Kenya's Silicon Savannah

Kenya has released plans to build a new city for 185,000 people 40 miles outside of Nairobi. It still remains one of the world's poorest countries, but while living in Nairobi and to this day, watching from afar, I'm continually impressed with the skill and ambition of the country's business and entrepreneurial communities. The exciting forward thinking and inspiring vision of a city that this plan showcases is in stark contrast to my current city's attitude, which continues to hold on to a glorified past that is no longer (at least in the government).

Make a Gift to KickStart

As most of you know, I spent the majority of the year in Kenya working for KickStart International. My project was related to the foot powered irrigation pumps we sell throughout Africa, and I spent more than a month in Zambia and Malawi getting a first hand look at how our MoneyMaker pumps are used and the impact they are making on the lives of African farmers and their families.

There are plenty of positive statistics I could share as a result of our Malawi/Zambia survey where we interviewed over 500 farmers using our pumps, but I'd rather share one simple quote we captured while interviewing Dancen Kazimbi, a Malawian farmer using our MoneyMaker pump:

I'm planning on getting more land because what I currently have is not enough. With the MoneyMaker, anything is possible.

Anything is possible. Beyond providing extra income that helps feed their families, pay for their children's education, and improve their living situations, the MoneyMaker pump allows farmers and their families to think about the future. For the first time in their lives, these farmers can look past today's concerns. They no longer have to worry about what their family will eat today and how they'll pay for their daughter's school fees this semester. They can finally look to and plan for the future with a sense of dignity that everyone deserves and yet so few in the developing world experience. They can finally look to the future and dream. Anything is possible.

This past week, I got an email from my former boss asking me to pass along to anyone who might be interested in KickStart's annual appeal for donations. I didn't have a chance to meet Mama Edna, the farmer featured in KickStart's email (below), but I met plenty of farmers just like her and know first hand that KickStart's work makes sense. The organization has the tools, the passion, the talent, and the model to rapidly scale this solution to reach the millions of African farmers that are in need. These farmers don't want a handout, they want a way to make money and a means by which they can plan for the their and their family's futures. KickStart provides just that and you should help them achieve this by donating.

If you're interested in donating visit KickStart's donate page. And feel free to send me any questions about  the organization, their work, or my specific project. Would love to help.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Meet Mama Edna

Mama Edna sells her fruits and vegetables from a kiosk in Sotik town, 125 miles from Nairobi. She says that buying a MoneyMaker pump changed everything for her family in a very short time – she proudly describes herself as a prosperous, serious farmer with a hired farmhand.

The year before, Edna was dependent on rainfall and a bucket for irrigation. Her crops often failed in the drought. Even when she could bring something to market, everyone else was selling the same produce and much of her harvest went to waste because there was little demand.

Mama Edna knew about the MoneyMaker pump but didn’t think she could buy it outright because she had to pay school fees for three children. She bought her pump with KickStart’s unique mobile phone layaway program “Tone kwa Tone” or “Drop by Drop.” Edna’s farmhand generates even more income from the pump with a car wash business next to the river.

The first thing Mama Edna says when asked about her pump is, “Kama siyo hii ningekwama” or “If it weren’t for this, I’d be stuck.” She sees a future where she will be a model farmer who supplies her produce to rural schools and hospitals. She says, “I am now the envy of the village, thanks to this amazing pump!”

KickStart uses your funds to build awareness of the value of pump ownership through radio advertising, Farmer Field Days and other events. KickStart also tracks the impact of pump ownership to measure nutrition, education, electrification, and other lifestyle improvements.

Your funds help Mama Edna and hundreds of thousands of farmers like her provide better nutrition, better education and a better future for their families, as well as provide additional jobs for dealers, distributors and farmhands.

You're not dreaming, kid.

It really is that big.

