Having lived all their lives with TIA, Africans become very creative and resourceful when confronting challenging situations. What in the West is called “thinking outside the box” is second nature to many Africans. For example, as we rode around Nairobi we noticed an innovative Kenyan deterrent to the type of auto parts theft we had seen in Maputo. On many cars, the registration number was sandblasted into the windows, mirrors, etc. It was a very ingenious solution and a value-added business! The world needs more of this type of creative thought.
However, my most memorable encounter with creative African thinking came one evening on a trip to the Nairobi airport with Bruce, the TechnoServe CEO, to catch an important international flight. South of Nairobi, the road to the airport is a four-lane divided highway and after rush hour traffic has subsided, the ride usually goes quickly. On this night, we hit severe traffic. The cause was unknown, but we suspected an accident. Traffic had not stopped completely, so we assumed that perhaps the police were directing one lane of traffic through the backup. As our car moved farther along, we noticed that other cars were passing us on the edge of the median, so thinking this might be the lane that was getting through, Tom, our driver, followed the other cars making a new lane of traffic. We later realized no traffic was getting through. The movement of cars was caused by the creative Kenyan drivers making two long lines of cars into five shorter lines with three lanes in the paved roadway and one each on the shoulder and the median.
At some point, drivers realized that no traffic was actually getting through, but a lot of people must have been really motivated to get to the airport. We were too, but we didn’t coach Tom; we just let him take initiative and be creative. Tom noticed that some other cars ahead of us were crossing the median to drive on the other edge, so he followed. The median was wide with two flat edges. In the middle was a deep gully for drainage. There was also a barrier of stone posts to prevent cars from crossing. Tom navigated the gully through a break in the barrier, and we found ourselves on the other side of the highway. We followed other cars along the flat part of the median on the other side, facing traffic! We were making progress toward our destination and the oncoming traffic didn’t seem too bothered by us, but the progress was very slow along the soft dirt. At some point, the cars ahead of us decided that there wasn’t too much oncoming traffic and that the oncoming cars could share the pavement with us. They pulled out into the oncoming traffic lane, and we followed! I was very happy that Tom only pulled out behind another car so that we wouldn’t be the ones to absorb the full impact of a head-on collision. As we proceeded down the highway, the oncoming traffic swerved to avoid the headlights speeding toward them. After a few miles, we passed the accident, which involved a huge truck totally blocking the road. There were a number of policemen standing around, but no one seemed to be making any effort to get traffic moving. Past the accident, we got back onto the proper side of the highway. We breathed easier and got to the airport well ahead of the departure time for our planes. Other people were stuck for much longer, but the jam had trapped so many people that all major international departures were delayed for at least an hour to prevent stranding so many passengers. These types of incidents always provided me with amusement as creative and sometimes subversive individuals overcame the oppression of the system. Despite my frustration with sometimes overwhelming TIA, I retained hope because of the incredible spirit and resourcefulness of some of the individuals we encountered.
Uganda
Part of my responsibility, beyond my work in Kenya, was to support Erastus, TechnoServe’s new country director for Uganda as he reestablished our presence, starting with an office in Kampala. So Wendy and I flew to Uganda. The flight from Nairobi to Entebbe (yes, the infamous Entebbe from the 1976 hijacking incident) airport is only about forty-five minutes. However, since it was an international flight, we arrived at the Nairobi airport two hours before the departure time. After touching down at Entebbe, it took us about an hour to go through immigration. Then there was the forty-five minute drive from Entebbe to Kampala; and I left out the drive getting to the airport in Nairobi. So overall it was a half-day trip for a forty-five-minute flight.
As soon as we landed in Uganda, Wendy said that memories of Entebbe and the Idi Amin fiasco associated with the 1976 hijacking began to haunt her. She had seen the movies Entebbe and Last King of Scotland and their scenes were spinning through her head. Thankfully, Uganda and the city of Kampala have come a long way since the 1970s.
