Blogging Siaya: Fundi-mentalism and cheap labor

A week or two before I went home for Thanksgiving, we had some electricity fluctuations that had the lights flickering on and off. The next day, some of our laptops weren't charging, and the AC adapters were wet with something that smelled like antifreeze. There was another expat around the corner, also affected, who was just about to start training her staff--so this was not far from catastrophic. I despaired, and tried to get Finance to procure me a new power adapter ASAP but it seemed like it would take a few days or a personal trip to and from Kisumu.

Eventually, rummaging around our storeroom (I'm still not sure I know all it contains), I found the adapter for another laptop that put out the same voltage. The plug wasn't right for my computer's power jack, but I got an idea. "I bet," I thought to myself, "I can take these to the battery charging station and electronics repair shop across the street and have him splice the connector from the broken adapter onto the other one." I thought I was a genius.

This repair shop, by the way, is about the width of a closet.

I walked over, introduced myself to the owner, Shadrack, and explained what I wanted to do. He could do it, but wisely suggested checking the new charger to see if it put out a charge. It didn't. Darn.

Shadrack, once a lecturer at the college
across the street, now the proud owner of
a repair shop. Because it pays better.

But! that was not the end of the story. Shadrack was convinced he could repair the adapter. He pried it apart, revealing a small circuit board. Shadrack quickly determined one of the capacitors had burst and was leaking electrolytic fluid. An hour later he had cleaned it with solvent, let it dry, and put it back together--it worked like new and he charged me $1.50.

That was a shift in perspective. I had just been thinking of the charger as a black box of plastic stamped together on some Chinese assembly line. But clearly it was a device that could be understood and repaired. I quickly brought Shadrack the second burned out adapter.

It's a fairly commonplace belief that we now have a "disposable culture" in the US, which is different from how things once were. I don't think anyone is surprised to see poor people getting more use out of the little they have than the rich. My experience here certainly bear that out; in addition to fixing laptop chargers, people also eat organ meat (they call it matumbo).

The reason we throw things like burned out chargers out is that time (whether labor or convenience) is expensive, and things are cheap. In Siaya, the reverse is true: time is very cheap--most people can't find much work and their back up is working on a near-subsistence farm) but things are comparatively expensive. Especially manufactured and imported things.  

That is one of the most foreign things about being here; although directly linked to the poverty, the low cost of time and labor is more persistently jarring and odd to me than the outright destitution everywhere. I see it featuring in lots of little oddities of life: a beer or soda at the store costs as much as it does in the restaurant, for instance. Or when I offer to buy someone lunch, they are just as happy if I bring them a meal to-go after I have eaten as if I sat with them at a restaurant. Or people in general being very willing to wait around.

Siaya and environs are teeming with people like Shadrack, or like Boaz, my bike mechanic. There's a Swahili word, fundi, which more or less means "craftsman;" that's how anyone plying a trade like this is referred to. There is a tailors' row in Siaya town, and also a barbers' row. They are even out in the middle of nowhere. I was riding along a rural road, and my bike chain started slipping off every few hundred yards. The third time it happened, there was a mechanic sitting under a tree with his tools on the side of the road. He fixed the problem for 20 cents and I was back on my way.

Boaz, bike and motorbike fundi, also asks sharp questions
about American race relations.

 
One of the ways I have heard the story about disposability told is that in the glorious past, we built things to last and we knew how to take care of them. This may have been true of 1950s America, but it isn't really true here; most manufactures are of pretty poor quality. And it makes sense that they would be: that's how you make something cheap. The seat of my new bicycle was not well attached, and from the very get-go the chain occasionally loosening and starting to fall off repeatedly has been a problem. But when it costs 20 cents to fix, and there is a bike fundi at every other corner, it makes sense that the equilibrium is for low quality goods. 

Blogging Kisumu: Cirque du moto

Sitting in the back of the motocycle rickshaw (a tuk-tuk, as it is known), rumbling down a dark but paved street in Kisumu, I glanced up when the driver tapped twice on the horn. A bicycle was entering the intersection right in front of us, with a passenger sitting on the rear rack. The bicyclist sped up just as the passenger gracefully leapt off the rack and stood back, allowing the tuk-tuk to pass right in front of him. 

Ladies and gentlemen, Kisumu. 

Blogging Siaya: Swahili or Bust (Probably Bust)

The Swahili pile, including headlamp
for your evening blackouts.

