• Irrigation kit sales have been so-so. 25% of the farmers that bought seed and fertilizer kits have gone on to buy irrigation kits (which cost four times as much, but then, what else were they planning to do with the seeds during the dry season?*) We'll continue sales for the next couple of weeks, we'll see how many of the farmers who have been saying "I'll have the money next week" will come through.
• We had a party. Did you know that steel wool+fire+oxygen = decent fireworks?
• Added some new projects to my list. So far I've been working on special projects - limited trials of possible changes to the core model. I'll still be working on them next year, but I'll also get some experience just running the core model.
• A cat is being spayed outside my window. Erp, apparently it is (was?) pregnant.

*This is just me being frustrated. Our farmers have pretty chaotic lives, it can be hard for them to stick to plans - and we (originally) gave them a short time window in which to purchase kits.

Sean is here from the US, to do an MIT-affiliated study on the impact of One Acre on farmers' harvests. He was interviewing a local leader, who, when talk turned to the election, said:

"So, now that Obama has been elected, will you agree that Africa has finally started to colonize the Europeans?"

Took a boda-boda (bicycle taxi) from the office to my house. It's 10 shillings (about 13 cents), 15 if they go down the dirt track to my door. Almost all the boda-boda guys have the same kind of bike: imagine a depressing Soviet-era steel bicycle with a cushion over the back wheel, festooned with paint, streamers and slogans painted on the mudflaps. Everyone pedals at the same plodding pace, since they have one gear at some ridiculous gear ratio, suitable only for Olympic sprinters.

This boda-boda driver spoke English, which is unusual.

"Hey, brother. Hey."
"Yes?"
"How can I have an easy life?"
"Sorry?"
"How can I have an easy life? I have been given a hard life."

He laughed, grinned, and kept at his sad, slow pedalling. I don't think his smile was faked. It's amazing how happy people are here, despite everything.

Talked to one of our survey agents today about a baseline survey we do when we enroll farmers - a sort of census and inventory of assets. Apparently it's pretty quick and easy to go through with a farmer.

"They don't have problems with any of the questions?"
"No ... well, sometimes they can't remember the names of all their children."

Obama's family is from a town a few hours away. Today: Obama t-shirts, Obama songs, cheers and handshakes from passers-by. I visited one of our farmers and he and another farmer discussed the election results. A radio was on nearby, playing Obama's acceptance speech interspersed with commentary in Kibukusu (the local tribal language.)

They admired the smooth handover of power in American democracy. They complained that no one in Africa gives up power without a fight. They agreed that it's not good enough to have good projects, they must be implemented well, and worried about Obama's inexperience. However they agreed that Joe Biden, with his 35 years of experience, would be a good advisor for him.

The best story comes from Sid and Melissa, who back in September talked to their cab driver in Nairobi about the election. The normal stuff: he asked who they were going to vote for, they said Obama, he went off on a five minute speech about how great Obama is. Then he paused.

"But McCain is strong too!"

Saving this to read fully because I think it has a lot of relevance to my work. Organization-building is job number one here. The vast majority of One Acre's interactions with farmers are handled by Kenyan field officers. We live and die by the effectiveness of our field officers.

So I came up with what I thought was a clever solution to one problem. No amount of cleverness will save me on the irrigation project, however, if any of the following things go wrong:

• Field officers do a poor job of delivering sales or training messages
• Kit pre-work doesn't happen on time: delivering components, preparing 400 seed kits, cutting 800 irrigation hoses, punching holes in them exactly 45cm apart, and cutting 70,000 emitter tubes
• Farmers can't come up with the money on time
• Farmers prepare their seedbeds incorrectly, and their seeds fail to germinate
• Repeatedly attaching and detaching the irrigation hoses from the jerry can causes the connection to weaken and leak water
• The cloth filter fails and dirt clogs the emitter tubes
• Farmers do a poor job of lofting the jerry can, and water doesn't travel all the way to the end of the hose

I'm trying to prepare training and plans to prevent this stuff, and backup plans to deal with it if it occurs. As you can tell I'm not comfortable with my progress. In the meantime I'm having weird food dreams. Last night I dreamt I was eating a hamburger and some people threatened to take it away from me. I pulled a gun on them.

I had a good idea today. I'm responsible for our motorcycles program: we bought some motorcycles, and we're going to let some independent drivers rent them from us. They're also required to provide one free return trip to a One Acre Fund field manager each day.

