DRC and LDS

During the course of my dissertation and a book chapter on hunger in Africa, I noticed a very surprising trend (that I'm writing up for a short policy paper for a journal). We're accustomed to hearing that all of Africa is going down to the toilet as fast as inhumanly possible. The hunger statistics (1990-2004) seem to agree: the number of hungry people is going down rapidly in Asia, slowly in most of the rest of the world, but is rising in Africa.

When I disaggregated Africa into its constituent countries, however, I was shocked to learn that nearly all the increase comes from just one country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly known as Zaire). If you remove the DR Congo from the data, the rest of Africa had not seen any noticeable increase in hunger for over a decade! In fact, the vast majority of countries have seen no change, with only a few (DR Congo and Tanania on the downside, Ethiopia and Ghana on the upside) moving appreciably.

This is tremendous news. The situation is not as desperate as we are led to believe. There is hope in a lot of places.

It also means there is a great need for help in the DR Congo to slow and stop the problems there. The #1 problem stems from the war that has been ragining on and off there for over a decade: The First Congolese War in the mid-1990s, the Second one a few years later which has been compared to the Africa World War. Wiki reports that "Today at the dawn of 2009, people in the Congo are still dying at a rate of an estimated 45,000 per month and already 2,700,000 people have died since 2004. This death toll is due to widespread disease and famine; reports indicate that almost half of the individuals killed are children under the age of 5." There is little that the average person can do about the war and refugees.

But there are many other things that a person can do. Imagine my joy today when I was visiting the Church Newsroom to see the DR Congo listed fairly prominently!

I've known the Church was active building wells in scattered villages in Africa, training the locals how to care for it, and doing all they can to help people help themselves through humanitarian service missionaries. I didn't realize that the large project I read about last year and on the 30-minute between-Conference session news segments (Luputa) was in the DR Congo! These people live so far away from a clean water source, it requires a 5 hour trip to collect water, including balancing the plastic and ceramic containers the entire way back. The water will be sent out to some 160,000 people, improving health and enabling children to go to school instead of to collect water.

The Church has also partnered with an NBA star who is building a rather large well for a hospital he started in Kinshasa (the capital) that does not have a reliable supply of clean water. The well will also allow the hospital to establish a dialysis unit.

I just see these stories and think, Yeah! That's where my humanitarian donations on the tithing slips are going. How thankful I am that the Church is reaching out to the DR Congo.

Hunger in Africa - online

I just got an email in from UN University and Cornell, indicating that my hunger in Africa presentation with Per Pinstrup-Andersen is now available online. I'm in the first two-hour segment. There are three people who introduce the symposium and me (including my noble chair), and then I speak for 20 minutes. There is then a 20 minute presentation on health in Africa, and then Professor O. and I do a Q&A. QC?

You can find the video here.

What I learned in school today

The UN - not content with turning power over Kosovo over to the Europeans, failing to police Sudan and the DR Congo, and finding any opportunity to bash the US - has made an important announcement. This year is officially ... the International Year of the Potato.

"And they don't mean Mr. Potato Head OR the Couch Potato."

There was apparently some talk of letting Dan Quayle be in charge of it, but someone nixed that idea....

So don't be a dud ... eat a spud!
*Joy singing*"Have you planted your potato today?"
"Potato huggers instead of tree huggers!"

Peru is apparently quite thrilled about this, as the country that domesticated the potato.
"Did it eat us before we ate it?"

You can find out more in this highly informative video. (Seriously, we know you women will just tune in to hear the educated British voice telling you all about it. C'mon, it's British!)


More seriously, the potato is the #4 starch in the world and a serious source of ending world hunger.
"And I love them, especially the funeral potatoes! and french fries! and hashbrowns! *lip smacking* twice-baked potatoes! mmmmm."
And spudnuts and potato bread (of all kinds) and mashed and chips...
"sour cream and chives!"
It's a great food, to be sure.

So welcome to the wonderful Year of the Potato.
"Plant. Eat. And be prosperous."