Entebbe airport had a large runway and an almost-complete, newly renovated terminal. However, there were only a few planes on the tarmac. The terminal is much smaller and less crowded than Jomo Kenyatta in Nairobi since Entebbe gets much less traffic. After passing through immigration, baggage claim, and customs, Wendy and I were picked up and driven to Kampala. The road out of the airport was very beautiful as it curved around Lake Victoria with its nicely landscaped median. I had been reading Lee Kwan Yew’s book about the development of Singapore and how he had insisted on beautifying the road into the city from Changi airport so that visitors would have a good first impression. I was sure that Uganda’s President Museveni had taken his advice. As we got farther along on the road into Kampala, it wasn’t quite as beautiful as the initial stretch, but as we compared our surroundings to Kenya, everything looked just a little greener, brighter, newer, and cleaner. It was obviously still a developing country, but Wendy and I seemed to detect a difference.
Based on population statistics, Kampala is nearly half the size of Nairobi, but it is really a much smaller city. The small city center quickly gives way to residential neighborhoods and low-rise commercial areas that spread out for miles and miles. We observed that some of the neighborhoods were quite nice with large homes and groomed yards. Other areas looked like the poor commercial and residential areas in the smaller rural cities in Kenya. In Kenya, electrical power was a problem as it went off frequently, requiring every office and residential complex to have a generator. The same was true in Uganda, but the outages were even more frequent. Sometimes they lasted for hours, but usually they were quite short. However, the unreliable power would often wreak havoc with electronic equipment. Every time the power went off at our hotel, the Internet connection was lost, and the server had to be restarted. One time, I was talking to our daughter in the United States using the Internet, and I had to restart the call six times.
Our original plan had been to visit TechnoServe’s current Uganda project in the western part of the country and then to have several meetings with donors. However, our African experience had taught us to be very flexible. Erastus and his senior staff were working on a proposal with a very short deadline. Consequently, he had no time to go with us to the field, and it would have required two days of another person’s time just to take us to the field and essentially give us a tour. Although Wendy and I really wanted to see the team and the activities in the field, this didn’t seem like a productive use of resources, so we cancelled the field visit. The donor meetings fell through as well, so we spent our time, during the week, helping on the proposal and doing our Kenya work. The frequent power failures had damaged the server at our small hotel and there was no estimate on when it would get fixed, so we spent multiple days camped out and working in the luxurious business center of the Serena hotel in the city center.
At the end of the week, we felt we had helped as much as we could and were ready to take a few days off for touring. While we were primarily working to help the poor, we did want to take some personal advantage of our location. Our destination was Murchison Falls, Uganda’s largest national park.
The roads north of Kampala toward Murchison Falls were not nearly as nice as the road in from Entebbe. Full of deep potholes, they were as bad as or worse than the roads in rural Kenya. As we drove for hours, my engineering mind kept trying to analyze the road problem. As I observed, the paved surface seemed to be quite thin with only compacted dirt below. Consequently, when a small hole developed, it exposed the dirt underneath to the rain. As the rain fell, it softened the dirt and undermined the paving at the rim of the hole. Since the edge of the paving surrounding the hole no longer had support from below, it would break off. The hole became larger and the cycle of decay would start again. So pretty quickly, any small hole got wider and wider and deeper and deeper until it became a pothole that could break an axle. The same process occurred at the edges of the roads. The paving surface was undermined and over time broke off in little pieces, which made the road edges look like they had been nibbled away by a giant invisible monster. Of course, over time the road narrowed with many sections being about one-and-a-half-lanes wide.
We had lots of time to observe the countryside. For most of the trip, the vegetation was very green and very lush. This meant that the soil was rich and rain was abundant. Unlike Kenya where only 20 percent of the land area is suitable for agriculture, much of Uganda is composed of very good farmland. So although many Ugandans don’t have a significant cash income, they can at least grow enough food to feed their families.