Work that network

The UM Alumni network is one of the biggest in the world, so it’s not too surprising that you’ll find a lot of us in Nairobi. Even before I arrived, I knew one – my boss is a UM MBA alum – and on the first weekend I ran into two more, a girl that had studied the same program I studied during undergrad and another UM MBA who also happened to live and work for a year in Flint (what?!!?). I went out to dinner with some friends not too long ago and sat next to a guy who had just finished his MBA at UM, and I even ran into a girl that lived in Alice Lloyd, my freshmen year dorm, and is now married to another guy I was fairly close with during freshmen year. We’re everywhere (and we’re cool, good looking, and smart, I might add). But I haven’t quite had to rely on this network until this past week when it turned out to be the handiest thing around.

Next week, I’m launching a test in Tanzania that involves 1000 credit card sized mobile registration cards that will be placed in our pumps’ packaging. The cards offer free mobile talk time (98% of the phones here are pre-pay) to any pump owner that sends an SMS with the code he finds underneath the scratch off box on the back of the card. New pump owners send us an SMS and get free talk time, and we get their mobile number to give them a call at any point to do follow up work – offer additional services, answer any questions they have, learn about where and how they’re using the pump, and better understand if the pumps are improving their livelihood. Because we’re not as much interested in the sales of the pumps as we are interested in confirming that our pumps are increasing the incomes of small scale farmers, it’s critical that we can locate, find, visit, and converse with the farmers that are using our pumps. The mobile registration card, if it works, will be a very cheap and effective way for us to do just that. I’m really excited to test this to see what happens, but since I did all of the design and printing work of the cards in Nairobi, I first have to get the 1000 cards down to Dar es Salaam, Tazania.

 Yes, there is DHL here and I could spend the $110 to ship the cards through their reliable network, but I find their price to be annoyingly expensive and there’s rarely any fun in convenience. So, why not look for a different option? Regular post is, not surprisingly, dangerously unreliable and though danger is usually a lot more fun than convenience, I don't like placing bets on something that's 90% stacked against me. So instead I sent out a few emails and a couple of texts to some friends, and sure enough the UM alumni network came through. Laura, the girl that lived in the same freshmen dorm as I, happens to be heading down to Dar es Salaam this weekend and is happy to carry the package in her bag. She’ll be leaving the package at her hotel’s front desk, and I’ve arranged with the Tanzanian team to pick it up on Monday morning. Cheap, reliable, fast and personal – DHL cannot compete with the East African UM alumni network.

Now if I could only figure out a way this alumni network can help me actually convince these farmers to send me a text.

Zambian Spiderman Is A Big UM Fan!

Spotted this little guy strutting around the Zambian Agricultural Show. I'm guessing the UM shirt that fits his 7 year old frame was at one time worn by a Tri Delt sorority girl.

Selling Pumps

My project is unrelated to selling our pumps, but I happened to be in Lusaka during the Zambian agricultural show this past weekend and was happy to lend a hand to my boss, our Zambian sales rep, and our distributors to help present our pumps. I actually wasn't too excited about it at first - there were a lot of things I'd rather do than sit in the hot sun, in the middle of a very large and dusty showgrounds with a carnival like atmosphere and shoulder to shoulder people - but I found it surprisingly enjoyable. My boss and I made up a good team, selling three pumps in one afternoon, and it felt good to do something that seemed so helpful, easily answering farmer questions about the pump and how it works. Of course not so easy at first, but within fifteen minutes I had it down. 4,000 liters of water in one hour, 10 meters of inlet pipe, 25 meters of outlet pipe, 4 spare piston cups, 1 year guarantee, irrigate up to 2 hectares in one day, 5 distributors and several dealers throughout the country. Any readers interested in becoming a small scale farmer?

Hiring People in Africa

I was here in Malawi for two main reasons. The first one was easy – I had to visit our three largest distributors and introduce a distributor incentive program that we created to help us gather data on customers. The second and larger reason was to kick off an assessment of how farmers are using our pumps in Malawi. Are they using them, how did they procure the pump, what price did they pay, did they get the pump for free, do they use the pump with a group of farmers, what crops do they grow, has their income increased because of the pump? We answer these questions very well in Kenya where we have a field staff that tracks and visits farmers on a scheduled basis, but since we distribute our pumps through the private supply chain and do not have any employees in Malawi, we’ve never actually quantified or measured the impacts of our pumps here. And that’s what we intend to do over the next month and what I was setting up the past two weeks. 