Paper 4 ... A New Project

For those of you who didn't know it before, I am insane.

J: "If Derrill didn't think so before, now he's convinced."

I've been really depressed at not getting any call backs from my interviews yet (still a couple hold outs) and Joy has been sending out new apps every day, but it's very stressful and it's been very hard to get solid work done on my dissertation for weeks. I did get some stuff done the other week because I signed up to present my work and I needed some work to present, but then just sat staring at the computer most of the day.

So then my adviser emails me. His post-doc up and got a job and has left their big, multi-year project in the lurch. Without any arm twisting, he asks if I would please be willing to drop my dissertation and work full time on this important book. I would be writing two of the chapters and reviewing/proofing the others, then listed as third co-author.

My first thought was that there was no way I would have time. There are precious few weeks before he and probably the other members of my committee leave for the summer, before which I'd have to defend the dissertation. But then Joy reminded me that I work best and happiest when I have way more to do than can possibly be done. She noted, correctly, how many times I have felt like God was inspiring me at certain points along the work, and testified of her confidence in me. The most touching part was that, when I reminded her that getting both done would really eat into family time, she said she would rather have me happy for one hour than all day as depressed as I've been. I decided to give it a second look.

It's really a good and important work, one that I believe will make a difference in the world for many people. I would be proud to be a part of it, and had actually wanted to be for a couple years as I heard him discussing it with Fuzhi (the post-doc) and other people working on the project. And the chapters I would be doing are right in line with the other research I've been doing on agricultural production and good governance.

I was still undecided that night, pondering the pros and cons and just how little time is left (and, incidentally, proved my lack of working ability again by not getting anything done after the call came, so even if I didn't get any work done on the dissertation, how would that be any different from now?). As I poured my heart out in family prayer that night, suddenly things came together for me. I realized how some of the things from Church and from priesthood blessings recently had foreshadowed this project coming.

And for the first time in a while, I felt peace. I felt peace and resolve. We've really adjusted our daily schedules this week to make it possible for me to spend full time on the project and still get an hour or two in on the dissertation and the job market every day. (Joy, meanwhile, continues her brilliant, dedicated pace at churning out several new job applications for me every day.) And Thursday and Friday, the first days of this new resolve, I've actually gotten back to writing the paper and making progress again ... just as advertised.

So maybe I'm going to have to find a way to keep my life overcrowded. It seems to have been one of my keys to success at BYU, and if it works here (as it did last November when I dropped the job market to work on the Hunger in Africa presentation at the UN with Per), it may be something I'll have to plan into my life.

So I've taken on far more than I can possibly do and pray that I still somehow finish the degree in time for whatever job is actually out there, somewhere.

So, in addition to the three papers of my dissertation, I'm working on:
Food Policy for Developing Countries book
Hunger in Africa book chapter
my meatpacking book
a paper on areas where people both buy and produce their own food
and planning future work on the effects of globalization on hunger and obesity, and identifying the difference between the effects of "market inequality" and "structural inequality" on economic growth.

A healthy pipeline, wa? This a picture of my graying hair. Watch for updates as developments are sure to be coming soon. :)

The Case of the Missing Wife: CLOSED

(Note: the following post is excessively long because I'm summarizing pretty much the last month. It's equal parts romance and economics, and you don't usually see those two things together much unless you're in Dr. McDonald's econometrics courses at BYU.)

Tomorrow I get to fly out to Santa Barbara to rejoin Joy. This is a very happy thing.

The first time we had to be apart was for Joy's grandmother's funeral. By the nature of such things, it came on us quite unexpectedly, and Joy was gone for two weeks to spend some time with family she doesn't get to see much. Though she enjoyed it - as much as she could given the reason for the trip - it was a pretty miserable experience for me, and we were both quite concerned this month apart might end up like this. But this time I had time to prepare and psych myself up for it.

