After settling into our rooms and having a nice “sundowner” gin and tonic on the viewing deck, we all sat down to dinner on the front porch. Only one couple knew everyone in the group. The rest of us felt like we were part of a group that had been assembled for some auspicious (or suspicious) activity that was about to unfold. It was like the opening scene in one of those movies where someone in the group gets murdered in the middle of the night and the rest of the group is trapped and can’t leave.
As we ate and drank, the mood lightened up, and we became fascinated by the geckos climbing on the brick wall next to the dining table. Five geckos were congregating around the lightbulb, which naturally was attracting large moths and other insects. The geckos were like a group of teenage males out for a Friday night adventure. They were hanging out together but competing at the same time. We became fascinated as they would carefully stalk the moths so as to not scare them off and then pounce when they got just close enough. The competitive stakes were high because the gecko that captured each moth got to eat it all. All of the geckos were incredibly fast, but there was one who outshone the rest and got to eat a lot more moths. Another was very clever and was able to catch a cricket. As the alcohol flowed, we became more and more engaged and entertained by the details of the digestion as well as the capture. The geckos invariably caught the moths by the tail and then proceeded to devour them like a snake swallowing a pig. The moths continued to wriggle around and flap their wings as if to escape, but none ever did. Once they were caught by the geckos, the end was inevitable.
The waterhole adjacent to the house did not disappoint. During the day, various animals wandered up to have a drink or a splash and then wandered away. We saw impala, waterbucks, and warthogs. But the real action was at night. In addition to the smaller game, a family of elephants visited both nights; and on Saturday night, we were visited by a herd of fifty buffalo.
Elephants and buffalo weren’t our only night visitors. During dinner, one of our fellow guests used the bathroom off our bedroom. Shortly after emerging, he stated that there was a “monster in our bathroom sink.” I went in to check and everyone on the veranda heard when I yelled out a two-word expletive. In the sink was what appeared to be a very sturdy spider more than six inches in diameter. Upon further observation, it might have been an insect since it seemed to walk on only six legs. But then there were the two additional forelimbs that ended in menacing pincers, certainly for grasping and conveying prey to its mouth. It could have easily been a model for those movie creatures that come from outer space to take over the world. Thank goodness the light was on.
I didn’t know if this creature was poisonous or would bite, but I didn’t want to find out. Before doing anything, I had to get a picture, but then I planned to smash it with my heavy shoe. I was shocked when one of the women in our party intervened. She knew that it couldn’t stay in the sink, but she didn’t want it killed. Being braver than I, she managed to trap the creature in a covered plastic bowl and deposited it outside at a safe distance from the house. I showed the picture to the rest of our party, but Wendy didn’t want to have nightmares (who knows, it might have had a mate lurking nearby) so she didn’t even look at the photo until several days later back in Nairobi.
The next day, we discovered that the other bathroom had more but less threatening visitors, tiny frogs hiding in the corners and crevices of the sink, tub, and toilet. The poor fellow, who had discovered the creature in our sink the night before, also discovered the first frogs. He was doing his business when apparently a frog leaped out at him as he flushed the toilet. We don’t know who was more frightened. Upon more careful inspection, approximately twelve tiny frogs were discovered. From then on, most of the women were a little nervous about sitting down.
A Quick Visit to the United States
And Going Home to Nairobi
In June, our daughter, Diana, graduated from Ross University Medical School, an event not to be missed. The ceremony was held in Lincoln Center in New York City. Wendy left Nairobi earlier than I because she wanted to visit friends in California and my mother in Washington DC. I flew straight to New York. Wendy had numerous travel problems with weather and mismanaged luggage by a now-merged airline (whose nickname was north-worst), but after a last-minute $100 round-trip taxi ride from Manhattan to Newark to pick up luggage, we were all safely in New York with our clothes.