We interviewed 10 people on Tuesday and hired three data collectors who will travel around the country interviewing farmers that are using the pumps. The resumes we collected were comic gold. Skills such as "knowledge of the internet" and hobbies like "making friends" and "watching TV" were listed. The interviews were pretty fun too. Though we didn’t hire him, Kenasi, was the most entertaining. He looked like he was fifteen and wearing his dad’s suit, but he spoke like he was a 50 year old politician. I’d hire him in a second as a sales agent or spokesperson, and probably would have hired him for this project if he didn’t have to go back to South Africa for school before our project is scheduled to be done. It was also fun having my co-worker in the interviews. His questions included “you seem a bit dull...have you had breakfast?” and “you’re always like saying ‘Iike’ a lot, is that like some sort of like bad like habit?” I was actually impressed with most of the candidates and it was hard turning down  a few of them. We ended up deciding on Andrew, Gifton (a bit dull), and Michael Mike (like). And yes, that is his real name. We confirmed that in the interview. It reminded me of my Nicaraguan friend, Victor Victor. When he arrived for training he was wearing a shirt with a picture of a horse on the front and said "hung like a..." We just finished everything up and they will release to the wild on Monday, travelling to the far corners of the country looking for pumps, working with NGOs, and collecting data on an Android smart phone. Wish them luck.

Malawi's Priorities

There are only about 8-9 countries in the world that are poorer than Malawi. Its per capita GDP stands at $800 per year, about how much I spent on my flat screen TV, and its total GDP in 2009 was about $4.3 billion, or about the same as Twitter's January 2011 estimated market cap. So it seems a bit weird to find a billboard in Lilongwe enticing you to join the Airtel network in order to "tweet faster." If I'm the average Malawian, I think I'd be more concerned with finding my next meal and avoiding malaria and dysentery than with tweeting about my new mosquito net and making sure I got Lady Gaga's tweets more quickly.  

I'm back! Malawi

I was scheduled to arrive in Lilongwe, Malawi on Monday afternoon, but due to some prior flight’s problems, they ended up rebooking me onto a flight for Tuesday and put me up in Nairobi’s Stanley Hotel. Yeah, I could have just as easily stayed at my apartment for the night, but why go back to an apartment with no food, when I was offered three free meals and a room at Nairobi’s most historical hotel, where men in top hats fetch your bags and Ernest Hemingway used to rest his head? Don’t mind if I do hole up for the day here:

Especially when what I was escaping is as chaotic as the street right below my hotel room:

The luxury was short-lived, however. I was back into the thick of that chaos by 6am Tuesday morning, fighting through airport security and check-in lines before finally boarding my flight to Lilongwe. It was a long trip, touching down in Lusaka for one hour and arriving in Lilongwe in the late afternoon. Lilongwe, with its relatively empty streets and small town feel was a welcome change of pace to Nairobi, and I actually felt pretty good (maybe arrogant?) getting into the city center – like I had come a long way since the last time I was here and am no longer just some amateur. I now know what I’m doing, how to navigate the country, who I need to work with, how much I should be spending. I’ve got the phone numbers of taxi drivers in both major cities and know exactly where to stay. I even know how to drive a hard bargain – cash is king here and USD is God...my offer for $60/night paid in USD cash was accepted at a hotel with $85/night rooms!

I’ll be here for the next two weeks. Whereas the last visit to Malawi was about research and learning, this visit is all about implementing and should be a lot of fun, even if all that has to be done is a bit daunting. I’ll be interviewing and hiring for two data collectors, setting up field work for the data collectors so that they can interview close to 400 farmers using our pumps, and starting a distributor incentive program to encourage better pump sale tracking. And of course I’ll be strutting around like it’s nobody’s business with a gangsta’ roll of Malawian Kwacha. Wish me luck. 

Chair

A security guard's office.