Chief in the process of psyching myself up for this month was the accumulation of way more to do than could possibly be done. Joy (the nationally certified Master of Career Counseling) and I had spent nearly all our time the month before working on the job market: identifying schools, preparing packets, preparing my job market paper, and so forth. She left just as we got out the first big shipment of them out. That meant there was a month worth of various things that needed to be done that neither of us had had time to do.

More urgent than them, though, was the preparation for the Cornell/U.N. Symposium on hunger in Africa on Nov 13 and 15. It's official title is The African Food System and its Interactions With Health and Nutrition. A lot of people had a lot of work to put it together, including in particular my adviser, Prof. Per Pinstrup-Andersen. He contacted me one night to inform me that one of the first speakers had had to cancel, and that meant that Per needed to fill in for that key presentation. He indicated that as he thought about what was needed, he realized that this was precisely the information I had been working with for my dissertation, and asked if I would be willing to work on this with him.

As I looked over the program outline, which included a number of very influential and accomplished researchers, U.N. leaders, and a vice-president of Uganda getting her Ph.D., I realized that the first speech he was talking about really set the stage for the other presentations. Its purpose was to describe the current state of hunger and malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa, what the recent trends have been, and what progress has been made in accomplishing the World Food Summit and Millennium Development Goals on hunger alleviation. And yes, it's exactly the information that forms the backbone of my dissertation. Each of the next presentations then dealt with specific elements of the food and health systems in SSA, proposing specific policy or research actions that need to be taken in order to reduce hunger.

So I happily signed on. Before Joy left and immediately after, most of my time was spent preparing the hunger presentation and paper. The U.N. has already posted the video of it, so anyone interested could watch it here. Cornell is expecting to upload their video too, and since that's the one where I presented our work, I'll be sure to put in a link in a future post once it's up.

After I got back from NYC and the first part of the symposium at the UN, I finally got that head cold that had been threatening the last couple weeks. That was just in time for my turn to present our paper at the Cornell part of the Symposium on Thursday, Nov 15. I asked some priesthood holders who live nearby for a blessing, where I was told my head and voice would be clear enough to be understood and do the work I had come to do. The blessing also mentioned something that made me think of the presentation in an entirely different light, so I adjusted how I planned my closing remarks. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. I think it generated a lot of thought and discussion, and helped more people realize the situation there.

It was actually quite thrilling to be working that closely with Per and moving an important piece of research forward that quickly. It provided some strong momentum to get other research and projects moving forward much more rapidly, and since they'd all been on the back burner for the last 6 weeks, they were overripe and begging to be picked. So by the time we were done with the presentations and I was done with the cold, half the time had already flown by!

The upshot is that the time apart has been infinitely easier than the last time because of how focused I could be on my work. This does not mean I haven't missed her, just that I haven't allowed myself to wallow in how much I miss her. It was a new testimony to me of Pres. Gordon B. Hinckley's advice of the importance of work to help you get through trying times, which he most recently stressed at the passing of his own companion of some 60 years.

The one exception, oddly enough, was at the church Christmas party last Saturday. They tell you that you should make sure you're not alone to prevent feeling lonely. Being alone with a lot of other couples may not be what they had in mind, though. When the first few people asked me how I was doing without Joy, I responded fairly "upbeatedly". By the time the 12th person had asked, however, my hand ached to hold hers and I left fairly depressed and missed her horribly. Thankfully (?), she was missing me very much that night too, so we talked a very long time on the phone after that and were able to put each other back together again.

At the party, someone asked if being apart had helped me realize how much I need her. I responded that the word "realize" presupposed that I didn't know before, but that, yes, we were both appreciating new ways in which we have grown to need each other. I was very gratified when the person acknowledged that I was one of the few husbands she knew who seemed to understand. It's a nice reputation to have. Actually, that reminds me that someone had gone to my website to get my bio for the Africa symposium, and when she met me for the first time commented that it was obvious how much I loved my wife. *chuckle* There are many worse things to be known for, than as someone who deeply loves his sweetheart.

And tomorrow, I will be with her again.