In discussing this with my junior colleague, Mpendulo (again, hum the m, then “pen-du-lo” with long vowel sounds for the u and the o), I explained that the only way that this business could succeed would be to establish a unique brand that addressed a specific niche and to do this with very little money available for advertising (against Coke and Nestle). Obviously tongue in cheek, I suggested that we start a rumor that this water would either heal very sick people or increase male potency. Those were the only ways I could think of to make this business successful. More seriously, we set about collecting information that would clearly demonstrate the futility to our client.
For both Wendy and me, the first week of work was intense as we jumped into our new assignments, and the days went by quickly. To our surprise, after only one week of work, we got a three-day weekend. Saturday was declared a national holiday in Swaziland because it was the birthday of the prior king, Sobhuza II (“So-bu-za” with long vowel sounds for the o and u, short for the a). As with many holidays in Swaziland, the holiday declaration seemed to come at the last minute and to be a surprise, even though Sobhuza II’s birthday was well known. Sobhuza II was the father of the current king, Mswati III, and the longest reigning monarch in any country in history. (It must have been his eighty wives who kept him healthy). Leslie decided that it would be unfair to celebrate a holiday on a Saturday, so she closed the office on Monday and gave us all a three-day weekend. Not bad for our first week on the job. We rented a car and drove to Kruger Park in South Africa for three days of big game viewing.
Back at work on Tuesday, Mpendulo and I met with the man who wanted to start a bottled water company. He was a very pleasant, gray-haired gentleman, probably not much older than me. He was retired but had a BS degree from Penn State University in agricultural mechanization, which had been his specialty throughout his career. Based on his idea and a good source of clean water, he had hired one consultant to write a business plan for the bottled water business and another consultant from the beverage industry to develop a set of specifications for a bottling plant.
However hopeful, our entrepreneur had very little in the way of ideas as to how he would compete with the large companies that were already in the market. He thought that he might be able to get preferences from local merchants because his would be a local Swazi company. He had talked to a number of retailers, although not the large ones, who had been encouraging, but all told him to come back when he had actual product to sell. He indicated that local hotels already had deals with existing water companies, but he thought he could break into this market if he formed a partnership with Tibiyo, the Royal Swazi company, that had investments and influence in many businesses throughout Swaziland. He hadn’t yet talked to Tibiyo in the two years that he had been pursuing his idea. He had talked to a large multinational food products company with a local presence about doing his distribution. In the discussions with the large multinational, the local manager had indicated a possible interest in sourcing private labeled water from him. However, the manager who had been encouraging had now been transferred to another location and the new manager didn’t show as much interest. When asked how he intended to promote his product, which we thought would be critical to any possible success, our entrepreneur had a one-word answer, advertising.
Mpendulo and I also inquired about the planned capacity of his plant and the size of the Swazi market. His planned capacity was roughly 60 percent of the total Swazi market, but he hoped to export to Mozambique and South Africa.
While any potential investor in the United States would have quickly dismissed this proposal, TechnoServe was trying to encourage entrepreneurship in a developing country. We needed to put in the extra effort to explore any possibility. I was also new to Swaziland and didn’t want to alienate anyone. This meant that I needed to thoroughly research a proposal before giving someone the bad news that their idea just wasn’t justifiable. So Mpendulo and I planned our investigation.
Smelling the Roses
Exploring Our Surroundings and
Understanding the Culture
My opinion is that when you’ve finished your primary career and you’re working in your next phase, there is more time to smell the roses, and you should take it. Whether you’re still working for pay or volunteering, you’ve made most of the money you’re going to make in your lifetime, and you’ve had most of the career advancement. At this point in your life, you don’t need to work sixty to seventy hours per week. Forty hours of serious hard work (or less if it’s a part-time role) is just fine. For many of us who have aggressively pursued our careers for thirty years or more, this is a revelation and a challenge. But if we can take this principle to heart, work can be positively pleasurable.
