Sometimes I am frightened but I'm ready to learn

(This post was written on Wednesday 15 May but only posted today for lack of time.)

 Today is the first day of ILRI’s 2013 Annual Planning Meeting; it is a regular strategic meeting where many of ILRI’s staff members get together to discuss the way forward for the Institute.

I am part of the organizing committee of this year’s meeting. It has been hard work to come up with a relevant program of activities that will keep a mixed crowd of researchers and administrators engaged during three days. The meeting also has to reach its objective: to figure out how ILRI can unlock livestock development potential through science, influence and capacity development. This is all part of delivering our new strategy.

Together with colleagues Barry Shapiro, Iddo Dror, Peter Ballantyne, Siboniso Moyo, Stuart Worsley, Sylvia Silvestri, and an army of diligent and helpful national support staff, we have worked under the stimulating supervision of Peter Thorne, chair of the organization committee, to devise the program of activities, set up an enormous tent to hold the event on the ILRI Addis campus, make arrangements to feed and house more than 200 participants, and try to keep everybody happy.

Last night, the biggest worry for some of the organization committee members was that the 'sauce' we had prepared for our colleagues to taste might not go down well. Some of the facilitation methods we have chosen require strong commitment from participants to attain the desired objectives. We can only be confident that these proven knowledge sharing methods like open space will work once again. 

There are still a few things to sort out before the meeting starts this morning but I am sure it is going to be a great event.

The power of love

Céline Dion, My love - essential collection, Sony BMG

APM2013 logo: ILRI/Apollo Habtamu

Photo: ILRI/Zerihun Sewunet

Take me out tonight where there's music and there's people and they're young and alive

I have just had a completely surreal evening, one only possible in a city like Nairobi.

The evening started rather badly with heavy rain around 18.00 just as I was leaving home to go into town centre. As a result, I was caught up in a massive traffic jam in which I was at a standstill for 20 minutes. I only managed to get out of the jam by snaking across lanes at 90° from the traffic flow between enormous lorries that were, luckily, completely still.

Once out of the jam I took a back road into the city centre where I quickly found my way to the Alliance française. I wanted to go see a puppet show by Théâtre MU. It was the very moving story of a child soldier somewhere in Africa who had escaped his tragic ordeal and overcome his tortured inner feelings through the art of puppetry. Indeed, the whole story was told with wooden puppets playing the main protagonists. I really wanted to go see this show because the child soldier phenomenon seems to be a recent plague in several conflict-ridden African countries. I am still discovering the continent and wanted to hear this story from somebody who had lived through this ordeal.

At 20.30 I was out of the Alliance française and ready to go join a new group of singers I have just started singing with in Nairobi. This small group used to be led by Stuart Tibbs who just left Kenya to go back to the United Kingdom. I had met Stuart on the production of A marvelous life last month and he had persuaded me to go take his place as the only tenor in the group. The choir rehearses once a week; singers take turns to host rehearsals and the host provides dinner and drinks before, during and after the singing. Needless to say, the concept of this singing group is completely in line with my personality.

I had asked the lead soprano Cathy Sampson to send me directions to tonight's rehearsal place. During the puppet show, I had received a text message, which I opened after the show had ended: the choir manager Diane Skinner was giving me directions to a house in a certain area of town. I had already been to that area so I knew how to get to it from city centre. I took out my Nairobi map to find where the exact roads were and off I went.

Arriving in the residential area, I was surrounded by darkness because the roads were unlit. I found the road intersection I was supposed to go to, turned the corner and found myself in front of an enormous cast-iron gate with lots of guards around it. Puzzled, I paused for a while. I then turned towards the gate to find myself in front of the residence of the British High Commissioner to Kenya. The guards asked to confirm my name; I seemed to be expected. I drove in with the car into the gravel alley, parked the car under a tree and was ushered into the residence by one of the guards.

And suddenly there was light! I walked through an impressive wooden-floored hallway flooded with light; I went straight on to where I could see people through a door on which I knocked. It was the dining room, also flooded with light, chandelier hanging from the ceiling, candles on the table, table set for 10 guests, waiters serving wine, a buffet of curries. And to greet me to the table was the British High Commissioner himself: Christian Turner. To my surprise, I found myself in front of a delightful young man of my own generation.

What followed was delicious food, an intense hour of sight-reading new pieces, meringues for pudding, tea and coffee in a beautiful setting. The evening turned out to be extremely pleasant after all.

There is a light that never goes out
The Smiths, WEA

Photo: Linh H. Nguyen

Out to the woods away, we'll hunt the stag to bay

Read here how I found myself being the game of an interesting hunt.

Foresters sound the cheerful horn
Henry Bishop
The singing club, The Hilliard ensemble and Paul Hillier, Harmonia mundi

Stag hunt: David Hoffman

I like simple tools

What made us so hungry that we literally wiped the plates clean at lunch time during a research workshop in Northern Vietnam? Read more here.

Simple tools
Ry Cooder, Pull up some dust and sit down, Nonesuch

The sun's ashine in the blue

After having sent my father off on his plane back to Chile and faced flight delays because of the snow in European airports, I have returned to Nairobi immediately to go on stage, taking part in a production of a delightfully British musical.