The personal project that I'm most excited about here is picking up Swahili. Then, once I've got Swahili down, I say to myself and anyone who will pretend to believe me, I'll take on Luo.* I have so much time here, after all, it makes sense to pay the upfront cost of spending my weekends for the first few months studying the language. But it is hard. 

Kenya is the first place I have been where the locals have insisted on how easy their language(s) is (are) to learn. I remember hearing when I was little that English is a notoriously difficult language for foreigners to learn. I heard it enough that I took it for granted--English in my mind was up there with Japanese. Then, when I went to France, my classmates loudly and modestly insisted that English was easy but it must be such a challenge for someone trying to learn French, with all its conjugations, etc., etc.. And I went to China--it is unsurprising that the Chinese have a (correct) appreciation of the difficulty of their language.

But Kenyans will not let you off so easy. I arrived, pronounced my intention to learn Swahili by the end of a year, and was told, "Ah, it's so simple, you'll know Swahili in six weeks." Six weeks in, this does not make me happy about the minimum of three seconds or so it takes me to locate and conjugate or make agreement of each one of the maybe 150 words I know. 

I actually find it particularly difficult. Probably that is above all beginning from nothing, but it certainly feels like Swahili is just hard. The most challenging thing for me are the long strings of words that have to be modified in relationship to each other. French has conjugations and agreements, but they're just pairs of words: adjectives match their nouns and verbs match their subjects. In Swahili you get a noun whose demonstrative as well as its adjective must match, at the same time that you need the right subject prefix (basically a conjugation). And on top of that a lot of grammatical features (like plural vs. singular) that any of my previous languages would tack on to the end of words are prefixes or even infixes in the middle of words. I have no head for it yet.

Useful example sentences

I have to acknowledge that there's a real possibility that I'm trying too hard. Not in terms of how much effort I've put in--God knows I could and should put in many more hours--but in terms of taking the grammar seriously as an organizing principle for my learning. I am working through a terrific textbook that lays things out quite clearly and in manageable but thorough chunks, giving extensive drill-like exercises to do for each new structure. Yet, when I had my first Swahili lesson with one of our enumerators this week, I realized that people don't seem to have the same kind of ideas about "correct" Swahili that I (for instance) have about English, or that Changchun denizens (for another instance) have about Chinese. J, my teacher, was giving some demonstration sentences, and I couldn't figure out how he was getting the demonstratives and the subject prefixes he was using for those particular nouns. I tried to say it the way I had learned or remembered learning from my textbook, and he said, "Yes, if you say it that way, people will understand."

But I wanted correct Swahili, of course, and I tried to figure out if his usage was a regionalism or they way the language had shifted over the last couple decades. When I pressed him on it, he opened up the textbook he had brought, and somewhat sheepishly said, "You know, when I was learning this, the curriculum was very confused because they were changing the names of all the noun classes."
It left me with the impression that correct Swahili--by any standard--is not quite a national obsession.

My hypothesis is that that's because it's a lingua franca but not a first language (at least not out here in Luoland). On top of that, it's one of two linguae francae (?), where English is the language of literature and status. Sandwiched between local languages and English, Swahili seems to be spoken with a very pragmatic bent.

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* Luo is a Nilotic language, while Swahili is Bantu, with a heavy dose of Arabic. Neither is too helpful for the other, although Luo has plenty in common with other languages spoken, for instance, in Kalenjin land.

Blogging Siaya: The Chicken (Food Culture Part 1)

During my first week in Siaya, when I was overlapping with my predecessor, I noticed he didn't have any meat in the fridge. He wasn't a vegetarian, he told me, but the only available meat was fresh. If I wanted some, I could ask the office assistant, J, to show me how to slaughter and butcher a chicken.

Needless to say, I quickly identified this as one of the emblematic Kenya experiences I was determined to have.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the reader's point of view) I didn't take a couple of the would-be key photos in the series. But there is still a pretty good "before" shot...

 And a nice "after" one, too:

In the end, the meat was a little tougher and stringier than I am used to, but the sauce, which featured the blood of the chicken as well as the more prosaic garlic and peppers, imparted a rich flavor. After this point, beware, there is a little blood.

J got the ball rolling by buying the chicken from the compound next door. Their free range chickens have been strutting around our yard, eating our trash. When she came back with it, she showed me how to hold it by the base of the wings, and went in to grab our knife, a big bowl, a tupperware for the blood, and to set some water boiling.

