Salinity?

Salinity?
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

My agricultural background, while fairly general, is a bit more geared towards livestock so I don?t have much background with horticulture/soil science/irrigation but despite that I hear about salinity every once in a while. When I hear there is high level of salinity in the water/soil of some place it usually conjures up a picture of the more finicky crops not being able to grow. Working in Azerbaijan my understanding of salinization has changed, mostly due to the fact that this is the worst case of salinization I have seen (now mind you, after doing some research I have heard of places that have it worse but for now I am just talking about places I have seen myself). In this photo the ground looks white, if it were the beach and this were sand that would be normal but it is not the beach it is an area that I pass through every once in a while called Imishli. The whiteness is salt (mineral deposits) that you can literally chip off. This is a camera phone photo so the quality is mediocre but if it were clearer you could see that it almost looks like a beach of salt. The primary occupation of rural Azerbaijan (this area is no exception) is agriculture and when I see those puny fields that are barely scraping by it does tend to make you feel sorry for those farmers.

Train me!!

As I have mentioned before my current position requires staff management, not one of my favorite parts of my job. One of the things that I am confronted with on a monthly basis is being told “I need training”. Most of my staff seems quite obsessed with getting trainings, presumably for their resumes. There is a catch though, because invariably the “required trainings” are in places like western Europe (read: EXPENSIVE) so “I need training” is somewhat of a euphemism for “I want the prestige of training abroad” and they are dead serious about this. While I do my best to humor them or walk them through the hurdles involved I am one of those who is not convinced of the usefulness of “training”, I have had to go to many a training and the hardest part is usually trying to stay awake, not to mention the fact that they are usually short enough or complicated enough (usually short) that I can hardly absorb what I am being taught. I know there are many out there that disagree but having sent staff to trainings, or had donors require my staff go to trainings and then seeing my staff go right back and do things they way they always have I just can’t help but think that trainings are 90% fluff and 10% useful. Our donor recently sent a person from one of our partner organizations to a fairly expensive training in Britian. My staff was sure that this guy was going to leave the instant he got back and found a better job. Well he got back and within a week he quit and got another (admittedly sweeter) job. One of the unfathomable parts of sending external people to trainings such as this is that there is very little that can be done to keep them at the organization after they get the training and there is no incentive to use this training (market development in this case) if the donor agency isn't funding such things; you can't get funding for drilling water wells and say, we are going to make the market work here! or at least there is very little incentive to try to use that training because all you have to do is drill the well (or whatever else the donor wanted), telling the donor what should be done can get sticky.