The graduation ceremony was wonderful! Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center is an elegant and prestigious venue for a graduation, and the graduates looked so impressive in their caps and gowns. Following the ceremony, we took lots of pictures with Lincoln Center providing many great backgrounds. Then we headed for a late lunch with friends and family at a nearby restaurant, the first of a number of celebrations over the next two days. On Saturday, we had the main party. It was a late afternoon cocktail reception. We had commandeered the bar area of an uptown restaurant, which was packed with relatives and friends, some who had known Diana for twenty-five years and some who had known Wendy for nearly forty. It was wonderful to share the occasion, and everyone who came was greeted by Sallie Mae, Diana’s recently acquired and appropriately named five-foot-high stuffed animal giraffe.
For those who didn’t already know, we recounted the story behind Sallie Mae. It started during a family visit to New York when Diana was eight years old. One of the sights we saw was the famous FAO Schwartz toy store with its collection of unique and amazing toys. Among the especially attention-grabbing items was an eight-foot-high toy giraffe, priced at about $2,500. Diana had asked me to buy it for her. I told her that I would buy it for her when she graduated from medical school since Diana already knew she wanted to be a doctor. My answer got me off the hook at the time, but I really meant it. I never forgot my promise and neither did Diana.
Some months before graduation, Diana let me know that she remembered my commitment but that she was releasing me from it because she wouldn’t have enough room in an apartment, and it would be an excessive amount of money to spend. However, I still wanted to remember the commitment with a symbolic gesture. I searched online for various types of toy giraffes. I looked at many small toys at varying prices, and then I found the one I had to have. It was a five-foot-high stuffed animal with a cute face and a reasonable price, shipping included! Several days later, Diana got back to her apartment just as the UPS delivery man arrived with a large box. Diana was frequently accepting packages for her neighbor, so she assumed this was just another. She was very surprised when the UPS man said it was addressed to her. She muscled the box inside and opened it carefully. When she opened it up, she smiled widely and felt a lump grow in her throat. She immediately called me to say thank you because without reading the card, she knew where it had come from. Then she began to think of names. She finally settled on Sallie Mae to represent the government loans that had helped to pay for her medical school tuition.
After my very short trip to the United States, I arrived back in Nairobi. It was very strange to be on vacation in the United States and go back to Nairobi to live. The Nairobi weather was very different from what we had left just two weeks earlier. It had gotten overcast, gray and cool (less than 70 degrees F). The locals called this cold and had been warning us that it would come in July. Occasionally it got “really cold” (almost down to 60 degrees F). It was amusing to see the locals bundled up in their heavy parkas and wool hats.
As I jumped back into my daily routine starting with walking to work, some things were very familiar, such as inhaling the smoke of open trash fires and the sooty exhaust from diesel trucks, which probably combined to equal the harmful effects of smoking a pack a day. Other things seemed new as I saw them in more depth, such as the terrain over which I walked to work every day. In some places, I walked on real, raised, concrete sidewalks. In other areas, the sidewalks were at street level but protected with steel posts that prevented cars from running over pedestrians. Some places once had sidewalks but were now covered with intermittent concrete and broken rubble over bare dirt. Along some roads, broad dirt shoulders substituted for sidewalks, but matatus cruised onto these recklessly to disgorge their passengers and zip away. In some places, the dirt shoulders were below the road surface and only wide enough for a narrow footpath with a deep drainage ditch on the other side. Along other roads, the only choice was walking on the roadway, facing traffic as we were taught as children (except that in Kenya, it meant walking on the right instead of the left). Usually this was safe, except when drivers made extra lanes to pass cars they didn’t feel were going fast enough. Even this was usually safe because you could see the cars speeding toward you and squeeze to the edge of the road as they passed. Unfortunately, that didn’t cover every situation, as we learned one morning when we walked out our apartment gate, turned right to face the traffic, and were nearly hit from behind by a matatu speeding down the wrong side of the road. He didn’t want to wait in the line of cars backed up at the stop sign. Welcome back to Nairobi.