She and another one of the staff showed me how to step on the chicken with one foot holding down the legs and the other securing the wings. They slid the tupperware under the hen's neck, and told me to cut off the head.

"Cut it all the way off?" I asked, knowing the knife was a bit dull.

"Yes, just cut it off."

"How should I cut it?"

"Just cut it off, it's OK." She plucked a few feathers out of the front of the neck.

I shrugged, bent down, and sawed through the chicken's throat with as few strokes as I could manage. The animal didn't put up much of a struggle until the blade was well into its throat. After I had the head free, I held the stump so that the blood (mostly) went into the tupperware. It kept trying to flap about for a little bit.

We put the chicken in the big bowl and poured the boiling water over it. On the first try, the water wasn't quite boiling, in fact, and plucking was difficult.

We did a second round of water, and the plucking was much easier.

I understand the custom is to place the chicken on a small charcoal stove (a jiku) for a few seconds to toast off the small "hairs" from the skin. We didn't have one. In the end, the skin had a slightly unpleasant pungent flavor, and I wonder if the charcoal treatment would have gotten rid of that.

The butchering came next, and, perhaps surprisingly, that was the point at which I could no longer retain my perfect composure and blase' expression. It was the subtle smell that did it, but in spite of my desire to appear stoic and worldly, a growing wave of nausea drove me outside for some fresh air. E, the project manager, took over after I'd made the first few cuts under her attentive guidance.

Then we through the pieces in the pot, J took over, and when it was done cooking (we only have one burner), we whipped up some ugali and ate.

Coda: I also snapped this photo after we had slain the chicken. Notice the (morbidly) curious visitor behind the chair leg.

 

Blogging Kisumu: a snapshot

Staying with the co-worker of a friend in Kisumu, this made me laugh uncontrollably.

I don't know if there's really any deep psychological interpretation to that, but if I were in an interpretation of dreams mood, I could say something.  Perhaps: "It captures the absurdity and the daily difficulty of determining whether an experience means one thing or its total opposite."

(The switch turns out to be a panic button, if you wondered)

Blogging Siaya: Money Culture, Part 1

 The idea that's been kicking around my head for this blog post has been "the astonishing honesty of rural Kenyans with respect to money." In spite of the vastly greater amount of money I have than them--and my extremely limited knowledge of Kenyan ways and prices--the locals are remarkably tame in their efforts to rip me off or defraud me. In fact, sometimes they seem to make no such exertions at all! It is customary for some merchants to inflate prices for wazungu,* but the markup is rarely more than 30%. Compared to the brazen vendors in Northern China who would inflate prices by a factor of 4 or 8, these guys seem strikingly ingenuous.

It's not quite an absolute: on a couple of occasions someone has tried to get a lot more money from me than they would have tried for from a Kenyan. But, in one of those two cases, I was in Nairobi. Notably that was one of the two financial transactions I had in Nairobi, which suggests this is more of an urban-rural divide than a Kenyan cultural feature.

But there's more to my surprise than the low mzungu tax rates. Bargaining is commonplace, but not nearly as much as I would have expected. There seems to be a pretty strong cultural understanding of what something ought to cost. Even when the mzungu tax is being applied, it isn't applied arbitrarily. A motorcycle taxi ride around town costs me 50 shillings, and it costs my co-workers 30 (I know that exceeds 30%, but these are piddling sums and I think it has to do with 50 KES being the smallest bill). On one occasion, I've managed to get a ride for 30 shillings--by hiring a driver through one of our staff. "Supermarkets" (more akin to what I know as a corner store) have what seem to be fixed prices, and they aren't alone--people selling fruit in the market also seem to, as far as I can tell.

Incidentally, a friend at another IPA project tells me that they're having a bit of difficulty measuring price levels, because, among other things, goods are sold in lots of different units. None of the vendors seem to have an idea of what the conversions are, so it's easy to imagine that the law of one price doesn't exactly prevail.

Registering for M-PESA: mobile money.

It also turns out that the local staff get paternalistically indignant when I "overpay" for something, even if the markup is small and they know I make (substantially) more than they do. Any time I come back to the office with something I've bought for myself, our office assistant in particular asks how much I paid for it. I've taken to being cagey.

