Kenya
First Impressions of Nairobi and TechnoServe in Kenya
The U.S. Embassy and Other Concerns
TIA, but Some Things Work Quite Well; And Africans Can Be Very Resourceful
Uganda
Believe, Begin, Become in Kenya
Photos of Kenya—Part One
Nakuru, Lamu, and Tsavo
A Quick Visit to the United States and Going Home to Nairobi
Matooke in Uganda, Genocide Memories in Rwanda
An Inspiring Visit
Photos of Kenya—Part Two
Managing Budgets and Donors
Finals of the Business Plan Competition
Coming Home
Your Turn
Epilogue
What’s Happened Since We Left in Africa?
Postscript
Is There Any Hope for Africa? Yes!
Swaziland
San Francisco to Mbabane
As the twin-engine turboprop climbed out of Oliver Tambo airport, we could see the densely packed slums surrounding Johannesburg, but the urban landscape quickly disappeared. It was winter in the southern hemisphere, and the flat terrain below was dry and brown. The land was chopped up into tiny plots for farming, most of them fallow. They looked rather sad, as farmland does when nothing is growing. The flight from Johannesburg to Matsapha Airport near Manzini, Swaziland, takes less than an hour, but this was our fourth flight since leaving San Francisco. We had been traveling for thirty-six hours, including two overnight legs.
The journey from San Francisco to Manzini, Swaziland, is just about the longest possible trip on earth. In addition to contending with the long flights, we had to manage our carry-on luggage through the multiple airport transits. Since we were staying for nearly six months, we brought a lot of luggage. The airlines allow you to check two bags per person, so we had four large suitcases weighing the maximum of fifty pounds each. In packing, we had allocated them fairly—that is, three for Wendy and one for me. She wasn’t going to Africa without a sufficient wardrobe and a six-month supply of her favorite beauty aids and toiletries.
However, throughout the trip, Wendy was a real trouper. Since two hundred pounds of luggage was not a sufficient allowance for all of our stuff, we also maximized our carry-ons. For carry-ons, the airline allowances are by size, not weight. Consequently, we each carried a thirty-five-pound duffel and a fifteen-pound computer bag. These were heavy for me, and my shoulders ached, but as we slogged through our last transit, I wasn’t sure Wendy was going to make it. Going through the terminal at Oliver Tambo, she looked as if she was about ready to drop. I helped some, and she pulled through bravely. Later, we saw the rough, red welts she had from the shoulder straps, but they cleared up in a few days.
As our flight approached Swaziland, the topography changed again. We began to see a few small mountains. They looked like the foothills in California, but craggier. In California, it rains in the winter, and the foothills are covered with green grass. In late spring, the rains stop and the land turns light brown as the vegetation dies. In California PR terms, the hills turn “golden.” They’re really dead brown, like straw, but can still be beautiful in a rugged natural way. In Swaziland, it rains in the summer and the winters are dry. The approaching hills looked comfortably familiar, like California with the dry, straw-brown grass contrasting with the black rock and the red dirt.
As we approached Matsapha International Airport, I wasn’t nervous or even excited. I was mostly curious and definitely fatigued. On landing and deplaning, the airport felt welcoming and comfortable in a cute and informal way. Since Matsapha has the only paved runway in Swaziland, it is an international airport by default. It had the smallest commercial airline terminal I had ever seen, particularly at an international airport. The terminal had one door for arrivals and one door for departures. Separating the two doors was a pleasant little garden, about ten feet square, of local flora surrounded by carefully positioned rocks. Someone had taken time and effort to make it attractive, and it worked. We entered the arrivals door and passed through immigration and customs in a space the size of our living room at home.
Outside the terminal, Kiki, the driver from TechnoServe, was waiting for us with a warm, smiling face, and we were very glad to see him. With very few people awaiting the arrival of our flight, it wasn’t hard for us to pick out Kiki. And as we were the only non-Africans on the flight, it wasn’t hard for him to identify us.
We loaded up our luggage and set off for Mbabane (pronounced by humming the m and then saying “buh-bahn”), the capital of Swaziland and our home for the next six months, about a half hour away. Our first destination was the TechnoServe office where we would be working. The office was on the second floor of a small, modern shopping mall in the center of Mbabane (population 90,000). The TechnoServe office had been open only since February, but was already becoming crowded. We met fourteen people, but there were nearly twenty names on a whiteboard that showed everyone’s location throughout the day. Among our future colleagues, only Leslie, our country director and boss, plus three other volunteers had come from the United States. Leslie had worked for TechnoServe in Mozambique for several years prior to Swaziland. Everyone else was from Swaziland. Some were full-time employees and some were interns, but everyone was young, most of them younger than our two children. After we met our coworkers, we got local cell phones and then bought a few groceries so we could exist until Monday.
Having spent two overnights on airplanes and having endured a nine-hour time change, we got tired very quickly, so we were driven to our lodgings about four miles outside of Mbabane. We were delighted to see the quaint little cottage where we would be living. Our cottage and several others were located on the grounds of a Christian retreat center along with a small conference facility and a chapel. The cottages were widely spaced and surrounded by large eucalyptus trees. Our front door exited to a patio overlooking a deep valley with mostly forest on the opposite side. Once again, we could imagine we were in the foothills of California, except for the thatched roofs on the cottages.