Once inside Murchison Falls Park, we drove 80 km (50 miles) on a single-lane dirt road. It was very rough, but no worse than the pock-marked paving that we had just left. Along our drive through a densely forested region, we stopped to observe a tortoise crossing the road. As we stopped, the car was immediately filled with a giant swarm of tsetse flies. They seemed to be instantly everywhere, filling the space inside the car and attacking us. Our driver, Dominic, immediately grabbed a magazine and started furiously swatting and trying to swish the flies out of the windows with one hand as he started the Land Cruiser with the other. Simultaneously, I grabbed the insect repellant and chivalrously gave it to Wendy who began bathing every exposed piece of flesh. Then I did the same, a little more judiciously while concurrently swatting and swishing. Dominic started the car and began to drive as we opened all of the windows. We all continued waving our arms wildly. Within a short time, we were able to either kill the flies or get them to leave the vehicle. No one had been bitten, but the intensity and speed of the attack had been startling. Tsetse fly bites are painful, and they do carry sleeping sickness.
Our first destination in the park was a point above Murchison Falls. As we learned, Murchison Falls is not a high graceful waterfall; it is a thundering cataract where the full flow of the (White) Nile River is forced through a narrow canyon and over multiple cascades. Approaching the falls we heard a constant load roar from the water as it accelerated through the canyon and bounced against the rock walls. As we got even closer, the whole earth seemed to pulsate under our feet from the force of the water.
After viewing the powerful falls from above, we quickly drove 35 km downriver to the ferry that we would take to cross the Nile and get to our lodge. Because the ferry only runs every hour, and we were going to be close for catching the five o’clock ferry, Dominic drove aggressively on the dirt roads and got us to the dock by four-fifty. However, someone had decided that there would be no five o’clock ferry that day. We would have to wait until 6:00 p.m. We smiled, got out of the car, and began to casually walk around. TIA; we’d learned to adapt, but sometimes it would help if they served cocktails.
At 6:00 p.m., Dominic maneuvered the Land Cruiser on to the ferry, essentially a barge with two large rotating drive engines. We walked on and rode across. Our lodge was perched on a small hill very close to the river. This proximity allowed us to be continuously serenaded by the rumbling bass grunts and roars of the hippos that populated the river. At dinner we got another treat when a family of elephants invaded the pool area, just below the second floor dining porch. One elephant came close enough that his trunk could nearly reach us. Maybe he wanted to sample our dinner, but it was just out of reach. The staff attempted to shoo the elephants away, but the elephants were in no hurry to leave. The staff was no match for the elephants, so they gave up and after a while the elephants left when they were ready.
Having seen Murchison Falls from above, the next day we wanted to see it from the river below. The lodge ran boat trips up the Nile to just below the falls, and on this day the trip was so popular that a small boat was being used in addition to the large launch. Based on our prior experience on the Zambezi River above Victoria Falls, we chose the smaller boat because it could maneuver closer to shore and provide more intimate views of animals by the river. The smaller boat didn’t have a bar, but Wendy and I weren’t interested in cocktails in the middle of the day. However, we discovered that, under certain conditions, the smaller boat had other disadvantages. As we motored up the river, the skies darkened, and it began to rain. The wind picked up just as the thunder and lightning began. Unlike on the large, fully covered launch with roll-down side shades, the weather was a problem for our little boat which had only a partial roof and no side protection. The rain was pelting us at a forty-five-degree angle from a constantly shifting direction. I had an umbrella and tried to manipulate it against the wind in a progressively losing battle until the roof began to drain onto my seat when I totally gave up and just got as wet as nature wanted to make me. Our captain got a little worried about being the highest point on the river as the lightning increased, so he pulled the boat against the shore of a small island. The surrounding high ground and trees provided some protection from the lightning, but he warned us to be vigilant for crocodiles and hippos approaching the boat. After a while, the rain stopped, and we continued our journey up the river. We got a great view of the falls, and by the time we were back at the dock, our clothes were dry. Nylon backpacking clothes work great in Africa.
