Asosa Field Visit

October is rushing by, but we do have several trips planned and I wanted to squeeze these entries between them so we can report on each one. October is typically a month of travel for us. It is a time to check in on projects after being away for the summer. Education projects are usually in full swing with students back in school. Often we will have guests visiting from MCC or one of our back donors, CFGB to monitor projects or do trainings. 

Also after Meskel (a celebration of the discovery of the 'true cross') that happens in October, the long rainy season usually comes to an end. This makes doing field visits much easier, particularly when we are literally going out into muddy fields. Meskel itself is always an interesting event. All over town, huge bonfire pyres are constructed. Crowds of people gather like we would do in the US for a fireworks display. They wear white if they are Orthodox and bring candles to burn. They sing and pray, then when it gets dark, the huge pyres are lit and as they burn a huge metal cross is revealed in the fire. 

Rebecca and I usually walk down to the large field near our house to watch the event. We stayed for quite a while but left at dark. We did enjoy seeing the many candles burning among the thousands gathered in the crowd. It has a feeling of joy and unity but belies the real state of affairs here as the conflict in Amhara continues to rage, and people are generally feeling fairly pessimistic about the economy and prospects for peace anytime in the near future. 

One big way that these October field visits feel different this year, is that we are really forced to avoid the Amhara region, the heart of the country and the place where most of our biggest food security and WASH projects are located. At this time we cannot drive or fly into Amhara. Although the Bahir Dar airport is open in theory, the town has become a staging ground for Federal Forces, and we cannot really travel out of town if we to go there. All internet and cell phone service has been cut off there for over a month and we cannot even get in contact with our partners there.

Despite that, our work does go on, and in fact, there was a big training planned for last week in another region on the Northwest side of the country--Beneshangul Gumuz. The training was for our food security partners that receive funding from the Canadian Food Grains Bank to promote conservation (low tillage) agriculture. The facilitator, our good friend Neil from Tanzania was leading it and had chosen themes of water harvesting and appropriate mechanization for small-holder farmers. Several of our partners who were not trapped in Amhara were planning to attend, and it was being hosted by our partner Food for the Hungry. 

Mesfin our FS program manager was going, and I decided to join him for the 5-day workshop. It was my first time going to this part of Ethiopia, and I was not disappointed to find that once again, it was like coming into a new world. My last big field visit had been to Gambella which borders South Sudan, but the town of Asosa is quite close to the Sudan border (to the north), and it has a much larger Muslim population than other project areas where we work. 

The flight was short, but because many people are traveling by air in the country to avoid the insecurity of roads, the airport was quite crowded. We arrived on Monday afternoon and checked into the hotel. The weather here is a bit warmer than Addis but not like Gambella. It was still a bit rainy, and I was really struck by the amount of red mud everywhere. It is very red soil in this region. It also seemed quite lush, but the town itself was very run down and it struck me that this area has been economically depressed for a number of years. The other challenge is the prevalence of tsetse flies which are harmful to humans, but make livestock keeping nearly impossible. as sleeping sickness kills livestock as well. 

We were a group of about 20 all said, and we started 2 days of all-day meetings on Tuesday morning. It was good to hear about the work of different local NGOs and several shared about their success with certain water harvesting interventions. We are hoping that experience sharing can promote innovation in different projects. There were also a fair number of 'cautionary tales' where a 'silver bullet' approach was found not to work in all contexts. Building water catchment pools for instance only works if the soil has a fair amount of clay in it to prevent seepage. Plastic lining is a solution but comes at a prohibitive cost for most small-holder farmers. 

On the second day, we focused more on appropriate technology mechanization. The featured tool is a traditional 'maresha' (ox-drawn plow) but with a planter/seeder attachment that can perfectly space corn as it rips a very narrow seed trough in unplowed soil. Neil was the designer of this and it is particularly appropriate for farmers in Ethiopia who have been using the maresha for generations. (The challenge is to get them to only rip the soil one time when seeds are planted and not to turn the soil over in the whole field. Other innovations included hand-turned machines to shuck cassava and maize. 

On the third day we went out into the field to see the work of our partner Food for the Hungry. We started early because the project areas were quite far from the city over pretty rough roads. We had 3 landcruisers and went in a caravan to the sites. It was actually quite amazing to see the work on the ground. Numerous farmers were happy to show us comparative fields where corn cultivated under CA was twice the height of the field cultivated in the traditional way. 

I was particularly impressed by FH's promotion of cluster farming. Farmers in a community trained in CA cultivated land together and some communities had 12 or more continuous hectares of CA fields. It was the largest single land area I had ever seen using CA at once. The economy of scale meant that the community was food secure and had surplus food to sell at the market. In addition, communal farming really promoted social cohesion which was evident when we ate lunch together with the members of the community. They are a mix of Amhara settlers who belonged to the Orthodox faith, and Sudanese Muslims who had been there many years. We shared food with the community, an orthodox priest, a Muslim Iman, and many Pentes (protestants) as well. These are groups that do not get along in other places. 

I was most impressed by Wro Merima, the lead Agriculture Extension Officer in the govt. She was an energetic community motivator who had a ton of expertise on farming and facilitated much of our visit to the fields in the area. But when we all shared lunch, she joined the other women in serving food and coffee. I was struck by her leadership as well as her hospitality. I am sure that a male leader would not jump up to serve food at lunchtime. 

We left the community after lunch and went to another project site where the new maresha was being tested by some farmers. Whether this innovation will work in a region where no one can keep oxen remains an open question. The FH extension officers had hooked the maresha up to to 2 donkeys. They are quite a bit smaller than oxen but did manage to pull it. The maresha is still in the pilot phase here. The idea is that eventually, it will be a kind of social enterprise where a service provider will buy one and then rent his labor out to plow the fields of many neighbors, or maybe on a cluster farm. 

The danger of tsetse flies was evident as I watched the demonstration and was attacked by a few who tried to bite me while I watched. These are not like mosquitos, the second one bites you know it! It is very painful. 

We left the field in the late afternoon and had a debrief the next morning before returning to Addis on Friday afternoon. 

The field visit is probably enough of an update for this blog. We are trying to buy a car for our program these days, which is quite interesting, but will need another entry to do it justice. 

Cluster farm