As I became more attentive to the details of my walking, I planned my route more carefully to safely navigate the traffic, and I developed two important new safety rules. My first rule, opposite of what we were taught as children, was to cross only in the middle of the block, not at intersections. In the middle of the block, traffic is only coming at you from two directions. In the middle of the block, you can see cars from a distance, judge their speed, and calculate when to bolt across the street. At an intersection, there are no controls (or they’re ignored); traffic can come at you from at least four directions; and cars are unpredictable as they jockey for position, trying to outmaneuver their competitors. My second rule applied to actually crossing the street. Before crossing, look back and forth continuously. First, because the situation is constantly changing in unpredictable ways; and second, because if you grew up in the United States where the traffic drives on the right you will instinctively look the wrong way for oncoming traffic and then step in front of a speeding truck. Obviously, few people make this mistake more than once.
Of course, sometimes you can’t avoid crossing at intersections. At one place on my way to work there was a traffic circle with multiple streets coming together. At this point I just had to follow rule number two and seize the opportunities as they came. These opportunities usually came when cross traffic provided blocking, but I still had to be watchful for crossing cars that decided to turn, without signaling of course. It was exciting every day.
Matooke in Uganda
Genocide Memories in Rwanda
Wendy and I flew to Kampala again to work with Erastus as he built up the Uganda TechnoServe program. Our flight was supposed to arrive at 2:00 p.m., so I thought I would have plenty of time to get to the TechnoServe office and get on a conference call by four. I say “office” because I had heard that TechnoServe would have a working office by the date of our arrival. Our flight arrived a bit late and immediately after another plane, so the lines were long at immigration. When the TechnoServe driver picked us up, we were told that an office had been rented, but it did not have furniture, telephone service, etc. We went to our hotel, and with traffic, arrived right at 4:00 p.m. I asked to go quickly to our room so that I could get on the call, using my cell phone. At about 4:10, I dialed into the call. After beeping a number of times for no apparent reason throughout the call, my cell phone cut me off after about forty minutes.
I didn’t know why the cell phone was no longer working, but I thought I might be able to get back on the call using Skype. So I went to reception to see how to get on to the Internet. Their process to get on to the Internet was to sell access codes that were good for a fixed period of time. I agreed to buy some codes, but they were out. The woman at reception promised to call the service provider and then send someone to my room with the codes. A half hour later, someone came to the room with the access codes. I tried them, but couldn’t get on. I called reception, and they said they would send someone up to check on my problem. About fifteen minutes later, a very pleasant young woman came to our room carrying a laptop. After looking at my computer and then trying a few things on her own laptop, she apologized that the wireless wasn’t receiving in our room. She indicated that it was working in the corridor and garden area, just outside my room. At this point, I was certain that the conference call had finished and decided it was time for cocktail hour. C’est L’Afrique!
The next morning, Friday, Wendy and I were working on our computers in the small garden area outside of our room where the wireless network was working. We were waiting to go to a meeting with a potential donor. Erastus arrived and told us our meeting had been pushed out to the following week and so we had nothing scheduled for the day. We had planned to go to the field to observe the TechnoServe matooke project on Monday, but now the logistics would work better to leave right away. Matooke (ma-toke-kay) is a member of the banana family, called a starch banana, that is boiled when green and eaten almost like mashed potatoes. William, a project manager who reported to Erastus, was already planning to take Payson Bullard (son of the TechnoServe founder) to the field to document our success on this project, and this way, we could all go together. So we quickly packed up some clothes and set off from Kampala toward Mbarara (hum the M, but longer than in Swaziland, bah-rahr-rah) in the southwest corner of Uganda, near the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), which gave Wendy some pause, but we headed out anyway.
During this time period, the eastern region of the DRC continued to experience unrest due to the multiple factions asserting their power against the weak central government. Some of these factions were guerilla groups left over from the 1994 “troubles” in Rwanda and the resulting migration, and some were more modern criminal gangs engaged in illegal mining. Often the lines were blurred, but there were periodic flare-ups in the conflict, which usually resulted in thousands of refugees fleeing across the border into Uganda.