The next day as we drove back to Kampala, we made one important stop along the way. Another attraction within the Murchison Falls Park was a chimp sanctuary where we could view chimps in their natural habitat. This was not like a zoo with a viewing walkway and windows into the cages. In this sanctuary, the chimps generally stay within a five-mile radius, but each day the guides and the tourists must hike around until they find them in their wild natural habitat. Before Wendy and I started hiking with our guide, he explained the safety rules. Chimps are smaller than humans, typically less than four feet high and less than one hundred pounds, but they are about five times as strong. Because these wild chimps had not directly interacted with humans, they didn’t know that they could easily overpower a human. Consequently, when humans entered their immediate territory, the chimps would hoot, holler, and jump up and down to intimidate the humans. We were to ignore this behavior, stand tall, and act very confident as we observed the chimps. If the chimps seemed like they were going to attack, we were to crouch down in a submissive position and pretend to be eating leaves. In no circumstance were we to run from the chimps. If we did, the chimps would chase us down and kill us. We got the message and followed our guide into the forest.
The forest was crisscrossed with trails and our guide seemed to be leading us in a random path looking for the chimps. After an hour and a half of hiking, Wendy and I began to wonder if he knew what he was doing, but he finally heard some chimp sounds so we set off in their direction. As we approached the chimps, they started making the anticipated noises. It was actually quite amusing because it sounded like the primate house at the zoo or a group of schoolchildren imitating a band of chimpanzees. We were shortly in the midst of a band of fifteen to twenty chimps spread throughout the surrounding trees above us. They kept their distance and expressed varying levels of displeasure with our presence. They were cute, yet fascinating and definitely scary. We saw a Colobus monkey enter their group, heard some terrible screaming, and then saw the chimps eating the monkey. Chimps are mankind’s closest relatives and like us they are omnivores. Also like us, they can be very violent. After about a half hour of tense observation we hiked back to the Land Cruiser, reducing the stress level for both the chimps and ourselves. Our close encounter inspired both of us to read Next of Kin by Roger Fouts to see how really close we are to our genetic neighbors.
As Dominic drove us back to Kampala, he took the flying-over-potholes strategy versus the slowly, carefully avoiding them approach he used on the way to the park. It was a lot bumpier, but we got back in half the time. On the way back we still had lots of time to observe, but this time the focus was bicycles and their diverse, amazing loads, including a baby pig, two goats, one hundred pounds of banana leaves, twenty empty Gerry cans (for banana gin), eight banana bunches, six sacks of veggies, six stacked crates of empty soda bottles, three suitcases, three enormous charcoal sacks, two huge sacks of potatoes, a giant load of used clothes, a small hardware store’s worth of household items including mops and brooms, a bundle of about thirty sugar canes about six feet long, and about thirty pieces of eight-foot-long lumber.
In addition to bicycles, Ugandans use lots of small motorized scooters that are equally overloaded with cargo or passengers. These small scooters are called “boda-bodas.” We heard several varying stories on the origin of the name, but all the stories agreed that the original phrase was “border-to-border” and referred to the transportation of goods across borders. Evidently, in the past, large trucks would stop as they approached a border and unload their goods onto these small scooters for actual transport across the border. Whether the scooters were exploiting a loophole in tariffs, less likely to be stopped for inspection or being used for straightforward smuggling was never clear, but the name and the scooters persist.