Week in Malawi: Part Six

Friday, March 18th

I’ve decided to hit the road again today. I’m not looking forward to another long trip, but I don’t have much interest in spending the weekend in Blantyre, I’d like to be able to see Lake Malawi, and there happens to be an NGO regional office on the way to the lake. So, after a short meeting at Nikhil’s office with another NGO, I head back over to the Blantyre bus market and hop on a mini-bus to Mangochi.

Based on the looks of the bus stations and the sheer chaos that exists surrounding them, it’s actually pretty surprising how quickly you become not only use to the environment but also able to navigate it and find the right bus. After being here yesterday to catch my “Fear God” bus to Llunzu, I’m able to easily find the Mangochi buses. You also learn quickly when mistakes made (like getting on the empty bus in Lliongwe and waiting at the station for two hours) result in dangerous spikes in blood pressure and acute cases of short term insanity, so I seek out the mini-bus that is nearly full and am on my way out of town within 10 minutes, patting myself on the back for my savvy veteran moves.

The trip to Mangochi is generally as uneventful as a four bus trip on public transportation can be in a developing country. It features all the standards of this type of travel – a terribly uncomfortable seat if you can call it a seat; a dangerous number of passengers; what feels like an infinite number of stops to pick up and drop off; freight that includes passenger bags, bamboo baskets, chickens, breast feeding babies, and some mysterious cooler type box that smells like rotting fish; and piercing sun that is, of course, shining through the bus window on my side. At one point I count 24 people and two babies (the bus is slightly bigger than a minivan). At another point the guy sitting to my right is trying to have a conversation with me, something I’m not at all interested in, though I must have engaged him enough because he gives me his phone number and email before he departs. At another point, there’s a baby resting its head against my arm which is actually pretty cute until I remember that most small children’s stomachs don’t handle the roads very well and am fearful that I may end up with this kid’s half digested lunch on my lap if I allow him to get too comfortable. Other than revelling in the nonsense surrounding me on the bus, I try to just let my mind wander to other thoughts and observations.

Observation 1 – I noticed this the moment I got into Lilongwe but it’s even more pronounced during the bus ride and in the more rural areas. Malawi is a lot poorer than Zambia and any other country I’ve visited. There are signs every where once you start thinking about it but the first thing that I noticed and connected to Malawi being “poorer” is the number of people walking around without shoes. There are A LOT. On my bus trip, I start to think that maybe the number of shoes in a country could be an indicator of the wealth of that country but after a few minutes of playing around with that idea in my head, I decide to throw it out since I suspect that poor countries in cold climates will have more shoes. Then I start to think of other unique indicators that may be able to measure a country’s wealth. I’ve noticed that very few of the people I am meeting in Malawi have business cards, something that surprises me after getting so many in Zambia. Maybe the number of business cards printed in a country is an indication of its wealth? Somewhere between Zomba and Mangochi I decide to make this my PhD dissertation.

Observation 2 – My right leg is starting to fall asleep and I’m not quite sure how much longer I can withstand the sharp metal point that is sticking out of this inhumanely hard seat I’ve had the pleasure of sitting on for the last three hours. But from desperation comes creativity and I manage to come up with a million dollar idea. I’ll be returning to Malawi next year to sell what in the states is used to shield and comfort our privileged asses from the cold, hard bleachers of high school stadiums while we cheer on Johnny Football Hero. I’d currently pay close to $100 for this type of cushion, and with proper marketing, I believe Malawi and its 1970s fleet of decommissioned buses and minivans would be a gold mine. I even consider taking a loan from these certain future earnings to pay the bus driver to immediately kick everyone else off the bus and just shuttle me the remaining distance.

I get to Mangochi around 4:15pm and call John, the NGO worker I’m trying to meet. He tells me to take a bicycle taxi to his office, so I blindly choose one of the 4 guys uncomfortably surrounding me all offering the back of their bike as a ride. I straddle the wire seat that sits above the back wheel, grab the conveniently placed handles coming out from the bike seat, and rest my feet up on the soldered pegs coming out from the bike frame. It’s a comfortable trip for me and from what I can tell a pretty exhausting trip for my driver. It’s about five minutes to the office on pretty loose dirt roads so he’s broken quite a sweat by the time we get to the office. After paying him the unkind fare of $0.25, I make a note to myself to not consider “bike-taxi driver in Malawi” for any future employment.

