43. Antestia's Days are Numbered Now

Dec. 6, 2015                                                                                              Kigali, Rwanda
Goals of the Africa Great Lakes Coffee (AGLC) project:
1. Reduce antestia incidence (thereby reducing potato taste defect)
2. Demonstrate improved productivity that results when antestia is controlled.

The exciting start-up of the project is happening.

• MSU team is here from East Lansing
• Baseline instrument finally finalized (after something like 17 versions!)
• IPAR staff are working tirelessly to translate the 350+ line baseline survey into Kinyarwandan. Same thing is happening in Burundi at University of Ngozi to get a Kirundi version. 
• IPAR is also hiring the enumerators who will start training tomorrow.
• Our Burundian research leads have hired their enumerators for Burundi.
• Next week IPAR will translate the survey manual into Kinyarwandan. 
• Burundi's research leads will travel to Kigali, participate in the Rwandan enumerator training then replicate it in Burundi with their enumerators.
• Meanwhile, Aniseh, with the MSU staff, is working day and night to get English, Kinyarwandan and Kirundi loaded into the CSPro software for the tablets.
• After 2 days training, the pre-test of the instrument happens for 2 days.
• Friday, Dec. 11, we'll debrief the experience in the field. 
• In another 7 days, we should be ready to start the actual baseline survey for the 2 weeks leading up to the holiday break.

Oh yes - my family and I also moved into our house in Kigali on Dec. 1. We're finally feeling like we're staying awhile, after a month of living out of suitcases. I'm grateful to be able to focus on monitoring and evaluation for this project again, instead of feeling like such a foreigner trying to register kids for school, buy a car, rent a house, find groceries, etc.