When we limit the amount of time we devote to our job, we can have much more time for exploring, understanding, and appreciating our environment, especially if we’re living in another culture. This can be incredibly good fun as well as mentally stimulating. And it will help you live a longer, healthier life. Gerontologists tell us that challenging ourselves later in life with new experiences, situations, and learning will keep us more mentally sharp and physically fit than a routine without these. Wendy and I wanted to work hard for a cause, but we also wanted to take advantage of our situation and take in all that we could of the culture and sights that surrounded us. We wanted to make our time in Africa an adventure. We wanted to explore. We wanted to experience the idiosyncrasies of the local environment and culture. So we did.
At the end of only two weeks, Wendy and I knew that we really needed to have a car, so we rented one for the duration of our stay. It gave us necessary flexibility on what we could do and when, including going to the Mountain Inn at any time to use Skype and call the United States. We also had a lot more freedom to visit the local highlights. Even though we were paying for the car, our combined $50 daily stipend went pretty far in Swaziland, and we were spending much less money than we would have been in the United States. Although we now had a car, Wendy had been sick all week, so we didn’t immediately take a big trip, but we did visit the Swazi Cultural Center, primarily a reconstructed Swazi village from the nineteenth century.
Historically, the Swazi culture was male dominated (many would say that it remains so today), and polygamy was traditional. Today, few Swazi men, other than the king, have multiple wives, but some still do. In the past, polygamy was the rule rather than the exception. Men were allowed as many wives as they could afford to marry and support. The first expense was the traditional present to the future wife’s parents; seventeen cattle if the woman was a virgin. Discounts were negotiated for nonvirgins, and if the couple already had a child together, it was definite proof. After marriage, each wife had her own two huts, one for sleeping and one for cooking. The husband could decide which wife he wanted to sleep with each night. He also had his own separate hut if he wanted peace and quiet. (Some traditions die hard: Although polygamy was no longer common in Swaziland, less formal relationships continued. As mentioned earlier, unprotected sex with multiple concurrent partners was a major reason that Swaziland had the highest rate of AIDS in the world.)
After the tour of the village, we watched a performance of Swazi dancing and singing. The dancing was more athletic than most traditional dancing Wendy and I had seen in other countries, and the singing had great rhythm with multipart harmony. The performance wrapped up with a traditional rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was written by a Swazi.
Later Saturday evening, we observed a slice of current culture in Swaziland. We had been invited to go with people from our office to a local country club for dinner and a wine auction. We had no idea what to expect, but we looked forward to the opportunity to socialize with our coworkers. The country club was some distance away from Mbabane in a more rural area. Strangely, it was located adjacent to a very large canning plant for fruits and vegetables. We pulled into the dirt parking area and walked with our friends to the clubhouse.
Immediately, when we entered the clubhouse, I felt as if I was in an Elks Lodge or an American Legion Hall in a rural United States community. The floor was concrete; the ceiling was acoustical tile with commercial-style fluorescent lights. There was a fireplace that gave some ambiance, but it was overwhelmed by the rest of the slightly down-at-the-heels décor. The room was filled with tables covered with paper tablecloths and surrounded by folding chairs. The decorating committee had actually done a very nice job dressing up these tables with attractive centerpieces made of local fruits and accessories. We arrived early, so we went into the bar where a self-serve wine tasting was in progress.
The bar had similar décor except the ceiling was lower, presumably to make it cozier. We sampled a number of wines from South Africa as more people arrived. When we went back into the main dining hall, most of the tables were full, and we were immediately struck by the sea of whiteness. To put this into perspective, when walking around Mbabane, the population we saw was over 99 percent nonwhite. In fact, my experience had been that, walking down the street, white people had a tendency to stare at each other with the implied questions of, “I wonder who that is and why they are here?” At the country club dinner, the couple of mixed race background at our table had the only nonwhite faces in the room.
With further observation, the crowd seemed to fit the American Legion theme. There was a lot of white hair as well as white skin. Most people were in their fifties through seventies and looked like farmers or perhaps small businessmen from a rural community. We were in our late fifties as well, but the idea that “sixty is the new forty” hadn’t made it to Swaziland. Some of the women were nicely dressed and obviously paid attention to their appearance. However, a lot of the men had significant bellies that projected well beyond their belts. I did see two younger men, perhaps in their thirties, apparently trying to dress cool and sophisticated. They both had on informal jackets over wide open-collar shirts with pushed-up sleeves. I think the idea was to simulate the Miami Vice look, but it came off as a rumpled imitation of a style that had long been out of fashion.