John is waiting in his office for me when I get there. He looks like he may have just gotten up from a nap and is wearing a look that I’ve seen a lot over the last few months – a neck tie that reaches just past the second button of a dress shirt but no longer than the third and features a Windsor knot the size of a new born baby’s head. The short tie and big knot always remind me of some cartoon character and I have a hard time taking John seriously. He also seems to be on the verge of falling asleep, straining to get out every word while he’s answering my questions and keeping his eyes open just enough for me to notice that his pupils are completely clouded over with cataracts. I’d guess that he’d choose to be anywhere in the world but in this meeting with me. We get through it nonetheless, but there are a number of follow ups I’d like to try to get from him and his field staff, so I ask for a business card. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t have one.

After another bike taxi ride, I’m back at the Mangochi bus market, boarding another bus. Mangochi is at the very southern end of Lake Malawi. If you travel north from Mangochi on the western side of the lake, you head up a small peninsula and reach Cape Maclear, the lake’s largest resort town and my final destination. This evening, though, I’ll only have time to get to Monkey Bay, a town just before you enter the Cape Maclear Nature Reserve and that has, I’ve been told, plenty of places to spend the night.

The trip is just like all the others, but I have the luxury of the front seat which is likely the most dangerous but at least offers leg room (if you don’t mind straddling the stick shift), a decent seat, and a little more personal space than what exists in the back. The road gets increasingly rural and narrow during our trip and by the time we’re an hour in, people, bikes, and goats far outnumber any cars on the road. In the last hour of the two hour trip, I relisten to the Malawian news radio’s hourly update (five 18 year olds in central Malawi have burned down their school after being suspended for discipline problems) and count the vehicles we pass – zero. The road feels more like a path through a corn field than a road and the evening’s darkness is making me a little nervous about where I’ll be able to spend the night. We keep passing signs for lodges and hotels but they’re pointing me down pitch black paths that I’d rather not explore at night, alone. I figure I’ll have better luck in town where I’ll be able to grab a taxi and just have him drive me to a nice hotel.

Unfortunately, Monkey Bay is more of a sleepy village than a town and the laughable thought of a taxi whisking you to a hotel is held only by a stupid, naive, and poorly prepared tourist that is now stranded in said village. There is absolutely nothing around and though the town looks completely harmless during the following morning, I’m more than a little scared when I realize we’ve reached Monkey Bay, I’m the last person on the bus, and I have no idea where to go or how to get there if there’s even a place to go to. Monkey Bay during a busy weekend day:



The bus driver and his helper ask me where I’m going, and they’re a little too willing to help when I tell them I need to find a hotel. They want to take me to Mofasa, a hotel they say is just up the road. Hmmm...yeah, it could be right up the road, yes, but so could a couple of ropes, hidden in the deserted corn field, they’ll use to tie me up before robbing me of everything I’m carrying. I’m scared at this point but don’t really feel like I have much choice other than to take their word. The driver’s helper opens the passenger side door to get in the front after I tell them to take me to Mofasa, and I tell him, probably more aggressively than needed, to get in the back. The last thing I want is to be in the front middle seat, surrounded by these two partners in crime, with nowhere to escape if things go sour.

