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.
In her Mukuru home on July 4th, she showed the Nike guest her products and knitting machine. He bought a baby outfit and scarf. Cecilia explained how she almost had enough money to buy a more compact knitting machine for herself. Then she would hire and train another girl to use the current device, thus expanding her business capacity by 100 percent.
It is people like Cecilia who are the hope for Africa, especially African women. Her smile and enthusiasm are contagious. She is a natural leader, organizing her Mukuru YWE alumnae and friends to build better businesses through improved record-keeping, stock purchasing, etc. I fully expect that in 10 years or less, with her entrepreneurial savvy, she will run a very successful business with multiple employees and locations. With her leadership skills, I predict she will someday be a Kenya Member of Parliament.
A woman selling used clothes and other goods at a typical market on the outskirts of Nairobi at this typical “kiosk” which can be seen anywhere outside the main office districts of Nairobi.
Lake Nakuru National Park, located in central Kenya, is home to many thousands of flamingoes which love the plankton that grow extensively in the alkaline Lake Nakuru and similar nearby lakes.
Peponi Hotel is the premier place to stay on the tiny island of Lamu off the coast north of Mombasa, Kenya, known for its mixed Arab-African aka Swahili culture.
The traditional buildings on Lamu Island off the coast north of Mombasa, Kenya, are constructed with “bricks” containing local shells, as seen from the top of one building in Lamu Town.
Along the Kenyan coast and around Lamu Island, a key form of transportation is the “Dhow” boat—viewed from our hotel. Typically used by old Arab traders, they still move most of the island’s goods, local folks, and tourists to and from the mainland.
“Matooke” are starch-bananas (vs. our typical, sweet banana), which are a staple in most of Uganda. TechnoServe Uganda advisors, seen here, work with Matooke farmers to improve their livelihoods by increasing harvests, providing market connections, and helping diversify their crops.
Ugandan smallholder “Matooke” farmers often transport their harvest by bicycle to their local co-op on market day.
Matooke bunches are consolidated at regional co-op sites to be trucked to larger Ugandan markets like Kampala.
Advised by TechnoServe Uganda staff, some Matooke farmers have diversified their crops with other produce like potatoes, seen here with a woman farmer.