Believe, Begin, Become in Kenya
After our trip to Uganda, we returned to our regular “routine” in Nairobi. Wendy split her time between Young Women in Enterprise and the Believe, Begin, Become business plan competition. I continued to support Fred, primarily acting as his deputy country director with a focus on strengthening our internal administrative processes. We had made significant progress, and I felt good about my contributions so far. In the finance arena, I had provided project managers with better reporting on their spending. Since financial reports from headquarters only came out quarterly and were often late, project managers didn’t have up-to-date information on their spending. This often caused them to overspend or to be overly cautious and not fully spend their funds when they could have been especially useful. I became familiar with our local finance system, dug into the monthly numbers, and created timely financial reports on Excel spreadsheets. I gave these reports to all of the project managers to help them keep their spending more in line with budgets. I also monitored spending levels myself and sat down with several project managers when I noticed their rate of spending would exhaust their funds before the project was supposed to end. With more timely information, we avoided several potential overruns. I also instituted regular, formal project status reporting to keep Fred fully informed and to assure that projects were on track and getting results. A third important change was to establish local project files in distinctive “blue binders” to assure that all relevant documentation on each project could be readily accessed without having to request that it be sent from headquarters when there was a question. While I knew that these changes would improve the quality of project management and ultimately deliver more benefits to our clients, I also missed the direct contact I’d had helping small businesses in Swaziland where my impact was more direct and tangible.
During this period, we lived on Rapta Road, and every morning on our way to work would pass the offices of IOM where there was always a queue of people waiting long before the offices opened. IOM stands for International Organization for Migration and among their goals is “to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need, including refugees and internally displaced people.” We realized that the people in the queues must be refugees from Somalia where the turmoil was generating a constant flow of displaced people into Kenya. We never knew what happened to people after they got to IOM. We hoped that they got better lives, but it just pointed out to us how easy it was to ignore someone else’s ongoing tragedy as we carried on with our normal life.
On a brighter note, we noticed that the government of Nairobi was progressing on their beautification of the city. There was a lot of planting going on. Borders of small flowering shrubs were popping up next to city sidewalks and in median strips (reducing the bare dirt index). To protect their investment and prevent pedestrians from trampling the vulnerable shrubs, the government had adopted a strategy that would never survive in the United States. Discreetly supported by wooden posts and strung throughout the shrubs were taut strands of barbed wire. Without the extreme fear of liability litigation that would typically result in the United States, the Nairobi government was determined not to let their beautification investment get wasted and destroyed by uncaring pedestrians.
Wendy’s support of Believe, Begin, Become (BBB), TechnoServe’s first business plan competition in Kenya was very different from what she did for the BBB in Swaziland. And the Kenya effort was on a vastly larger scale from any other TechnoServe business plan competition. TechnoServe had partnered with Kenya’s Ministry of Youth Affairs (MOYA) to sponsor the competition, and it was receiving a much higher level of attention than in any other previous country. In previous countries, we had received up to six hundred entries, and in Kenya, we expected between five and ten thousand. We were also planning to provide over forty hours of training simultaneously in eight locations to the anticipated three hundred semifinalists. MOYA wanted a high-profile way to support young people (into their thirties) in a country where their unemployment rate was approximately 40 percent. They also wanted to make the program very geographically fair and attract entrants from every area of Kenya, not just the larger cities. With her extensive marketing background and since she had participated in the BBB program in Swaziland, Wendy was perfectly positioned to provide broad marketing support to the team including writing press releases, developing marketing materials, and creating the training for the initial recruiting sessions.
Because of her marketing role, Wendy was able to tag along to the formal presentation of simulated donation checks to TechnoServe, hosted by Kenya’s vice president at his office! She shook hands with the VP as well as the minister and permanent secretary (PS) of MOYA. Besides the TechnoServe representatives, there were several senior executives from private sector companies including: managing director of Lenovo for eastern and southern Africa, the chairman of the Kenya Pipeline Company, and one of the board of directors from Kenya Commercial Bank. TechnoServe was receiving dummy checks for forty-five million Kenyan Shillings from MOYA, seven million from Lenovo, and one million from Kenya Commercial Bank (70 Ksh = U.S. $1). The press snapped photos while the ministry recorded the speeches.