For much of the drive, the road was incredibly good compared to what we had previously experienced in Africa. It was like a two-lane rural road in California. It would be interesting to know the history of various roads, as to when they were built and who built them because there was such diversity in the quality. We heard that President Museveni had originally come from southwest Uganda, so the roads leading to his home territory were especially good.
Our drive reminded me of my impressions from our previous trip. Uganda was green everywhere. Some people would say verdant. Practically the whole country gets enough rain for good agriculture. As we drove through farmland, my favorite view was overlooking the hills covered with tea plants. As it’s growing, tea is very dense. The low shrubs are very bushy and planted close together. From a distance, the overall effect is of a thick-pile green carpet covering the hills. I wanted to reach out and feel its dense softness.
About halfway through our trip for the day, we stopped for lunch in Mubende (Moo-ben-day) at a café William knew. We parked in a dirt lot in front of a nondescript concrete-block building. We walked inside where it was dark because there were few windows and no lights. The only electricity was being used for two soft drink coolers. William ordered food for all of us, and we walked outside to sit on the porch and wait for our food. The porch seemed to be the place to eat because there were several sets of turquoise, molded plastic tables and chairs, all with dark blue, oilcloth tablecloths imprinted with beer advertising. There were no other customers, but it was past normal lunchtime.
When lunch came, it was our first introduction to the typical diet in southwestern Uganda: nearly 100 percent carbohydrates! We had large helpings of rice, Irish (white) potatoes, sweet potatoes, and matooke. There was some peanut sauce to go on the matooke, which would have provided some protein and fat, but it was burned so we didn’t eat it. There were also two small pieces of chicken to share amongst the four of us. It didn’t look that appealing, so Wendy and I deferred to William and Payson who gladly devoured it with just a few bites. Later, when we reached our hotel, Wendy had an attack of hypoglycemia, and she had to be very careful over the next few days to get some protein with her meals.
Since the next day was Saturday, we decided to visit Queen Elizabeth Park. We couldn’t get reservations at the lodge inside the park, so we stayed in the town of Kasese (Kuh-say-say), just a few miles north. To quote the Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa, “Kasese is a boom-and-bust town that tasted glory during the copper years…but generally seems to have passed its use-by-date. It’s a small, hot, dusty, quiet town in a relatively infertile and lightly populated area, and it wears an air of permanent torpor.” I thought it was a perfect description. We were among the few guests at the best hotel in town. The accommodations were Spartan but adequate, and the modest dining room had a diverse menu with some very tasty meals, especially for $7 apiece.
On Saturday, William, Wendy, Payson, and I visited Queen Elizabeth Park, bordered on the north by the Rwenzori (Rw as in Rwanda-en-zoree) Mountains (also called the Mountains of the Moon) and on the west by Lake Edward (its outflow is ultimately a tributary of the Nile) that is shared with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The park contains Lake George, which flows into Lake Edward through the Kazinga Channel. The many bodies of water encourage the varied species of animals and particularly birds that are found in the park, and the number one tourist activity is to take a cruise on the Kazinga Channel to see the wildlife.
On our cruise, we saw the expected crocodiles and hippos, as well as lots of buffalo and a few elephants. However, the more interesting aspect was the bird life. Queen Elizabeth Park is purportedly home to six hundred species of birds, and we saw many of the most interesting ones. We had seen the majestic fish eagles and giant goliath herons before, but here we saw many new species including the wonderfully colored saddlebilled stork. This tall elegant bird, with its primarily black and white coloring, is initially reminiscent of a conservative waiter in a tuxedo, but the bright red and yellow highlights on its beak quickly establish it as a rakish dandy.
