Merigoesaround

If you are ever in a plane and you notice somebody looking like the lady in the picture there are chances the weirdo is just me. Flying is always an adventure. Even before reaching destination. I now travel with a rosary, drink water constantly, chew an average of five gums per flight and practice the Valsalva method often, very often...all in all to avoid cabin pressure looocura. In my last flight the pressure on my ears was so bad that the flight attendant brought immediately what is now a normal ritual during my plane shows: two plastic cups with paper soaked in warm water inside. It might be psychological but the steamy sensation helps.

My memory box mysteriously opened up today with the image of my grandmother running hysterically around the house, armed with a sweeper and screaming to the mice populating her kitchen: "son of a b...bastards go to hell". Grandma was bad to the Royal Spanish Dictionary and the Spanish mannerism, she often invented words and she used lots, but lots of funny insults, nasty words of those that make you laugh. At least they make us, Spaniards, laugh. The squeaky kitchen mice got beaten, many times to death. My grandmother was so not special that that make her unique and special. Every time she drank water would make a noise with her lips, like a kiss to the air, and rumored "how delicious". She would also hide the last piece of bread, that one that always seems to be left over the table, in her pocket. This behavior was probably normal for somebody who lived through a civil war: she highly appreciated water and bread till the end of her days. Mice were enemies, robbers...

I spent the day willing to scream to my office mates, to the building guards, to the lady sitting in front of me in the metro, to the world that it was my birthday. But I did not. I observed my colleagues and measured all their movements, are they preparing me a little surprise as we normally do ? do I feel some nervousness or tension around? what would be my "thank you" speech? 'guys you are simply the best', I rehearsed mentally. Where is the cake, are they hiding it on another floor?. I checked the fridge twice. Nothing in there. I imagined my parents signing me 'feliz cumpleanyos' through the phone and my uncles' band playing the birthday theme as they normally do every 14th of August. But NOTHING of that was happening. Nada. Nobody said 'happy birthday', no songs. No cake or smiley colleagues. It was already 5pm and no happy birthday love at all. I decided to sms my parents: 'Today is my birthday'. Answer: 'We did not have your cel...

My friend the ex-banker recently started working in development after many years in commercial banking. She wears too much gold during donors' roundtables and hasn't yet learned to manage the politics in a conducive way (conducively towards the goal of the institution you represent) but in general she is a hands on 4x4 lady. Her first appreciatiation of the international donor arena is this: 'People working in development are nerds and bad looking'. Full stop. We analyzed the sample we are currently immersed in. 300 individuals, over 100 nationalities. We run some domestic descriptive statistics to find out that there are only five goodlooking men in our sample. 1.6% beauty ratio. Since the five of them are taken and so am I gossip is rare, hence, the girls in campus spend our time talking about microfinance first, and finding a boyfriend after you turn 30, second. *Notice strategic order in case my boss happens to read this. My friend the ex-banker says it is tremendou...

So everything is allowed unless Islamic law prohibits it. Easy enough to remember. Mr. Khan is a friend from Pakistan. We have spent the last weeks having interesting conversations on Pakistan, Western Europe, from microfinance or marriage to religion. It was after a class on Islamic banking that Mr. Khan told me 'let's go for lunch, I hope I can survive this last week on fruit and vegetables'. I told him that he could find meat in the cafeteria. His anwer: 'it is not Halal enough'. We discussed the meaning of Halal (allowed) versus Haraam (forbidden) in the Islamic law on our walk towards lunch and I realized that even if the cafeteria was prominently displaying the Halal certificate, it would be difficult for Mr. Khan to eat that meat in good conscience. 'In Pakistan we have too many rules, I am not sure they follow them here in Italy'. He also told me that he was not feeling well because he could not pray on Fridays in a Mosque. This conversation reminde...

whether you sweat when you swim? I have.

Two youngsters. Slim. Drunk. Armed. - 'Do you think she carries a girl or a boy?' - 'A boy' - 'No way, I think is a baby girl, I am sure of that'. - 'You are wrong and very drunk. She carries a boy', insisted one of them. - 'I bet you five bucks the baby she has in her belly is a girl'. - 'Okey, let's see'. They shot her in the head, opened her stomach with a knife and rejoiced at their finding. 'You see, it is a girl, give me the five bucks'. Sierra Leona, only 10 years ago. This story was explained to me by the school professor of these two youngsters, today an official at the Central Bank of that country. He is proud of his new country, the democratic election, the new mood but I see the trauma and shame in his eyes, I see he is wondering what did he do wrong.

