Work is finally starting to get interesting, which is great since I'm here from 7:30-4:30 every weekday. For the first week I was mostly meeting with people to try and find a project I could work on, but I think I've found one! We're putting together a guide for small-scale farmers that will help them apply a business model to their operation. My personal business experience extends about as far as the lemonade stands my brother and I had when we were little, however after all of the reading I've done on businesses, I now know that we used product development to increase our value proposition (by offering, not just beverages, but snacks also). Business models are actually a lot more interesting than I previously thought...Anyway, I get to work on section 1, which is about value chains, and something I know much more about to begin with. It's kind of weird, though, to be given so much freedom to do real things (i.e., write a section of this real guide that real people will actually read). Part of it, I think, has to due with the fact that everyone here assumes I'm a graduate student. I've been asked what my 'background' is dozens of times (and given dozens of different answers...)
CIAT, where I'm working, stands for Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, and conducts a lot of agricultural research specifically aimed to reduce poverty. Given that, it's really ironic how much hierarchy there is here. There are department leaders, who are given cars with diplomat status (that's weird..). There are all of the scientists and lab staff who work for the leaders, and then there are the farmers who do most of the labor of growing the crops that are involved in research. There are three different dining spaces, one for each of these groups to eat lunch in separately. Apparently the justification for this separation is that the field workers need to eat more so the portions are bigger, and the department leaders can pay more, so they have more expensive food....
Also, the mosquitoes here are fly way faster and are way smaller than the ones in the U.S., which is SO ANNOYING.
And, last night two french hippies moved into my house as well. It's a man and a woman couple, and then were high as a kite last night when we got home from a birthday party celebration, haha! Weed seems to be really common here, and costs like a tenth of the price as it does in the states, which doesn't make a ton of since, since food and other stuff is only maybe a third of the price as in the U.S.