As we cruised the Kazinga Channel, our guide pointed out the small fishing village where he grew up, which is still allowed to remain within the park’s boundaries. He also recounted several stories that highlighted the unique dangers of living in rural Africa. The most memorable was from his early teen years when he and two friends were walking home one night after playing games at another friend’s home. A lion had come into their village and was watching in the dark as the three boys approached. Our guide and one friend walked by the lion, but the lion attacked their other friend. The first two boys ran and escaped, but in the morning, the villagers found remains of the other boy’s clothes and skeleton. Several other people in the village had been killed by lions in the intervening years. As if to drive the point home about the unique dangers of living in rural Africa, that evening we heard that earlier in the day a speeding bus on the nearby highway had hit a wandering hippopotamus. Several passengers on the bus, along with the hippo, had been killed. At times it was easy to get comfortable and complacent about living in Africa, like being a tourist and only experiencing the interesting highlights. But then, a story like these would wake us up and remind us how different our life was from those around us.
We spent the next few nights in Mbarara as we visited the matooke farmers that TechnoServe was supporting. Again, we stayed in the best hotel in town, which was slightly better than Kasese, but outside of major cities, there was no understanding of the quality of accommodations and service expected by Westerners. The employees were very friendly, but things just didn’t work. The accommodations were adequate, but all of the rooms had holes in the window screens and bare bulbs for light. Also, in our room, the hot water in the bathroom sink didn’t work. We mentioned the hot water problem, but no one seemed to particularly care and no attempt was made to fix it. TIA once again.
I still don’t know if the hotel staff thought they couldn’t do anything or thought it wasn’t their job to do anything or if they just didn’t understand that something needed to be done. I’m sure the behavior was learned over many years and probably generations. Maybe it started with paternalistic colonialism. Maybe it starts over again with every individual facing so many challenges that she feels overwhelmed and powerless to make change. It’s always easier to conform than to fight the system, and I think that’s what most people do to get by. I often did it myself.
However, there were times when I could take action and change my situation. As we settled into our room, I sat down on my bed. My butt seemed to sink almost to the floor. The middle of my bed had no support for the mattress. I didn’t want to change rooms, so being an engineer by training, a problem fixer by nature and knowing how difficult it would be to get someone else to do anything, I attacked the problem myself. I took the mattress off the bed to reveal the support structure. The mattress was supposed to fit into a frame and be supported by a series of slats that fit into the frame. A few of the slats were broken and many were just lying loose on the floor. I set to work. I moved the broken slats to the foot of the frame, where there would be less weight, and placed the best slats from the floor under the center where they would support my butt. To remove or replace a slat, it had to be bowed and then maneuvered into or out of a slot in the frame, so this exercise was physical as well as mental. However, when I finished, my bed was well supported, and I could sleep just fine. This was Africa, but I could still fight back.
On Monday, William, Wendy, Payson, and I visited the matooke farmers whom TechnoServe had been assisting. Beyond helping them adopt good agricultural practices, TechnoServe’s primary support had been in organizing the farmers into groups to aggregate their produce and to connect them with buyers. TechnoServe had organized “markets” where farmers would deliver their matooke for buyers to purchase and load onto trucks. This is a simple but critical innovation in many TechnoServe programs and always the one that farmers appreciate most. It provides farmers with a reliable market for their produce and buyers with a reliable supply of matooke. Most importantly, the market can sustain itself when TechnoServe leaves.
As we talked with the matooke farmers, they were very thankful for their increased incomes resulting from TechnoServe’s support. They talked about being able to send their children to school, to purchase irrigation equipment, and in some cases, to buy a cell phone. After Payson had finished asking them questions, we offered to answer questions from the farmers. Although they asked several general questions, they primarily wanted to know if we were capable of increasing the market for matooke in the United States. They were very disappointed to hear that no one in the United States had ever heard of matooke, much less ate it.