Reading about somebody I would like to emulate in the next years, Rory Stewart , I realized that even those who seem so sure and certain of where they go and what their contribution to society is or will be suffer from the accute syndrome of reinventing yourself. This syndrome makes you be whoever you want to be, learn as many languages as you can, travel as many countries as time and money allow you to, and struggle with an internal conflict between your life now and your life one second later from now. The constant reinvention of who you are and who you want to be can be tiring but is the path to self-improvement.

Somebody from the Far East told me recently that I was probably a man in my previous life. At first I thought the male in question was insulting me. To be fair with him it is true that it is difficult to dance salsa with me because I always try to lead the movements, spins and tempo...in short, I take the man's role. However, from that to have chest hair...nah. Man or not the comment made me wonder about the belief in previous lives and how strange, mysterious and almost comical, the concept of 'previous life' sounds to the Western Christian ear. Wikipedia tells me that Christianity, Islam and Judaism reject the concept of reincarnation while Hinduism and Buddhism endorse it. I've been googling 'past life', 'reincarnation' for some minutes now and all google comes up with are 'past life generators' that when you click into a mirror tell you what you were in your previous life. I did it twice and twice the mirrow showed male pictures.

Bongo, recently departed ex-president of Gabon: “Africa without France is a car without a driver,” he said, "but France without Africa is a car without petrol.” Courtesy of Mr. Blattman .

French people do not go jogging or running often. Or at least some around my hood find it terribly comical to see somebody (me) doing so. Today after work, and terrorized by how fat accumulates in all the wrong places of my small and roundy body, I put on my Mizunos, armed myself with my iPod and went for a run around Bastille-Marais...not once but twice was I applauded by le peuple screaming 'Bravo' and effusively supported by a 50-year old pal who ran for 2 minutes by my side in his office suit. For a second I double checked my hand to make sure that my old iPod hadn't mutated into the Olympic torch. Frankly, with workouts like this, forget about spending money on concerts, opera or theatre. This French spontaneity is priceless.

Social Policy has been at war with targeting since the very early conception of public cash transfers. How can governments make sure that they help those who need social support and not compensation seekers? Targeting is certainly the key word and probably the most complicated and crucial element distinguishing good from bad aid programs. I have news; I think microfinance could help with this. Information on microfinance usage could be used as a proxy to identify social protection beneficiaries. Think of a village or a region with very low income levels. Within those income levels you have the poor, the very poor, the ultra poor. Think about those days when you would delegate to your little brother what your mum asked you to do…weeell, this is the right picture: there is always somebody below you. Now, as a point of departure, let’s assume that microfinance should target the poor, probably not the very or ultra poor, who do not have regular income sources and will almost certainly bec...

I can't help it: I listen to others' conversations while they chit chat on their cellphones in metro or bus stations. Yesterday I was sitting by this young, handsome, black guy who involuntary disclosed his love life out and loud to the bystanders of Oberkampf metro stop. I obviously could not get the whole story but all I understood is that he had been dating a white girl. Apparently white girls did not meet his black standards. "No brother", he said to his interlocutor, "to play is ok, but to marry...I want to do like Obama, choose one of ours". This sentence amused me for a second, shocked me for a minute and terrified me immediately after.

There are many reasons why I am working for CGAP but one is to learn as much as I can about market-driven, innovative interventions that could be applied to education and health programs. Development policies in education need a large amount of fresh air. A hurrican of innovation. I have two ideas. ONE. Imagine the following: a low-income mother from Nowayoutland, she saves some money, she has to save to face shocks, such as one of her 3 kids getting sick. She is among the poorest of the poor in her community. A poverty-measurement tool confirmed so. This mother saves some money into an account opened at a microfinance institution. The microfinance insitution acts as a government agent. The mother can't touch that money: those little savings are for emergencies and for her three kids education. Each 10 dollars that she saves is matched by a dollar from the government from Nowayoutland. Isn't this like a dream safety net scheme? TWO. And now think of an exchange program that bri...