My thoughts were obviously biased by the sophisticated Silicon Valley environment we had left just two weeks earlier. However, I couldn’t help but think that these people were probably Afrikaners who had migrated from South Africa with all the negative implications from the history of apartheid. Of course, when looking at me, I think most people in Swaziland guessed that I was from South Africa as well. So we all have our prejudices. I was told at a later date that most of the whites in Swaziland aren’t actually from South Africa but instead came directly from Europe. All of these people whom I had observed were probably very nice, hardworking individuals who had contributed to the economy of Swaziland. I just couldn’t ignore the stark contrasts with both Silicon Valley and the general population of Swaziland, and I felt very uncomfortable.
After we sat down at our table, the auctioneer for the evening took the podium. He was an elderly gentleman, portly, and dressed in a white shirt with a string tie. He took command and told us that the wine auction would be completed before dinner was served. We had mild trepidation since the only food on the table was bread and a small cheese plate garnished with a few vegetables. We had no idea! There were one hundred lots of wine that were auctioned off, and it took forever. I thought people would start passing out from hunger, but the auctioneer went on and on. Finally, after fifty lots, he took a break, but this only meant that dinner was further postponed. Dinner was served after 10:00 p.m. When we finally got to eat it, it was a pleasant pedestrian meal, well-done beef with mixed vegetables, potatoes, and a decent dessert.
During dinner, I got the opportunity to talk to the husband of one of my coworkers. He had a position of responsibility with the largest local bank. As we talked about the older age of the crowd at the auction, he said that seeing this demographic had become more common in the native Swazi population as well. The cause was the AIDS epidemic that was still killing off a huge proportion of Swaziland’s young adults despite the omnipresent cautionary billboards and readily available condoms. His bank had encouraged many of their retired employees to come back to work because so many of their productive younger workers had been lost to AIDS. From a larger perspective, there was serious concern that the Swazi population was evolving to a distribution with many children and adolescents (including many orphans) and a number of people over forty, but with a “hole” in the twenty to forty age group. The implications for both the business community and the society in general were ominous.
Although the AIDS epidemic threatened the country long-term, the weather had a more immediate impact on us. In general, the weather since we arrived had been very pleasant. It had been similar to northern California weather in the early spring with daytime temperatures usually approaching 70°Fahrenheit. The nights had been cool, around 50°F, which isn’t bad if your house is centrally heated, but ours wasn’t. Our cottage had small, relatively ineffective space heaters in two of the rooms. They definitely didn’t heat the house and really didn’t seem to make a difference if they were on or off. So the nights were very cold. Although we were used to having our own sleeping space in a queen-sized bed at home, compressing ourselves together in a double bed under a sheet, a blanket, the bed cover, and a quilt seemed a reasonable compromise to keep warm.
After a few weeks, the weather began to get a little warmer. Not a lot, but it was noticeable. It had definitely gotten just a little warmer at night, and on some mornings, I hadn’t worn a jacket to work. It had just turned to August, which is the equivalent of February in northern California. And like California in February, some days were actually warm if you went out in the midday and soaked in the radiant heat from the sun.
With the relatively mild and temperate weather lulling us into a sense of pleasant complacency, we weren’t prepared for the occasional intensity of Swaziland’s storms. Then we had two nights of fury. The first night, we had an amazing storm. It wasn’t a hurricane, but it came close. At dusk, the wind came up. I had never experienced wind so strong without rain. It was intense. I don’t think the winds got over seventy-five miles per hour, but I imagine it blew at fifty or sixty and carried on for several hours. Then it started to rain. The most intense rainstorms I ever experienced had always been in the tropics, but this was just as severe. The intense rain and wind continued for several hours. We could hardly sleep. Throughout the night, Wendy and I kept thinking about the forest of eucalyptus trees right next to our cottage, hoping they wouldn’t fall on us. Later, the rain stopped, but the wind kept up all night long. The early morning was calm and gave way to a beautiful day with perfectly clear air and not a cloud in the sky. Our view over the Ezulwini Valley was beautiful. We understood why it is called the Valley of Heaven.