As I have visited farmers and other small entrepreneurs, it never ceases to amaze me how creative some people can become when given the opportunity to participate in capitalism. In addition to matooke farming, many of the group members were beginning to get into other commercial activities, including matooke trading. One member was buying produce from his neighbors, renting trucks for transporting it and selling it in Entebbe. The most interesting group was the one who had noticed what they thought was a good opportunity to make a profit in beans. They noticed that beans always sold for a low price at harvest time and a higher price later when the supply had diminished. To take advantage of this, they pooled some of their matooke profits, borrowed a little more money, and bought beans when the price was low at harvest time. They were holding the beans to sell at a higher price. In essence, they had independently discovered leveraged commodity trading. I expect next year they’ll have a hedge fund and be trading derivatives.
After only a few weeks back in Nairobi, I left again to attend the TechnoServe East African senior staff meeting in Kigali, Rwanda. It was my first time in Rwanda. I was only there for a few days, and I never got outside of Kigali, but Rwanda looked like a beautiful country. It was so hard to imagine what had happened there.
Kigali was like a smaller version of Kampala, without the paralyzing traffic. Built on green hills, Kigali presented continuously attractive vistas in every direction. Driving through the city, it was hard not to immediately notice how nice the main roads were. They appeared newly constructed and were flanked by a myriad of new buildings with more under construction. Even outside the commercial and government areas, the mostly brick and terracotta houses looked relatively new and well-kept although modest and aligned along dirt roads. I was sure that much of the new construction was being financed by major companies and countries with guilty consciences. I just hoped that it would contribute to sustainable growth in Rwanda’s economy. I firmly believe that if there are enough good jobs and business opportunities that everyone will live together peacefully.
With limited free time, I went to the memorial center, which is focused on genocides, primarily of the twentieth century. Surrounded by beautiful but understated memorial gardens, the center is built on a mass burial site containing the remains of 250,000 people. The memorial building itself contains exhibits explaining the various genocides of the last century, ultimately leading up to the events in 1994 in Rwanda. The exhibits were excellent, combining scholarly descriptions with displays that evoked powerful emotions. It immediately reminded me of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC as well as what I knew about the holocaust itself. Confronted with incomprehensible events like these, I often try to achieve some understanding by putting them into frameworks, comparing and contrasting them to other things I know. I couldn’t help myself. My mind had to start processing these horrific events.
Compared to the “troubles” (as they refer to it) in Rwanda, the Holocaust was bigger, more well-organized, and mechanized. It was carried out by a highly structured and controlled society. Many of the people involved excused themselves by saying, “I didn’t know what was happening,” or “I was just doing my job.” All of this was possible during the Holocaust because most of the killing wasn’t up close and personal, and most Germans could ignore what was going on and go about their daily business. In Rwanda, genocide was very visible, and a large proportion of society was directly involved. In Rwanda, fewer people were killed, but it happened in a shorter period of time and most of the killing was very personal. There were no railroad cars, concentration camps, or gas chambers. People died, often at the hand of their neighbors, from individual bullets or more often a blow from a machete, and the dead bodies were very visible.
The thought occurred to me that in mathematics most people understand infinity as one concept, but mathematicians who study the concept in detail actually define different types of infinities. I wondered if there are different types of infinite evil.
While the “troubles” in Rwanda have long since passed, and the world has moved on, not everyone is living happily ever after. The consequences of 1994 live on today. While some of the major perpetrators of the genocide have been tried and convicted by the International Court in Arusha, Tanzania, many who were not caught continue to pursue their evil aims across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo where they fled in 1994. Although inside Rwanda things have been mostly peaceful since 1994, just across the border, there have been multiple wars and almost continuous sporadic fighting. Once the genie of racial hatred leaves the bottle, it is incredibly difficult to put back.
Sometime later, back in Nairobi, I read Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Allaire, the Canadian general in charge of the small United Nations peacekeeping mission in Rwanda when the killing started. It is an excellent but very depressing book about his frustration at not being able to stop the killing because no one would listen to him seriously and supply the necessary resources when they could have helped. During the day, I tried to put the Rwanda story out of my mind, but I continued to read in the evenings, and my weekly mefloquine nightmares took a very dark turn.