--
* the plural of the famous "mzungu", which translates roughly into American English as "gringo." Except that of course Latinos fall under the mzungu label, as do lighter skinned Indians.

Blogging Siaya - The Journey Here

IPA Kenya, Siaya Office. We don't stand on ceremony here.

Here I am! Surely at this point on my journey all my readers know me well and have heard that I just took a long-craved job with the Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) spinoff, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in rural Western Kenya. The task: oversee the second half of a development randomized controlled trial on how farmers learn about new products and improved practices. The setting: Siaya, Kenya, a town of about 11,000 people about halfway between Kisumu and Busia--or more or less equidistant from Lake Victoria and the Uganda border.

I expect I will write both about the experience of being an expat/administrator/manager/researcher here, and about the substance of what this work is about, although those components might go in different places. Right now, everything is fluid!

Now I've been here a week and there are a ton of thoughts stewing around, but I'm going to keep this post to the journey here itself. A week ago today, after I sold or gave away nearly all my worldly possessions and filled out a respectable stack of paperwork, my (new) sweetheart (!) gave me a ride to Logan airport. When we arrived, a wave of horror came over me as I realized I didn't have the letter of invitation I required for my visa, which I would pick up at Nairobi airport customs. Our heartfelt and emotional farewells were abruptly cut off as she sprang into action, determining where the nearest printer was located--the Marriott by the airport--and dispatching me through security to see if I could locate one inside. Happily, there was one, once I had begged my way into the Delta SkyClub, and the crisis was averted. (In fact, the crisis had never existed--I was never asked to produce a copy of the letter).

The flights to Amsterdam and on to Nairobi were long but in fact relatively painless. On the way to Amsterdam I sat next to a woman who turned out to be a Kenyan who lived in Madrid and was visiting family in the US. I picked her brain for information about the Luo people, who inhabit the area around Siaya, and learned that they are largely Catholic.

(I would later hear, from Catholics, that most of Kenya is Catholic. I would also hear, from a Baptist, that most of Kenya is Baptist.)

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport

On the way to Nairobi I sat next to an Englishman who had been born in Kenya, and whose father had worked for the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. I was two for two on apposite plane companions. This fellow was the current owner of a family coffee-exporting company operating throughout East Africa. I extracted a number of Swahili pointers from him and discussed the coffee trade. I also heard what is becoming a familiar refrain about African farmers failing to recognize their own interests in how best to cultivate their land. It is an idea I have been predisposed by my teachers to resist--in fact I have seen the white/yellow corn example employed by the coffee scion had been presented to demonstrate how farmers are rationally making choices that seem to outsiders like they reduce yields. Yet, this view is coming as well from quarters where I wouldn't expect it, and I have to acknowledge that I simply don't know what to believe. Surely the poor farmers are right sometimes--but maybe they are also stubborn and ignorant other times?

Besides these conversations, I spent the flights trying to deduce the rules of Swahili grammar from a phrasebook that was well-written but not oriented toward the new resident of the country.

Grace House - Accomodations in Nairobi, with the
nicest bed net I've seen yet, even though there's no
malaria in Nairobi.

Immigration at Nairobi presented a formidable line, which I ended up at the back of. But I got through fine, secured my visa, purchased a Kenyan SIM card, and--after a phone call to the Cambridge Savings Bank--was able to withdraw some Kenyan shillings from the ATM. Then I was on my way to Grace House, where I got three or four hours of sleep before an early morning flight to Kisumu.

Landing in Kisumu

My companion on the flight to Kisumu was a student of environmental planning in Eldoret, and an excellent conversational partner. It was a short flight, however, and soon we were descending into Kisumu above Lake Victoria. Through the window, I could make out the triangular sails of fishing boats and then, as we got closer, fishing rowboats and canoes. We crossed the tarmac on foot barely after dawn.

I got into a car and saw rural Africa filing by me: schoolchildren in adorable uniforms, men and
women (but mostly women) hard at work planting and turning over the soil, structures built of mud and sticks, red dirt roads, and security checks by armed guards. I dropped off my bags at a small hotel where I would stay until my predecessor vacated his room, and came into the office. (The motorbike pictured here is said predecessor's).

Committee on World Food Security Workshop

Last week I attended a workshop hosted by several French institutions on the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The motivation for the workshop was the increasing attention paid to CFS after its 2009 reform, which elevated the visibility and capacity of CFS and enabled wider participation by non-states.

