Blogs

It's my last day in the office, so this is likely to be my last post from the warm heart of Africa. Payt and I are just wrapping up reports and preparing presentations for sector team meetings over the weekend. We have profiles drawn up of our agrodealers, reports for EWB, CNFA, and AGRA being polished up, and some cool mindmaps of different market structure, dealing with different sized agrodealers, distribution networks and associations (to be posted when I figure out how to do it!).

After reading Tom's latest post, I decided I needed to write this one. Not to fuel the competition (although that's kind of fun too) but to share some of the differences from my experience. If you haven't already read it in great detail, it's probably best to at least skim his first.

It's been brought to my attention that Lucas is seriously out posting me and since this is obviously a competition I feel obligated to make some sort of half-hearted attempt to catch up. It just so happens that I'm in no mood to post at all so here goes.

This post is for me to gather my thoughts about my work as well as an effort to get other people (that would mean you!) involved and getting your thoughts.

What's the point?

20 days left in Malawi, and only 12 in the office. The work doesn't all end there, but some things are hard to do from the other side of the world. So here's the basic run-down of what I'm going to be doing for the rest of them. I'm all moved into and settled down in my new home, coming to work at the office 8 o'clock each morning. Payt and I have taken over the conference room. We have electricity and fairly good wireless internet, and only get kicked out for the occasional meeting. From here we're writing a number of reports, profiles and business models.

This post initially stated a while ago, but I was in a pretty disheartened mood, and my thoughts were rather jumbled, so I'm restarting, but thought it would be fun to include what I had, since I think it may get the point across just as well as coherent, logical writing. Here it is:

It's been two weeks since I posted a blog post (though only one since I wrote one). I didn't take time to think about what I was going to write about this time (since the focus of last week's unposted post was asking for your input) so you'll have to read it to find out. Right now there is about a 50% chance that it will end up being a profile about my community.

So this post is really just an update on where I am and what's up in the next few weeks. Hopefully it's only boring to me (I just wrote about five emails about it to various people) and most of you will find it somewhat interesting.