An Inspiring Visit
Shortly after arriving back in Nairobi, Wendy discovered that she would be hosting a representative from the Nike Foundation, which was sponsoring TechnoServe’s Young Women in Enterprise (YWE) program. Although I had previously visited a YWE site in a rural area, most of the YWE work was in the slums of Nairobi.
As Wendy described the visit in her blog:
We drove 30 minutes out of downtown Nairobi into the large Mukuru slum. All Nairobi slums actually consist of multiple villages, though as an outsider I couldn’t tell where one ended and another began.
Led by TechnoServe’s Young Women in Enterprise team and alumna Cecilia, we entered one slum village where Cecilia worked and lived. There were hundreds of rows of hundreds of one-room, tin-roofed-and-walled huts, most windowless, with dirt floors and cloth as doors when the solid doors were open to the streets. The streets consisted of mud with a liberal coating of trash and garbage, often split by running water, the source of which I didn’t want to consider. Due to these conditions, the main 3 modes of transportation are walking, pull-carts, and bicycles (all Dutch according to our Nike guest who lived 5 yrs. in Amsterdam). We did have to move out of the way once for a small pickup and once for an older Mercedes sedan, probably a landlord. All the slum lands are owned privately and tenants pay rent to the landlords. Water is shared from a single faucet on most streets. Electricity is usually pirated from the few paying customers. Most often, shops are the “store-fronts” of people’s living quarters that line the main streets where people walk, children play, and the sewage system runs. After a few minutes of getting our balance on the slippery road surface, we crossed a bridge over a river which just seemed like another branch of the sewage system. As we entered the “main” area of the slum village, I made several observations: how cleanly dressed most people are, despite their homes and streets; most children and adults wear flip-flops everywhere, even when warmly dressed in hoods and sweaters; and like kids anywhere, large groups play together then run up to anyone with a camera so they can be immortalized while being silly.
Despite the environment, the Mukuru visit was very uplifting because the tour was coordinated by Cecilia (more below) with a few of her friends from the Young Women in Enterprise program. We were invited into the home of one of the YWE Club young women, where on the tarp-covered wall above the mother’s head was the plaque her daughter had won at the Young Women in Enterprise business plan competitions. This older mother had 7 daughters and 1 son. The parents (read, father) decided to educate the son and not the daughters. Unfortunately, the young man was electrocuted and the father disappeared, leaving the minimally-schooled mother and daughters to fend for themselves. Five sisters still live with their mom in the one-room homestead. Nearby one daughter, the YWE alumna, runs a small kiosk where passers-by can purchase hot or cold milk in mugs (which she washes and re-uses). We visited another YWE alumna’s shop selling sweets. This single young mother of 2 had been divorced, though her ex-husband was in the shop when we arrived, now attracted by her earning a living…
Our final Mukuru stop was at the home of our tour guide, Cecilia, who won the YWE regional first prize for her knitted clothes’ business and was a speaker at the YWE final competition. A good entrepreneur, she brought product samples and sold a number to the judges and guests, including me, at the competition. I ordered 5 scarves in Kenyan colors, gave her my business card and asked her to call me when they were ready. A week later she called to ask when she could deliver them. Since I was in Uganda, I requested she come to the office on Wednesday the following week. When I asked how much the scarves were she said Ksh. 500 (~ U.S. $7)—I assumed per scarf. The next Tuesday night she text messaged me (SMS is the local term) to confirm I would be in the office Wednesday afternoon. She arrived on time, wearing one of her colorful scarves on her head. I paid Ksh. 500 for all 5 scarves—her pricing. I then told her that she could get much higher price in Nairobi proper and if she would come back to me with her competitive research, I would buy many more scarves at the higher price. Two weeks later, she called to say that she hadn’t had the time to do the research, so we discussed meeting in July after I returned from the U.S. to research together.