Somebody else had the idea and did the profitability analysis. I'm not in love with it, but since it's mine now, I have to figure out whether the original rationale holds: is it reducing transportation costs for field managers?

Problem: how to get good data on usage? Drivers don't want to give free rides, but will probably say "of course I gave a field manager a ride today" anyway.

And for field managers ... frankly it's not that convenient. Each location only has a couple motorcycles, and drivers might be busy or have already given their free ride that day. But the field managers know they're supposed to use them, so they might just say "of course I used the One Acre motorcycle."

Solution: give vouchers, with random serial numbers, to the field managers. They give them to the drivers, and the drivers write their names on them and give them to One Acre when they're submitting fees. Barring a motodriver-field manager conspiracy, we'll know exactly how much field managers are using the bikes.

Sorry about the lack of updates. Have been recuperating from some tropical flu (I'm fine, Mom, it wasn't anything serious.) Frustrating to have just gotten here and suddenly get sidelined; now I know how Greg Oden felt last season. Coffee'd up and sorting through the wreckage of my work plan.

While I was laid up, the boundary of my world was the One Acre place here in Bungoma. The other expats are friendly, thoughtful and fun to be around. However, the risks of the all-expat diet are becoming clear. If you spend all your free time with people, books and movies from home, you're inevitably going to get a pale imitation of a previous life. I'm still hoping for better than that.

Picked up one of our $5 irrigation kits yesterday - basically a plastic hose that connects to a jerry can, with little tubes to guide water to the plants. Hoping to sell a few hundred of these in time for farmers to plant during the dry season. Lots of little implementation questions remain - will farmers have an extra 20L jerry can around to actually get the water with? (the one provided with the kit will have a hole in it) Will farmers have a way to loft the jerry can enough to get water flowing? (probably - most will have a chair or something similar)

I don't have the field intuition yet to feel my way through these questions, but I'm glad to be enjoying the details. This week we roll out with a pilot location, so more to come.

My first field visit was last Tuesday, to the Chola site. Jake (expat staff), Andrew, Moses (Kenyan staff) and I visited five farmers and handed out logbooks for them to record some of what they eat and buy. Limited trial to test the logbook format before we roll it out for real. We left the house before 9 and got back a little after 12.

The first surprise for me about Bungoma wasn't the size, it was the density. The main roads are a constant stream of bikes, trucks, and matatus (overstuffed minibuses.) Shops, markets and restaurants are crowded full. I figured boredom would be a problem, peace and quiet wouldn't. Guess again.

The second surprise came when Jake and I were walking between houses and he mentioned that a lot of our farmers don't do much during the day. I'd have expected people experiencing chronic hunger and the resulting health problems and infant mortality to be working themselves to the bone.

Then I remembered a line from the One Acre reference materials; paraphrased, "our farmers are not used to being rewarded for their effort." They lack capital for quality inputs (seed, fertilizer.) They lack the expertise to plant and harvest most effectively. And it's difficult for them to get their outputs to an interested buyer.

Those three basic things are what we offer to farmers, and are the reason One Acre Fund exists. And here's the third surprise: One Acre is close to sustainability. In fact, at current maize prices - which are, however, unusually high - farmers are paying back enough to cover our operational costs and then some.

Alright, there was a fourth surprise: field work is fun. Visiting farmers is better than frowning at a laptop. Speaking of ...

Landed in Nairobi the night of the 13th. Up early the next morning for a bumpy eight-hour ride west to Eldoret; two hours by taxi later and I'm getting picked up in Bungoma by another expat staffer. Hellos, a trip to the grocery store, some unpacking, and by 6pm I'm crashing in my bed under a mosquito net.

We live in a little compound with three houses near the center of town; One Acre's been growing, so there's now another house just down the street. Don't let "compound" confuse you: it's nothing elaborate, there's barbed wire on one side but this is not your typical expat bunker. There is a dual-tank reserve water system that I spent some time learning about today. Playing house ...

Looking forward to later this afternoon when I find out what kinds of projects Andrew (founder) and Veronica (current Director of Program Innovation) have in mind for my first three months.

View Larger Map

The blue marker is a town called Bungoma.

This September I'm moving to Kenya to start a full-time job at One Acre Fund, a microfinance organization serving farmers in Kenya and Rwanda. I'm very, very excited.