26. John and Ruth Ann's work in Kigali - how it looks

Dec. 3,  2015
Maybe one or two readers of this blog are asking, "what kind of work are John and Ruth Ann doing?" And, "how does one do that in Rwanda?" This is a nitty, gritty, rather long blog.

Our transition to Rwanda has been simultaneous with another momentous transition, namely me (Ruth Ann) leaving full-time employment voluntarily in order to focus on developing my coffee business. The work and studies with Michigan State University (MSU) go along with that. This week feels like the start of actually doing coffee business, because everything else since Oct. 16 when I left my job at UofM has felt more like desperately doing the long list of tasks to get moved.

We are still spending a lot of time on the moving checklist. We just spent about $200 on household items at Nakumatt (East Africa's version of Walmart). But gradually, the work of moving is becoming less urgent, and not consuming all day, every day like it has been. It will feel good to get working on our professions!

John
John's Municipal Analytics clients have been patient but are starting to be less so on the projects he has going for them. For example, he compiles details on all the positions on a city's payroll (or several departments, such as fire, police and water treatment) to align and compare their pay rates and benefits. Then, through surveys he's done with other Michigan towns of similar size, he analyzes whether this client is "in-line", above or below their peers. This takes a lot of time with large spreadsheets, and involves calls and discussions with elected officials and government employees.  So John's phone starts to "light up" around 3pm here (9am in Michigan) and calls may continue through 8 or 9pm.

At our new house, John does his work from a "standing desk." Our furnished house came with a piece of furniture that is meant to be a bar, but we put an anti-fatigue mat down and it serves as a great standing desk in our living room. When that's too tiring, John has been using our large dining room table or the 'circle' of sofas.

Ruth Ann
I tend to be the one working in the small, fourth bedroom, we call "the office." But this office has only a small table and hard wooden chair, so working there a lot of hours can get wearisome and the floor becomes the extended working surface. But overall, it is great to have this room so that "office things" have a place, and I especially like that I can put my maps and my static cling white boards on the walls.

This week a team of three colleagues from MSU is in Kigali, so meetings are happening almost daily related to the start-up of the research project. It's a pretty complicated project with many parts and many people, and I'm seeing first hand how the $1.8 million USAID funding may seem like a lot, but it really isn't. And on top of that, even getting the money to where it needs to be is a challenge. My role, however, is the monitoring and evaluation (M&E). I wrote drafts of the M&E section for the proposal back in Dec. 2014 and Jan. 2015.  After the award from USAID finally came, I began writing the "full" M&E plan. Drafts went back and forth, with a particularly large push to meet the Oct. 18 deadline. Then there was another push to reply to USAID's comments and questions. Those questions came through on Nov. 2 (the day before we flew out) and had to be 'replied to' within a week, creating some extra stress for those first days in Rwanda!

Now that the plan is actually done, I have to implement it. In my perspective, the implementation is really a managerial communication effort. So one thing we will do before the MSU team leaves is have a meeting where I present the key performance indicators again and make sure everyone on the 8 person leadership team knows who is responsible for what. There are metrics to report like, "number of antestia bugs per tree" and "number of farmers who have implemented improved practices."  Then there are about 12 indicators of sub-goals.

Also for the MSU project, I've been involved in developing the 350+ question survey instrument that will be administered to 2024 farmers, (1024 in Rwanda and 1024 in Burundi). For 3 days next week, I will sit in on the training for the  10 enumerators for Rwanda. The two Burundian lead researchers will be sitting in and then they will then return to Burundi to train their enumerators. I've also been having several meetings with other coffee industry leaders, including a meeting with the head of the coffee division at the National Agricultural Export Board (NAEB).

On the coffee business side of things, Artisan Coffee Imports, lack of bandwidth on my part has slowed things down. But I've continued to have regular meetings with Saumin, a man in Ohio who is interested in joining Artisan as a partner, and the meetings I've been having with companies like KZ Noir, Sustainable Harvest and BUF all have a business side, as well as a research side.  Calls with other research groups have been important, too, including East Africa Trademark and an SCAA committee studying "cost to produce" for coffee farmers.

Thing to note as you read what John and I are doing -- internet connectivity and phone calls are very important. This drives our high consumption of data on our home router and a confusing series of attempts to first understand the options, then purchase and continually "refresh" the monthly data plans that are the norm here. On the side, we must also continually pre-pay for our phone calls by purchasing 'scratch cards' where we get a number to enter on our phone that loads our "air time."

So apologies for quite possibly more detail than any reader of this blog would want!
[Author: Ruth Ann]