passion fruit, radio, and motorbikes (oh my!)

I actually have about seven different projects in various stages right now: cost cutting, radio advertising, work visas, productive assets, motorbikes, pH testing, auditor. In a throwback to my elementary school days, when I used to explain my day to my mom in a one-sentence summary, I'll choose a few that are most update-worthy to paint you a picture of my work life.

1. Cost cutting

This project has turned out to be tremendously rewarding, mostly because the scope is so big it's taken me through virtually all of One Acre Fund's operations. I've become a near-expert on the passion fruit program: correcting all the relevant farmer databases (nice how that whole task fits into six words but consumed an impossible amount of my time), monitoring sales and deposits, collecting weekly data on harvest and payments, tracking and issuing bonuses for field staff who meet our weekly harvest target of 10 kg/farmer/week.

The most interesting recent development: Normally we select farmers for planting each season, train them on land preparation, and then during the rainy season provide them with passion fruit seedlings from our nursery and fertilizer inputs. This year over a thousand stems were destroyed by a hailstorm before being distributed to farmers - so in four sites, farmers received few or no seedlings, and the ones we distributed had 50% death rate because the plants were so fragile.

Having become the resident passion fruit go-to, this problem now falls under my jurisdiction. With help from our field director and approval from Andrew, we'll be providing our failed passion fruit farmers with free bean seed and fertilizer for an eighth-acre plot (standard size for our passion program) and asking for no repayment. (Normally our inputs are loans that are repaid at the end of the season with a portion of harvest; since this was our mistake we are allowing the farmers to keep all their bean harvest.) The bean planting is more central to OAF that the auxiliary special projects where I've been focusing, and it's exciting to source seeds and organize input delivery/planting training. I sort of stumbled into One Acre Fund's core operations - with three weeks left. Not bad!

2. Radio advertising

We're going on air! OAF will make its debut on a agricultural market program, Soko hewani ("Market on air") as a guest speaker on June 23 - free of charge. Next week we will announce the appearance to our field staff so they can encourage farmers to tune in. I'll also be meeting with Patrick, our field director in Webuye who is our on-air OAF representative (selection basis: 1. knows all about OAF; 2. speaks Swahili; 3. doesn't get flustered; 4. awesome voice). Then I'm meeting with the DJ to go over the script/prompts... And on Tuesday tuning in nervously to hear one of my projects actually going through to completion!

3. Motorbikes

Why haven't you heard about the motorbike program until now?? It's actually been a three week "borrowed" project from Lukas, who is currently in the US. It's been a notoriously hellish project for everyone involved, which actually makes it a bit easier to take over; anything that can go wrong already has and can't possibly be chalked up to my personal incompetence. ;) In principal, our drivers should bring our field managers to their work sites, spend the afternoon driving for cash, submit 300/- daily remittances, and pick up the manager again the afternoon. In reality, the picture is blurred by lots of accidents, arrested drivers, stolen bikes, missing remittances. What fun.

Side: As an illustration of just how poorly the program has performed, our April Fools Joke on poor Lukas was totally moto-centered. We explained the holiday to Tipo, the Kenyan staff who deals with the bike program, and arranged for him to call during our group dinner at the local Red Hat restaurant. The phone call came through: "Lukas, two more motorbikes have been stolen". Lukas went outside to answer, came back in looking near-tears, and without speaking to anyone asked Sean for a cigarette. Because of his visible anguish - understandable from a guy who just that week had been out visiting prisons trying to figure out where one of our bikes went - we yelled "April Fools!!" almost right away. And then provided him with an endless supply of beer and hugs. Maybe you had to be there (or know Lukas) but it wins my vote for best April Fools joke ever.

In the past couple weeks, I've worked with Tipo to collect daily remittance data, hold driver meetings in two of our districts, and establish a trial "token" system to reward our best drivers. The remittance data collection is frustrating; we have about 20 drivers with a ridiculous turnover rate because so frequently drivers fail to remit, and most of the new drivers don't get the proper training or even know what is on their contract. We attempted to address this, along with their other complaints, during the driver meetings.

Yesterday in Kakamega our meeting ran over two hours, and more than an hour of this was simply listening to driver complaints. I diligently took notes and addressed each concern, but had to raise my eyebrows at a couple of the issues raised (e.g., "the field manager's husband is jealous of me driving his wife to work and if he is there he won't let her get on my bike").

I've enjoyed attempting to tie up loose ends of the program, but the problems are pretty deep and pervasive so I won't be too sad to hand it back over to Lukas when he returns. After all, I did get a forwarded email just this week from our Chwele bookkeeper that began, "Dear Lukas, The motorcycle program in Chwele is failed."

Here's hoping law school is half this educational (or entertaining).