With the previous night’s weather behind us, we went to the office. Unfortunately, we heard from the business advisor in charge of horticulture that one of her clients had his crop of baby vegetables wiped out by a hailstorm. She had visited his farm and taken pictures. The hail had been severe and had accumulated so much that it looked like snow on the ground. The localized hail didn’t cause widespread devastation, but it had totally destroyed our farmer’s crop, causing a twenty-thousand-dollar loss. Crop insurance was so expensive in Swaziland that it essentially didn’t exist, so individual farmers paid the price for the whims of nature.
The rest of our day was uneventful, and Wendy and I left the office around 6:00 p.m. The wind picked up, just like the night before. As we drove the few miles to our cottage, we began to notice that the street and traffic lights were out. We hoped that it didn’t affect our house but expected to come home to darkness. Although all the way home there were no lights on the main road, as soon as we turned into the Emafini complex, we could see glimmers of light in the distance. We had hope. As we drove over the top of the hill on our dirt and rock road, we could see the exterior lights from our cottage. We were happy. And when we scrambled into the house and closed the door, we felt we had achieved our refuge.
I began to cook dinner (while we were in Africa, I did all the cooking as Wendy created a website to keep our friends and family up to date on all of our activities) while Wendy packed for her planned trip to Johannesburg with Atiba and Leslie in the morning. The wind was really blowing again. No rain, but tree branches were being broken and blown about. And the constant roar was like a wind tunnel. The lights flickered. The television was intermittent as the reception of the satellite dish was interrupted. Just as I finished cooking and was putting dinner on the plates, the power died for good. We had dinner by candlelight. Actually, we had the modern version of dinner by candlelight and LED. Our son, who is an outdoor equipment aficionado, had convinced us to pack battery-operated LED headlamps. So we used these with the candles for dinner. How very strange; the eerie, sterile, high-tech beams from LEDs combined with the primitive, warm glow of candles. The novelty of the candlelight dinner wore off quickly.
The previous night, the winds weren’t hurricane force, but this night, I’m sure they were. They roared all night, making it impossible to stay asleep. As the wind ripped branches off the trees and smashed them against the windows, it sounded as if the panes would shatter. I worried as to what I would do if they did. Periodically, I was able to doze off until a particularly loud crash against a window would wake me again. Luckily, the windows never broke, and we survived the night.
In the morning we surveyed the damage, and it was significant. Trees were uprooted and lying everywhere. Our cottage had relatively minimal damage although a piece of the roof had been ripped off and blown away. Large branches and a broken tree, twelve inches in diameter, had fallen within ten feet of our bedroom. Our closest neighbor had a two-foot diameter tree uprooted within six feet of his house, and he had major roof damage. The exit road from our Emafini compound was blocked by a large fallen tree. We called the office to get a ride to work, but we had to climb over downed trees and branches, with Wendy’s suitcase, to get to the main road where our driver could pick us up.
Fortunately, our shower worked. We had hot water and electricity from the Emafini backup generator. Others in the office had been without power and water for two days. On the road to work, most of the traffic lights were out. Everyone who had gotten into the office had a story to tell about downed trees, blocked roads and detours, and our office Internet was down. Wendy’s trip to Johannesburg was delayed to make sure the roads were passable. We were informed that the roads were passable, but Johannesburg had gotten a rare snowfall overnight. With every bit of warm clothing she had, Wendy finally set out with her colleagues.
The weather remained cold, and the winds continued for a third night. They were not as severe as the night before, but there were more trees down when I got up the next morning. Electricity and water remained off in many areas. Once again, people in the office had lots of stories: going to hotels for showers, being given a bucket of water to wash up, etc. I continued to be fortunate. (Wendy was still in Johannesburg.) Our compound had a generator for electricity, which also powered the water pumps. For the most part, I had electricity and water pressure. However, the previous night, as I had been reading and debating with myself as to when to go to bed, they shut off the generator, the lights went out, and I had my answer. In the morning while getting ready for work, I heard a strange sound from the toilet, which turned out to be the water in the tank draining back into the pipe because the pumps had quit. I hadn’t taken a shower and was not looking forward to going to work unshaven and unshowered. However, within fifteen minutes, the water pressure came back. I shaved first, just in case, because the effects of being unshaven are more obvious than being unshowered. I showered as well, but did it quickly and didn’t soap too much of my body at once in case the water disappeared again.