'Glamorous life' portrays the life and works of Welsh composer Ivor Novello who lived in the first half of the 20th century and produced popular hits during the first and second world wars. The cast is all dressed up for a dinner party during the 1920s in the first half and then during the 1940s in the second half. We play and sing deliciously old-fashioned and romantic music while our audience is having a three-course meal.

Concentration was high before the show in the men's changing room last night - or was it everybody reflecting on the oddity of heavy snowfall in England in late March as broadcast on the television? We all had a great time on stage afterwards because the weather is fine here in Nairobi and Novello's music is so light-hearted it is difficult not to be happy when hearing it.

Waltz of my heart
Ivor Novello, The dancing years, Hallmark

Grief should ne’er approach the fair

I have spent one month in cold still wintery France lately because my father had to undergo two operations for unrelated problems. Coming out of hospital after major surgery is hard on the patient because doctors discharge their patients as soon as the latter can stand on their own. This allows the hospital to reuse the room for another patient. So the first few days out of hospital are really hard because one is back home but one no longer has all the medical and general care provided by the nurses.

I decided to leave Nairobi to go take care of my father for a whole month between the two operations and after his second operation. I think it was a wise decision because I noticed how debilitated he was from the grueling experience: one is asleep during the operation but it takes a long time to get over the pain afterwards. So I spent ten days in our Parisian flat, one week in a Bordeaux hotel while my father was being operated upon and another week in our aunties’ house in the Southwestern seaside village of Mimizan. My mother could only come for two weeks because she had lots of things to sort out back in Chile in preparation for my parents’ final move back to France in May when my father retires.

The good part of looking after my father was that he had to be fed lots of good food in order to get back into shape so I spent a lot of my time cooking and preparing his favourite dishes to make sure he would eat. I just needed to watch out for his now strict diabetic diet and control all sources of sugar in his food. That meant cutting my own consumption of wine and – alas! – desserts so as not to be tempting him. This was one more reason to stay at home and eat home-cooked food, the ingredients of which are easier to monitor than what one eats in a restaurant. Special highlights for my father were the beef roast I prepared on his second day out of hospital in Paris, a butter pan-fried sole meunière freshly fished out of the sea by the local fisherman in Mimizan and the roasted suckling lamb chops and shoulder, the leftovers of which I then recycled into a simple but delicious Basque stew. 

While in Bordeaux my mother and I tried out some of the numerous restaurants in town because we could not cook at the hotel. Of course, my father was jealous and sulky because he was eating hospital grub. I was delighted to catch up with Antoine Moga, a high school and agricultural university friend, who took my mother and me out for a delicious dinner and a refined bottle of 2002 Burgundy wine. Antoine works as a wine broker for the more prestigious Bordeaux wines so I guess he has very good suppliers.

While the food was French, the music was British. When in Bordeaux my mother and I got an opportunity to go to the city’s grand opera house to take our minds off our ordeal. We saw a good show of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in a very minimalistic stage setting, which fitted the extremely concentrated and tragic plot of the piece. All this time, I was working on solos and ensembles for a musical based on the early 20^th century Welsh composer Ivor Novello’s life and works; I also managed to squeeze in an hour of tuition with my Parisian voice coach Mary Saint-Palais to prepare my solos. I had to know the music by heart because as soon as I would come back to Nairobi, stage rehearsals would start for the musical show. Read more on that in my next blog post.

My father is now well and resting at home in Chile.

Dido and Aeneas

Henry Purcell, Les arts florissants, William Christie, Harmonia mundi

It ain't heavy

I’m discovering African markets while travelling for ILRI. Last month I was in Tamale, the biggest town in the Northern region of Ghana, to facilitate a training on agrifood marketing and value chains for farmer beneficiaries of the Volta 2 project. So I took the opportunity to visit the central retail and wholesale markets there.

From past literature on agrifood marketing in Africa, I had come to understand that one of the plagues of markets on the continent was the lack of common measurements for mass and volume, which was very detrimental to farmers and consumers. One woman farmer involved in the training explained: a common mode of measurement used by stakeholders in the value chains are large bowls or basins. They fill these bowls up with grain and buy or sell the product at a given price per bowl. However, the bowls can be filled up to various degrees: flat up to the rim, or with the product piling up above the rim. Traders are known to change their bowl-filling practices depending on whether they are buying or selling. The farmers at the training complained that when they are selling grains to traders, what the trader measures at 3 bowls, they could measure at 3 bowls and a half! I was even told the bowls could be adulterated by filling up the bottom with material so the outside volume looked the same but the containing volume was actually much smaller. This is a source of great transaction costs in African markets because farmers and consumers have to bargain not only the price of the goods, but also the way the goods will be measured. The solution to this, according to past literature, would be the introduction of weighing scales.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see that in the central retail market of Tamale, all the butcher stalls were equipped with proper weighing scales, thus allowing butchers and consumers to transact meat and agree on its price per kilogram. Using a weighing scale can also help consumers buy the quantity that they really need for the size of the household, thus avoiding food waste in areas where refrigeration is not widespread in household kitchens. In the butcher stall photographed above, there were two scales: one hanging scale for large beef carcasses and one smaller scale for cut meat chunks. Unfortunately, scales were still rare on the stalls selling fresh produce and dried fish where the products were still being sold by the bunch or by the stack.

He ain't heavy, he's my brother

The Hollies, Very best of The Hollies, EMI