My first week of work at Runa

Greetings from Ecuador! 

Today is Friday and I have almost completed my first week of work at Fundación Runa (check out my website bio here). For those of you who don't know, Runa is a social enterprise that seeks to improve the livelihoods of indigenous Amazonian farmers through primarily through income generation, but also through community development and environmental conservation. As Fundación Runa's new director of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), I will be in charge of measuring the benefits that Runa provides to the farmers, mostly through periodic surveys of farmers and other community members. 

In the past few weeks, I have been on a mission to learn as much as possible about M&E. I have been reading books, talking to other M&E professionals and I even completed a short online class given by USAID on the subject. The learning curve is steep, but I am slowly but surely understanding M&E better and figuring out how to apply what I have learned to my new position. 

However, I am not only learning about M&E; there are many things that I've had to adjust to while working at a new company in a new country. Runa has two offices, one in the capital city of Quito and the other in the jungle town of Archidona. I normally work in the office in Archidona, although I am able to work in Quito when I want to. In the jungle office the hours are long and they start early. For those of you who know me well, you know that I do not like to wake up early. Here, I am up by 6:30am and in the office between 7:30 and 8:00am (can you believe it??). We usually leave work sometime between 5:30 and 6:00. Also, we have uniform t-shirts, which are relatively common in businesses here in Ecuador. We have three shirts that we wear on Tuesday - Thursday and then we wear what we want on Mondays and Fridays. 

Our Tuesday shirt:

 Our Wednesday shirt:

I'll have to attach a picture of our Thursday shirt (my favorite) next week! 

Next time I'll write about and send pictures of my new house (aka the spaceship, the mansion, the aquarium... you'll understand why!) and I'll tell you about my roommates. 

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Love, 

A