Wendy was on a roll. Within two weeks, she had accompanied TechnoServe colleagues to meetings with Kenya’s vice president, the minister of Youth Affairs and permanent secretaries of both Youth Affairs and the Education Ministries. She had been seen on Kenyan TV twice! In her meetings, she was particularly impressed by both the vice president and the PS of the Youth Affairs Ministry. She told me that the PS of Youth Affairs was very knowledgeable and quick-thinking when responding to questions from the press. Wendy also said that he gave the impression of a venerable African chieftain who truly wanted the best for his people and was very accessible. She predicted he would have a long and successful political career.
Because BBB was such a large endeavor for our office, it wasn’t long before I got involved as well. To aggressively promote BBB, we were doing awareness days throughout the country. In the larger venues, these sessions consisted of stage shows that alternated singing, dancing, and other entertainment with short inspirational talks on business. In the more remote areas, the gatherings were smaller and focused totally on business learning rather than entertainment. Wendy and I went to a midsized city, Nyeri, where the event was presented on a temporary stage that had been erected in an open field that apparently was a city park. It had rained heavily the night before, so the field, which didn’t have much grass, was an oozing plain of mud. Despite the conditions, the firm that had been hired to promote the event was able to attract nearly two thousand people by driving around the city with a loudspeaker truck. The people who came seemed very interested and stayed around for hours paying close attention. There were a lot of young people who seemed intrigued.
Wendy and I stood behind the table in the TechnoServe booth, handed out application forms with the training brochure she had developed. We also answered questions when the questioner spoke English. Many of the teenagers seemed to want to engage us in conversation just because we were obviously foreigners. We were the only Wazungu (white people) to be seen in the area, and while most of the teenagers would have seen white people before, they had probably never had a chance to interact with them. The young children were even cuter and very amusing as they seemed to want to just shake our hands and look closely at our white skin. It was a very warm experience; I felt I was making a very personal global connection just by being there.
Wendy’s work in the booth was interrupted when the emcee of the show called her up to the stage to participate in the dancing. She did a credible job, but in a later discussion with colleagues was very self-effacing and repeated the cliché that white people can’t dance. Her Kenyan colleague reaffirmed the perception saying, “I’ve noticed that. Even in the discos. Why is that?” Wendy muttered a vague answer about being something cultural and not being as exposed to music as children. After a long day, we rode back for hours over potholed roads, but both of us felt very good inside.
Over the next week, Wendy and I both anticipated our upcoming visit to the exclusive Muthaiga Country Club, made famous by White Mischief. We had each read the book about the rich colonialists of the 1930s who lived in Nairobi and farther north around Lake Naivasha where they owned large plantations. The management of the plantations and households was typically delegated to trustworthy local employees, so the owners had little work to occupy themselves. They filled their time primarily with their social lives, which featured heavy drinking, some drugs, and extensive sexual encounters with each other’s spouses. The Muthaiga Country Club, which is still a prestigious country club on the northern edge of Nairobi, was at the center of these activities. Wendy had been dying to visit it since reading the book, but we didn’t know any members.
Eventually, some new friends invited us to the club to hear a recital by a pianist touring from the United States. It was interesting to me that a country club would have sponsored this type of event. Perhaps the club maintains an old tradition of bringing culture to the hinterlands or perhaps just wants to demonstrate that they are not the Muthaiga Club of old. I was already convinced that there had been change since the first person I saw when entering the club was an African woman, presumably a member, at the bar casually having a drink. There were also a number of Africans attending the recital. We asked our friends about the legends of White Mischief.” They said the culture still exists, and that although not so overt, the activities still go on. It would not have been obvious from the mostly geriatric audience at the recital, but who knows; maybe they’re really carrying on the old traditions.
Nairobi streets and sidewalks are congested with entrepreneurial sellers of all sorts of common goods, such as pictured here, secondhand shoes.
Next door to our first Nairobi apartment, a building looked as though it was constructed of tree branches, which actually comprised the scaffolding for pouring concrete.
In the TechnoServe Kenya office in Nairobi, Wendy poses with some colleagues who worked with her on the Young Women in Enterprise and Upscaling programs.