The new CFS is seen as a model of a new tool for global governance: a multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral platform. Speakers at the workshop repeatedly commented on the increased academic attention to CFS, which has apparently become an important case study in the global governance scene. The discussions of the workshop are planned to be fodder for a policy brief emerging from IDDRI (at Sciences Po, in Paris) soon. Participants were largely poli sci researchers, with a splash of civil society, NGOs, and international civil servants; no government staff were there. Few of the attendees thought like economists.

One of the central questions was whether the CFS model would be useful more broadly. The prevailing view seemed to be that the model is too context-dependent to be easily replicated in other issue areas. CFS benefits or benefited from close linkages to FAO for follow-up work, the example of the reform effort of FAO, and the political urgency created by high global food prices. But one participant* made the case that global governance is no longer a planned, organized international system. Instead, it is fluid and complex. In this context, the CFS model is a type of negotiated, hybrid entity emblematic of how governance will work going forward.

One session was dedicated to a discussion of science-policy interfaces. There was a lot of appreciation for the HLPE Report/Decision box model. Participants distinguished between the classic, "linear" model of science-policy interaction and new models. Much was made of "co-production of knowledge" between policymakers and researchers, as the stage that follows after HLPE-style "border interfaces."

The workshop also coincides with the CFS's own monitoring process, which has been struggling to reach agreement on an approach for years. The debate focused on what point of the impact pathway should be the locus of monitoring, i.e., should we be oriented toward outcomes? impact? effectiveness? Some voices agitated strongly that the only thing that matters are development outcomes. Others contended that we had to differentiate between where CFS could be accountable and where it was "co-responsible" with others--national governments, civil society, NGOs, international agencies, private sector firms. As far as I could tell, no minds were changed. Nonetheless, in a final session among researchers, there was some sense that a formula of "differentiated responsibilities" among actors could help resolve some of the political disputes over the monitoring framework.

I learned a lot about institutional specifics and what the CFS means to global governance speakers. My own comments were about the centrality of members'/participants' attention as the key resource for a deliberative body like CFS. Unlike financial resources, attention has network externalities and therefore a different kind of political economy. Instead of misallocation, the risk is "unraveling," where members' conclusions that--for whatever reason--CFS is no longer a useful forum become self-fulfilling prophecies. Not too much response at the event itself but it may lead to a collaboration.


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* The workshop was under Chatham House Rules

Getting MacVim to load fast

I got excited about setting up a pretty and efficient coding environment in Vim, inspired by Jeff Knupp. And on my home computer, an Ubuntu machine, it worked perfectly. I ran into trouble with MacVim on my work computer (the boss is an Apple fanboy). MacVim would load very slowly--15 seconds or more--would take several seconds to open or save even small files, and what's worse, I couldn't find much evidence of other people running into similar problems.

Using mvim --startuptime vim.log, I was able to see that the largest hold-ups (seconds long!) were caused sourcing .vimrc and pieces in Vim's runtime/ directory. Armed with the "sourcing" search term, I found this post. Although I don't even have Go installed on my computer, it seemed likely that the problem was that the MacVim directory was located too late (or not at all) in the runtime path on Vim startup. So I added the following line to .vimrc:

set rtp+=/usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.4-73/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim

(Since I'm using a Homebrew install, as one should).

Problem solved. Load time is now under a second, which I can happily live with.

New project: Stata-like regression analysis

"You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program"
-Alan Perlis

NOTE: THIS PROJECT IS GOOD AND DEAD.

I'm now beginning work on an open source package--working title "freeregr"--to provide a basic interpreter for the Stata statistical analysis language. This is my first free software project, and I'm not at all sure how far it will go, but my goal is to provide basic multiple regression capabilities and data manipulation.

freeregr will:

1. Get me more familiar with the actual math behind regression analysis. The big criticism of Stata is that it is a black box, and I used Stata to learn econometrics. So hopefully I'll gain a more fundamental understanding.
2. Provide a resource to job applicants who would like to acquire basic Stata skills but don't have access to a Stata license.
3. Stick it to the proprietary software Man. 

Stata predominates in economics, and apparently it is also used in bioinformatics. Many RA positions require Stata proficiency and it is a staple of undergraduate economics classes. 

If you are interested in signing on, let me know. freeregr should show up on Github in the next few days...