to describe the food. Iris made something with a pepper. I don't remember what Eric made. It was supposed to look like a fish though there was no fish in it (what's the opposite of meta?).

Second course - entree. Iris made something with seaweed and rice. Eric made something with a biscuit (I did eat a couple of those) and some kind of peanut / sugar snap pea salad (which obviously also had something purple in it) that everyone seemed to really like.

Third course - dessert. Sadly the ice cream maker was no where to be found, so no protein based ice creams :( Iris made a peach cobbler and some kind of cocktail. Eric made some kind of sorbet-type thing (though it didn't freeze right) with chocolate and honey.

Rachel playing the part of Jeffrey Steininger (one of the usual Iron Chef America judges). While everyone fills in a score to determine the winner, Rachel provides the searing commentary.

In the end, judgment declared Iris (with sous chefs Nadia and Sid) victorious over Eric (with sous chefs Alli and Elise). Clearly Iris was excited :)

Realizing I had too many pictures of food I didn't know anything about and not enough pictures of people, so below are pictures with lots of people in them.

Eric on far left (from behind). Nadia in black. Sid in the middle. Renee in gray. I think that's Stephane and Iris on the right but hard to tell from this angle.

From left to right, Darshan, Rachel, Eric, Alli, Nadia, Renee, Roxy.

From left to right, Nadia, Sid, and Renee.

Nicky in pink, and Sid serving as barkeep.

Sarah keeping track of time close in on the left. Then going right - Barry, Caitlin, Elise, Catherine, Stephane, Darshan, Rachel, and Eric.

Eric - the two-time champ.

Terrible picture, but the guy in the blue shirt is Angeles (who had the birthday party at the US Embassy a few weeks back).

Nadia and Iris.

In a stunning turn of events, Rachel (who is engaged to Eric) immediately challenged Iris in a grudge match. Clearly, Iron Chef Addis #4 will be a barn burner.

I was going to post more pictures of the awesome weekend that was March 14-17, but I've already taken too long on this, so look out for them soon.

House and SPA farewell #1

So…the internet clearly got offended by my attitude towards it last week. It punished me by being not just slow but non-existent almost the entire week at ATA. It finally came back on Friday, which simply meant there was so much to catch up on that I needed to work this Saturday. I kid you not: 5 minutes after getting into the office, it broke again. Needless to say, everyone who has emailed me or commented or my blog or tried to get in touch with me recently is going to have to forgive the tardiness of my responses. I’m writing this on Saturday, March 30, but goodness only knows when I’ll be able to post it (update: though the internet keeps flipping off and on, I think this might get out today).

In other news, I found a house…actually an apartment. Three other SPA’s started around the same time as me, and I got suckered into moving into a super nice apartment (not what I wanted) that is unfurnished (also not what I wanted). As the consummate frugal person (a nice way of putting it) in the SPA community, it offends me a little how much we’re paying for this place. On the positive side, there are 4 different levels of room in the apartment, so I could quickly claim the smallest (or thereby cheapest) option.

My roommates are Hayoung (she worked for McKinsey in South Korea), Stephane (he worked for McKinsey in Belgium maybe but he’s from Luxemburg…I don’t know…something like that), and Fabio (he worked for Bain in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Four roommates, four different continents (living together on a fifth continent).

Hayoung and Stephane moved in last Sunday, I moved in on Monday, and Fabio didn’t arrive until this week (and then immediately had to go out into the field), so he’ll move in during the next couple days.

In an interesting development, Hayoung and Stephane have apparently started dating (though they haven’t told me, it seems pretty obvious), which is kind of a strange dynamic in the apartment.

We’re on the 2^nd floor (3^rd floor in America) of a 5 story apartment building where each apartment takes up one floor with the ground floor available for office space. We are the first tenants in the building, so things are currently pretty quiet.

Enough chatting, let’s see some pictures…

The building (we're the floor just above the tree on the right).

The outside courtyard (grass is at a crazy premium around here so you'll notice the lack of it).

Dining room (taken from the connected living room).

Living room (taken from the connected dining room). Notice the doors to the balcony.

Kitchen (with Stephane and Hayoung).

More kitchen (sorry, I wouldn't be posting so many, but I'm trying to play to my audience...I'm looking at you Dad).

Hallway between living room and bedrooms.

Bathroom to be shared by Stephane, Fabio, and me. Hayoung has her own bathroom in the master bedroom. The shower is crazy nice. It has all kinds of different spigots and shower heads to shoot water at you (though we're figuring out a leak problem at the moment). There are two sinks - one in the bathroom itself and one just outside in the hall, which is convenient when 3 people are sharing a bathroom.

My room packed and as unpacked as it has gotten so far.

My cabinets (Addis equivalent of a closet), which are in the hall just outside my room.

View outside my bedroom windows. The big buildings on the right of the first picture are Getu Commercial (one of the landmarks close to us).

The view from the balcony off of the living room (apologies for the weird lighting in one of the pictures).

When my family lived in Houston, we used to joke that if you changed the hymn from "A Might Fortress is Our God" to "A Mighty Fortress is Our Home," it would describe the house we lived in. I think I may have beat that house now as the apartment building not only has a giant cinder block wall around it but also has not 1, not 2, but 3 gates.

Most SPAs come to ATA for 6-12 months, so I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that I’m already seeing people leaving. Sarah Platts had been at ATA for 14 months. She started working on EthioSIS (Ethiopia’s project to do detailed soil mapping of the entire country), then Household Irrigation, and then the CEO office. The CEO office and Special Projects sit together on the 9^th floor, so she sat just a couple seats to my right. In fact, funnily enough, I have Sarah Hewitt (the SPA from the Gender team) sitting two seats to my left, so for a while I was surrounded by the ATA’s Sarahs. Anyway, for some reason I feel the need to commemorate each SPA who leaves, so you may have several of these over the coming months. Sarah Platts was at Deloitte before ATA and did some cool work with them over in Afghanistan. She is now traveling SE Asia for 3 months before going to hang out on her parents’ ranch in Wyoming while she looks for a job (potentially in fashion, Venture Capital, or some kind of start-up).

Below are pictures of the farewell ATA held for Sarah in Riva’s (the restaurant on the 2^nd floor of our building). I would have put up the pictures with her looking the right way but the flash reflected in such a way as to look super creepy. Sarah's obviously in the blue dress. In the first picture, you can see Khalid (our CEO) in the tie and Jeffrey (our Senior Director of Systems Programs) beside him (he's the super tall guy). In the second picture, you can see Mirafe in the suit over towards the far right. He's the Chief of Staff to the CEO and was involved with some work I did at McKinsey last year. Stay tuned as I think we'll have another farewell next week.