Later, as we ate dinner, we discussed our first impressions. From what we had seen, Swaziland was definitely a developing country. However, it seemed cleaner, neater, and sometimes more modern than many others we had visited. Especially in the center of Mbabane, where there was a shopping plaza dating from the early nineties and two small malls that were newer, we felt the ambiance of a small working-class city in the United States or Canada. It wasn’t an exotic environment from an African novel or a movie. The city streets were better maintained than in some U.S. cities, and the road from the airport to Mbabane was a four-lane divided highway. While the cars were not extravagant, they were not all old and run-down as they are in many developing countries; and they seemed to be plentiful. However, contrasting with the pleasant, if not inspired, architecture of the shopping area was a huge concrete skeleton of an abandoned multistory building that dominated the hill above the city. I was sure that there was a story of speculation and probably corruption behind the giant edifice because it looked as if it had been abandoned, partially constructed, many years earlier. I wasn’t judging, and I hadn’t drawn any immediate comprehensive conclusions; I was just trying to take in the comparisons and contrasts to begin the mental processing.
My other immediate impression as we walked around Mbabane was of a disproportionately youthful population. Since we were walking around a shopping plaza at 4:00 p.m., the youthful crowd could have been just what would be expected at a shopping mall at 4:00 p.m. anywhere in the world. However, I couldn’t help but think about the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging Swaziland, worse than any other country in the world, and producing an average life expectancy of only thirty-two years. Maybe it was what a society looks like when AIDS kills a huge proportion of the adults and produces a generation of orphans.
How Did We Get Here?
It’s hard to know when the idea started for me. Maybe it had been percolating since I read a biography of Dr. Albert Schweitzer when I was a child. Or maybe it only started a few years ago as I became one of the frontline baby boomers contemplating what I wanted to do in “retirement,” whatever that means anymore. I had always admired Albert Schweitzer, who gave up a great life in Europe to be a doctor in a remote region of Africa. However, I hadn’t been so moved that I wanted to be a hero and give up all the worldly pleasures of a good life. I wanted a good career and the rewards that went with it.
Now was different. We had been fortunate in our lives and careers. We weren’t rich, but we had enough saved that we didn’t need to focus on maximizing our income. Also, our children seemed on their way to careers of their own. One was in medical school and the other nearly finished with law school. So when I left my last high-tech job, I evaluated our finances and decided that I’d finished my primary career, but I wasn’t ready to stop working. For a number of years, Wendy and I had periodically discussed what we would do next as we contemplated wrapping up our primary careers. Neither of us wanted to be heroic, but we both wanted to “give something back.” We both wanted to be working on something of obvious benefit to society.
Wendy had taken the first step in this direction. Four years earlier, she was feeling frustrated and unsatisfied selling just one more new technology product. So she left her career as a director of marketing in the high-tech industry where she had spent her career. She took time off to contemplate and explore what she wanted to do next. As she thought about her interests and how she might contribute to society, she narrowed her focus to three major themes: youth (especially young women), education, and entrepreneurship. Her next step was to network and explore for potential opportunities that could satisfy these interests. After a lot of lunches and coffee sessions, a friend suggested that she might want to join the board of directors of Junior Achievement (JA) in Silicon Valley as a part-time activity while she continued to explore. The focus of Junior Achievement is teaching young people the life and business skills they will need to thrive in our free market economy. So it aligned precisely with Wendy’s interests, but it wasn’t a fulltime activity.
Wendy joined the Junior Achievement board and immediately assessed that JA needed help with marketing. There was no marketing plan, so Wendy set out to create one. She did extensive interviews with the executive director, the staff, donors, and other stakeholders and developed a marketing plan that would allow JA to increase their revenue and the number of students that they could serve. The executive director loved the plan and convinced the executive committee of the board that she needed someone to implement it. She wanted to hire Wendy as a full-time employee. The executive director got her approval and approached Wendy, who was excited, but a little surprised and definitely hesitant. The position sounded great, but Wendy had been expecting to take more time off. In the end, the opportunity was too good a fit to pass up, and Wendy agreed to start in a part-time role that quickly evolved to fulltime.
Wendy became JA’s vice president of marketing, and several months later, when the vice president of development left, Wendy became vice president of marketing and development. She was paid half of her former salary, and she still worked long hours, but she felt she was doing it for a better reason. In addition to teaching kids about the free enterprise system and how to be successful in business, Junior Achievement encourages young people to stay in school, study hard, and to see themselves as future entrepreneurs or businesspeople. It was a great fit with Wendy’s interests and allowed her to use her skills and experience to benefit society.
While Wendy was at Junior Achievement, I was still pursuing my career in the high-tech industry, but I knew it wouldn’t be for many years. It had been a very enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding career. I had been a partner in a large consulting firm, a senior vice president at a start-up and a general manager in a software company, but I was ready for a major change. I thought a lot about what might come next. As with the millions of baby boomers who will soon reach the traditional retirement age in good health, I knew that I could easily live another thirty years, and I knew that I would have a lot of time to fill. I didn’t play golf, which can fill more time than any other human activity I know, so I had to think of something.
I knew I wanted to contribute something back to society, and I knew I wanted something that would excite me, but I wasn’t sure what it would be. My first thought was to become a paramedic and support relief efforts after global disasters. It sounded exciting and heroic, but it would have meant a year of training and then being away from Wendy for extended periods of time. I realized that I needed a more disciplined approach to my search. I bought What Color Is Your Parachute? and followed the instructions and exercises for a “life-changing job hunt.” In one exercise, I decided the person that I would most like to be was Kofi Annan because he worked to achieve world peace. I decided I wanted to work on world peace, and I knew I could use my skills and experience to do it.