They drive up the dark dirt path, which to me looks completely unpromising and more than a bit malicious, and make a right turn at the sign for Mofasa. The sign makes me feel much better but the right turn is onto something about as wide as a walking path and even darker than the path we were on before. It’s a cornfield with large boulders on my right and surely the dreaded ropes on my left. The driver’s helper keeps telling me to pay him 1000 kwacha, more than what I’ve spent to make the entire 7 hour trip from Blantyre, but I’m not in much a position to negotiate and will happily pay the fare if he actually gets me to a hotel, a task I’m still unsure he’ll complete as we’ve been driving now for five minutes and it doesn’t look like we’re close to anything but several ditches in which they’ll dump my body. At last, just past a very big boulder and a dip in the path that’s completely submerged in two feet of water, I see a fence with Mofasa painted on a sign. Sweet Lord, yes! My two would be assailants turned saviours deliver me right to the gate and assure that there’s a room before wishing me a very pleasant stay and returning to town, rich from a short little trip to Mofasa to drop off a stupid, vulnerable, and jumpy tourist.

Mofasa isn’t really what I had in mind when I took off for the lake this morning. I wanted a nice hotel and had imagined all day during my journey that a warm shower and a beach bar serving a good meal were waiting to reward me for the long trip. What I get is more of a Robinson Crusoe hippie hangout with no electricity, three Israeli travelers that are waiting for their pot brownies to cool and a guy in dreads that looks like he has been at Mofasa for a LONG time and has certainly had his fair share of brownies. I have three beers to calm my nerves, sitting right on the beach, staring at the silvery lake and full moon (the biggest in 20 years!), both of which are beautiful but something I'd probably trade for electricity, a shower, and a Papa John’s pizza. I stumble around my candle lit room, tucking in the mosquito net and hiding my camera, computer, and money before falling asleep uncomfortable in the filth of a 7 hour journey on public transit and more than a little annoyed I have made this whole trip for a night not a a Hilton, but at Mofasa.

Week in Malawi: Part Five

Thursday, March 17th

My boss left this morning, on his way back to Lilongwe for a meeting before returning to Nairobi. He elected to fly back to Lilongwe which makes me feel better about the bus ride we shared to Blantyre. I like knowing that he hated it as much as I did. You ride one of those buses and everyone else on board seems to be taking it all in stride, like it’s enjoyable. Your first thought is something like “these people are crazy,” but with each smile you see and normal conversation you hear, a very different thought starts to creep into your conscious, “maybe I’m insane for thinking this is bad.” My boss choosing to fly back proves that he hated it as much as I did and it makes me feel like I might still be normal, not just some whiny bitch. I’ll be here for one more week to continue meeting with distributors and NGOs that buy our pumps. Today, I’m on my way to a small town about 25km from Blantyre where I want to meet with a guy that works directly with farmers as an extension agent for an NGO. But first, I’m on my way to a meeting with Amin, one of Nikhil’s employees who is taking me over to another NGO within Blantyre.

The meeting is pretty short because this NGO just happens to be funding the projects that are using the pumps. There are two other NGOs that are responsible for implementation, and it’s those two organizations I’ll have to talk with to get anything close to what I’m looking for. I write down the names and phone numbers of a couple of additional contacts that I plan on calling this afternoon. The means by which these pumps actually reach farmers continues to get increasingly complicated, but I’ve found that I like the work involved in trying to understand the process. It’s like an unsolved mystery with an outcome that includes a hard to find farmer and a blue pump.

I decided to check out of the hotel I was staying in the past two nights because the only room they have available is more than I’m willing to pay. After the meeting, I have Amin drive me to Hostellerie de France which I found on Trip Advisor, listed as the second best option for hotels in Blantyre. Most of the reviews on Trip Advisor were pretty good, but there was this doozy which was either intriguing or scary depending on your personality:

Salvador-Dali lookalike proprietor has not heard of personal space and insists on touching his guests, photographing them (without permission) and imagining that all guests are captivated by his charisma. I wasn't. The room was depressing if clean, fan fell to pieces, nylon cover circa 1970 on the bed, and towels of same vintage. Fierce and intimidating dogs in the car park. Long trip to airport. OK for one night if you can avoid Monsieur's clutches.

