Working for the FAO in Afghanistan

From November 2023 to July 2024 I served as FAO Afghanistan’s Head of Communications, Strategy and Resource Mobilization. I plan to write about it and will edit this post soon. For the time being, here is a short movie shot by Barmak Akram that we edited together into a 6 minute teaser.

It follows me as I travel through Northern Afghanistan speaking with farmers about climate change and what can be done to adapt to it/mitigate its effects.

Barmak is a talented and versatile filmmaker; he shot this on a new iPhone and barely intervened in my activities (except by fixing and removing lapel mics and occasionally asking me to repeat a movement or introduction). He managed to catch most of his footage on the fly. We’d like to make a full length movie on climate change in Afghanistan. Any producer interested can get in touch with him (or me).

YouTube player

Sonic BBQ and the Hunger Kitchen

These are two projects I worked on with Gilles Stassart when in Ethiopia; they finally blended into one at the Alliance Éthio-Française in Addis Ababa, in a series of performances:

  • VIP dinner with WFP rations, November 2018
  • Sonic Barbecue part 1, November 2018
  • Sonic Barbecue part 2, March 2019

Part 1: The Hunger Kitchen

The Hunger Kitchen idea started with the following observation that I made while working in Somaliland and Somalia: beneficiaries of food aid generally dislike the food rations they receive, and do not know what to do with them. Therefore, they often resell those rations to buy foodstuffs they’re more familiar with.

A vendor selling WFP ‘plumpy sup’ (a variant of plumpy nut) on the Somaliland-Ethiopian border at Tog Wajaale. The price is 1000 Somaliland shilling, about 10c, per ration. I took this picture in 2017
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