A Great Man and Mentor!
I worked with Mike at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Nairobi from 1979 to 1982.  What a great man and mentor Mike was! I had just completed my MSc in Agricultural Economics in the US and my work with Mike involved helping researchers in government agencies in East and Southern Africa to conduct surveys to identify farmer problems and opportunities for introducing improved technologies.
Mike was one of the leaders in farming systems research ─ giving agricultural researchers the means to understand farmers’ objectives and circumstances by holding informal, semi-structured interviews with them and incorporating these into their research to improve farm productivity. Strengthening the capacity of African researchers in these concepts and methods was a key priority for Mike and his farming systems training workshops and materials were much appreciated and in high demand. Mike was a leader in systems thinking, interdisciplinary research and engaging farmers in discussions about their problems instead of just collecting information from them, which was the prevailing, top-down approach of the time.  It was a great experience for me to work with Mike and have him as my field supervisor for my PhD research while I worked for CIMMYT.
And I remember lots of laughs and jokes with Mike, many of them involved him making fun of Americans. Here are two: One day, Mike said something about the British Marines and I said, “Oh, I did not know that Britian had marines too.” “Well, we do not make so much noise about them” was his retort! And he loved telling the story about the American professor who accompanied us on a visit to a research station and the Kenyan station director asked the professor where he was from. “ I am from Indiana,” the professor told him, “not the part in the corn belt but from the hills of Southern Indiana”. Later the station director asked Mike, “That man said he is from India but why doesn’t he speak with an Indian accent like other Indians do!”
I remember visiting Mike in Washington soon after he moved there to work at the CG Secretariat in the early 1990s and he told me, with that snarky smile, ""You know, surprising as it might seem to you, I rather like living in the US and I even like Americans!" To which I replied, "you see, they are not all as hopeless as that American professor and I were!"