Wendy’s trip to Johannesburg was a big success. She and her colleagues were able to witness a very successful JA program operating in an adjacent African country. They were also able to observe a highly effective and heavily utilized business center for entrepreneurs. Following her trip, Wendy contacted JA International’s Africa director to begin discussions on starting JA in Swaziland. From the conversation, she learned that JA had operated in Swaziland ten years earlier but had been shut down due to financial irregularities. However, JA was willing to re-start the program with the backing of an organization like TechnoServe. Since TechnoServe did not have the people resources to start up the program alone and eventually wanted to turn the program over totally to a local partner, LULOTE was chosen to be the local sponsor. With these developments, the School-Aged Youth Entrepreneurship (SAYE) program began to take shape.
Wendy’s trip to Johannesburg was a big business success, but it didn’t help her sickness, so Leslie recommended a local doctor, and Wendy finally went to see him. The doctor was an interesting chap. He was probably in his midseventies and seemed to practice very informally, as would have been done sixty years ago in the United States. His offices and equipment also looked as if they may have been new fifty years ago or more. I saw a baby scale that was the exact model my mother had used to weigh me. The doctor was originally from England but had immigrated to Swaziland many years ago. He was pleasant and seemed to know what he was doing. He diagnosed Wendy with bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics and cough medicine, which his assistant dispensed. Wendy paid the total bill for medicine and the doctor’s visit. It was about $40 cash. No insurance, no co-pays, no submission of the physician’s bill to the insurance company for reimbursement, partial payment, and subsequent billing to the patient for the remainder with computers printing out a paper trail at every step. It’s too bad the doctor supported only himself and his office staff. If he had been working in the United States, he could have charged five times as much and supported a legion of administrators and clerks at multiple insurance companies and intermediaries. Sometimes the simple old ways work just fine.
The medicine seemed to help, and Wendy’s condition improved. She had a follow-up visit with the doctor, and I went along because we both needed a specific signed certificate from a doctor to get our work permits/visas. Even though we had signed letters from our doctor in the United States that indicated we had been recently examined and found to be in good health, we still needed to have this specific Swazi government form signed by a doctor. The form that the doctor signed certifies that he has examined us and that we are not “idiots, mentally defective, deaf, dumb and/or blind.” Everyone has a good laugh over the form, but the government requires them anyway. This doctor signed a lot of them.
Although the medicine seemed to help Wendy’s condition to improve, it may not have been the only source of benefit. Wendy’s cough was really nasty-sounding, and it could be heard by anyone in the vicinity when she coughed. After her visit to the doctor, she happened to cough while she was in the restroom for our office building. A woman came up to her and said, “You must get rid of that cough.”
Wendy said, “I know. I just came from the doctor.”
The woman said, “No, I mean I can help. I have the healing touch from Jesus. Let me help you.” The woman then proceeded to put her hands on Wendy and prayed for a few minutes. No results were immediately obvious, but Wendy continued to get better. We could never be certain as to the real source of her improved health.
Start-Up Challenges
From many years working in business, and especially Silicon Valley, I’ve learned that for a start-up business to be successful, the stars of marketing, production, and finance have to align; and before starting a business, this possibility should be confirmed through research and analysis. Mpendulo and I were taking a step by step approach to prove this was possible for MPE and at the same compiling evidence that it would never work for bottled water. We confirmed that there was a strong demand for high-quality pressure-treated poles in Swaziland of the type our client could potentially supply, but first we had to get them some funding so they could go into business. For our water-bottling client, we did further research, which continued to confirm my initial impression that it would be a very bad idea to start a new bottled water company.
Part of the bottled water research was an interview with the professor whose students had done the initial industry analysis. Their paper had been more of an undergraduate class project rather than a report done under the professor’s supervision, which helped to explain the quality of the conclusions. The study concluded that marketing and distribution were the keys to success in the bottled water industry, which were right on, but the rest of the findings, including that a new company could compete in this environment were very naive.
