Adventures in Onionism

I presented my research yesterday. Seemed like it went well. The swamp-ass weather is not suiting me well. If you feel the same, then you should watch the Norwegian film Kon-Tiki from 2012, while huddled in your AC cocoon. Sorry, I can't get it to embed right now. [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97XrASFPhF0 ] Also watch the original doc, with real 16mm film from the voyage, if you can find a copy. [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joem9SKS3LY ] And remember that Gourevitch article in The New Yorker about Rwandan cycling? Now there's a doc. [ http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/risingfromashes/ ]

I'm home in Berkeley. It is cold. Photos are up on Picasa .

Let me just say that as a straight dude I bet one of these ads is way, way, way more effective than the others.

Wait, Denzel Washington is your favorite actor? Mine too! That's not actually how the conversation went, but it was pretty similar, and it reminded me of pretty much the same Denzel Washington-themed conversation I had a couple times in Pakistan (one of which was awesome, one of which went south when I said pro wrestling was fake and KSM cut off Daniel Pearl's head, but I digress.) The conversation was actually something along the lines of: "Wait, are you talking about Training Day ? I love that movie. 'This shit ain't checkers it's chess.' 'When I'm through with you you'll be playing ball in Pelican Bay!'" After which the Rwandan dude I was talking to proceeded to quote the lines more accurately than I had. And then we did the same thing concerning The Hangover . So yeah, the trip ended pretty well, if a little regretfully, in that I realized that if it didn't take me two weeks to warm up to people, maybe I would've started t...

I'll be spending this week working closely with two of the workshop participants helping them answer their specific questions about Rwanda's community-based health insurance (Mutuelle). The project as a whole is about results-based financing (RBF) of health clinics, but there's pretty good panel data on all sorts of health-related topics. For more info on a bunch of RBF-related projects that the Bank is running, go here . The people I'm working with had to go back to their regular jobs, so we meet in the evenings and I have days to myself. I'm doing a little work on my own military recruiting research idea and doing a lot of running--the new hotel is on the nicer outskirts of town, complete with a public golf course and tons of tiny squatted farm plots, so I can find dirt roads to run on and the air is much better than it was downtown. site of the workshop Nicolas Sarkozy on US health care reform: "Welcome to the club of states who don't turn their back on ...

the view waiting for Kagame's motorcade to pass path on the hill behind Gisenyi beetle me at the DRC border W at Lake Kivu

A grey crowned crane almost walked into the hotel breakfast buffet line. Helped out briefly with some umuganda. (The morning of the last Saturday of every month in Rwanda is set aside for mandatory public service.) Then went to Gisenyi on Lake Kivu. Drove by a big national brewery powered by methane from the bottom of the " Exploding Lake ." Bought a couple wooden gorilla carvings and some colorful fabric. Walked to the DRC border, but it's $60 to cross, so didn't bother. Walked around a lot. Got delayed by President Kagame's motorcade. Trying to upload pictures, but it's not working.

I got way more excited by this project yesterday when we finished teaching Stata and started talking about what we could actually do with the data. There was a pretty great question about the effect of community-based health insurance on health care utilization in Rwanda which I totally thought we could answer with our panel data using individual fixed effects. Only panel data isn't any better at getting you causal inference if there are unobserved shocks that are correlated with the first-differenced x's and y's. (That is, OLS is biased if there are unobserved e's correlated with both x and y; panel data instead regresses delta-y on delta-x, and if you use individual fixed effects you eliminate the e's. Only you still don't observe delta-e, and if that's correlated with delta-x and delta-y, you've got the exact same problem you had before. Ugh.) Still a cool idea worth looking into. ANYWAY, switched to a far swankier hotel this morning, hoping to get ou...

Teaching Stata to people with whom you do not share a native language in a building with a metal roof during a monsoon season rain storm is not that easy. It is in fact exhausting. I am digging the endless pineapple. M: [Sees Peter Singer book] Are you a Peter Singer fan? G: Yes. M: That's such a bad-ass pose on the cover. "I'm an ethicist, look at me." G: I guess I haven't read that much of his. Just Animal Liberation and I saw him in this movie The Examined Life , which was basically following 9 philosophers around parks talking to them. M: Oh, was that the one with Sandra Bullock? She was philosopher number 6?

Went to Heaven last night. Surprisingly, they let me in (and served me banana liquor and spinach ravioli and cream of mushroom soup and Tusker and Primus). Ran a little this morning, felt like I got intimate with an exhaust pipe. Hope to get out of the city this weekend for some lightly traveled dirt roads and big hills. Also watched The Cove and cried like a baby.

Jetlag. Took some pills and slept for the better part of 12 hours last night. The mangoes are to die for. The diesel exhaust while out on a morning run is to die from.

Greetings from the back corner of the room at the National University of Rwanda School of Public Health and a session on program impact evaluation. After 58 hours of travel, including a long delay at Dulles (and the Worldgate Marriott in Herndon, VA) and an overnight stay at a swanky hotel in Addis Ababa all care of Ethiopian Airlines, I arrived in Kigali yesterday. One of the three channels on the hotel TV is CNN, and there's free slow wifi, so on that note: hooray for helping 32 million people get health insurance. It's not 47 million, but it's something.

I just got back from a trip to Rwanda last night. I wasn't feeling too hot on Friday, so I left Saturday morning and took a matatu to Kampala. Sunday morning I took a bus to Kigali and had dinner with an Isreali lawyer that I met at my hotel, a Chinese toy packing designer, and a Rwandan staff member from the Genocide Memorial who had translated a session of the traditional gacaca court for the Israeli. Monday I visited the church in Nyamata where 10,000 people were killed and the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. Tuesday I took a bus all the way back to Busia. $80 in visa fees alone plus some long bus rides, but I'm glad I was able to go. I'll mostly just let the pictures of Rwanda speak for themselves. The work of cleaning the church is not yet finished. Looking out the window of the museum. Kigali.