Once in my life I had a terrible crush on a Minister. The Minister of Justice. This was in Albania, some years ago. The female staff of my employer in that country, including me, loved him into pieces. While I await the results of the presidential election there I just found out via http://www.eca.al/ that my Minister won in his district. With Ministers like him European integration in the Balkans should advance much faster. But this is not the case. European integration is neither widening nor deepening. Europe seems less united than ever before. Directionless. Or maybe is just me feeling less European than some years ago.

Some weeks ago I was in Spain, in Madrid, concretely. I was there for a seminar slash conference, the new way of developing Africa, organize a conference, preferably in a country with more than 300 days of sun, running water and European bathrooms. Spain has great potential as conference destination (another idea that runs in my head is to promote Spain as the Florida of Europe, with luxury kind of assisted housing for old Japanese and Russians...down with the crisis!! this idea is great - I share IP with my friend Miguel btw, in case he is reading this). So I went to Spain for work. I learned more and more things about the industry I work for during the seminar, this sector is more commercial and complicated than I ever thought of. Spanish men...however, they are quite simple, it sufficed a nice tight dress and some make up to get a guy in the street calling me "Vaya Bombonsito" ("what a nice little sweet you are"). This kind of compliments can be sweetly told or d...

My life is my life and I live it the way I want. Partly true. We all compare ourselves to others, just like economists compare GDPs per capita. This deep reflection to say that boyfriend husband has been slightly downgraded in my personal scale since I know one of his friends is a (hot) European Space Agency ASTRONAUT. BH is an accomplished, goodlooking, caring guy...but not an astronaut. My love for BH is in absolute terms. No worries. Having a dream is the essence of happy, driven lives...but dreaming of being an astronaut and becoming one is out of reach. Or isn't? BHs spatial friend got an engineering degree, a PhD in Astrophysics and had a clear direction where he wanted to be: up there, in the space. Maybe dream chasing is what differentiates absolutely from relatively happy lives.

If there is a cool topic to be working on right now, this is it: microfinance. Forget Dambisa Moyo (even if she is quite supportive of microfinance) and the Easterly-Sachs online dramas, the development world is waiting for an answer on what microfinance can and cannot do. The answer is unfortunately blurred but on the way of being clarified. I think there are three groups of constituencies that are either helping or damaging the microfinance world. The rigorous observers: Some must-read blogs ( this and another one at PSD blog) this week portrayed a recent paper by some of the members of this group. There is good news for microfinance: the existing business owners of a Hyderabad slum appear to use microcredit to expand their businesses, durables spending (i.e. investment) and business profits increased. Unfortunately, there is a down side and some bad news. On the down side, the introduction of microcredit had little impact on non-financial aspects of development (health, education ...

Since Moyo was interviewed in the FT some months ago http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4121b1fa-ee5a-11dd-b791-0000779fd2ac.html?ftcamp=rss she's being literally everywhere. Even in my friend’s Martin facebook status. Today he wrote: “Moyo in the FT weekend, what's wrong with the press?” If Ms. Moyo wanted to heat the development debate, she has truly excelled at that. Among Collier, Rodrik, Easterly and the likes, a stylish young women with (also) something non conventional to say is refreshing. Maybe that is part of her success. Moyo's proposal of cutting aid for developing countries in the next five years and helping the poor through microfinance, for instance, leads me to the question: what if even if her idea has pitfalls is it really about time to get to the bottom of the pyramid with close-to-the-poor interventions that relegate governments to a temporary second stage? I think what is catchy of Moyo’s message is the kind of Yes We (Africans) can , empowering message behind ...

That the French are crazy about their food is no news. But to sympathize with their habit of eating the inside parts of animals, the tripes and so on...needs longer than the short half a year I have been here. Or another dinner at my friends' terrace. It might be very refined to eat those parts of the animal anatomy but in my country they are used to produce fibers for instruments or as a coat for chorizos. I have very sweet memories of my childhood winters in my grandma's village...the ritual of killing the pig (la matanza) and producing chorizos and ham; when I think about this twice now I reckon I should be a traumatized (and vegetarian) adult. La matanza is probably the least child-friendly activity you can think of. I am going to avoid describing how they sacrifice pigs in rural Spain for the sake of keeping my friends reading me and this posting free of digressions. I admire how the French eat viscera in a classy, refined, different way. From my friends' Matt&Mich...