I decide to take my chances. The hotel is a five minute drive outside of town, set on a large hill with nice views of the valley and city. The French woman that greets us speaks halting English, but we’re able to pretty easily negotiate that I’m looking for a room and would like to see it before deciding whether or not to stay. Hotels around here aren’t anything like their cookie cutter cousins in the states. You’re never really sure what you’re going to get and the rooms can vary to a great degree even within the same hotel. It’s best to see and check everything before committing. She waddles over to the room and shows me inside. I’m an easy customer and am quickly sold. The room is completely adequate, even if it features a shower wand device like Lusaka Hotel’s rather than a full shower. We agree with head nods and before I can say any different, she sends for someone to carry my small bag, explaining with a phrase that makes me laugh. “Me call boy.” Monsieur is currently no where to be found.

After settling in and wishing a good day to Amin, I head out, finally on my way to Llunzu to meet with a field worker. Right outside the hotel, I’m able to flag down a mini-bus that takes me into the Blantyre bus market which is quite a bit nicer than Lilongwe’s but as equally confusing. Situated on both sides of a busy street, there are hundreds of mini-buses all parked or moving in an unorganized snarl. I ask someone for help and he very easily points me in the right direction. I board a white mini-bus that’s nearly full with passengers, has a sticker on the front windshield that says “Fear God,” a wooden sign with the name “Llunzu” by the steering wheel, and looks like it’s held together by two staples and three paper clips. My bus companions shoot me frightened and suspicious stares while the bus driver revs the engine and slowly exits the market, yelling out the window “Llunzu, Llunzu, Llunzu!” We’re off.

The bus trip feels longer than 25km should, but I make it easily and safely. Llunzu is about 1km long with concrete shops on either side of the highway. There are wooden shacks selling tomatoes and onions and forty or fifty “shops” that are more or less plastic tarps laid on the ground with second hand shoes, shirts, and pants displayed on top. I go into a restaurant and call Victor, the field worker I’m meeting. He knows exactly where I am and says he’s riding into town on his motorbike now.

He’s a few years older than I and has a real hard time understanding my accent. I try to talk more slowly but usually have to repeat myself and notice a few times that he’s just nodding yes, not really understanding me. He suggests we go to his “office” which also serves as his home. I get on the back of his motorcycle (looks like a dirtbike) and hold tight while he drives away from the highway, down several different dirt paths/roads that are surrounded by corn fields and a few crudely constructed houses with either tin or thatch roofs. Just a few turns off the highway and it feels very, very rural. Everyone we pass does a very clear double take to get a look at the white guy riding on the back of Victor’s motorcycle, holding on for dear life. His house is a very modest concrete rectangle, painted white, with what appears to be a new tin roof. He has three kids and his brother, who lives next door, has three of his own. All six of them are playing in front of the house when we arrive and they follow us into the front room which for its size, holds too many pieces of furniture. There are two couches that you might find on an Ann Arbor curb, a large side table in the middle of the room, a dining table and three chairs pushed against the wall, a larger than expected TV in the corner, a bookcase with a stereo and speakers, and some sort of wardrobe next to the front “window.” I make myself at home on one of the couches while Victor makes each kid come up to me to shake my hand. None of them dare utter a word to me and I’m tempted to yell “boo” a couple of times but hold my tongue and just smile.

It’s been almost three weeks since my trip began and only now am I meeting with someone that works directly with the farmers that are using our pumps. Victor, and the many other NGO field workers, are the keepers of all the data and information I need, and I’m excited to finally talk to someone who knows where the pumps are and who is using them. Victor has distributed around 80 pumps in the past two years, so I start by asking how he keeps track of the farmers’ names and locations. Easy enough, he writes them down. When I ask them if he can show me how/where he captures all this info, he heads over to his bookcase, shuffles around a few piles of paper, grabs two plastic shopping bags full of loose paper and notebooks, and brings them both back over to the couch. Five minutes later, with papers thrown about the couch and floor, he finds what I’m looking for – a small notebook with a bunch of chicken scratch and farmer names scribbled throughout. So this is what I’m trying to track down! A crumpled notebook that sits at the bottom of a plastic shopping bag, resting on a bookcase amid other loose paper, in a concrete house with no running water that’s owned by a worker who has trouble understanding my English and is an hour away from the nearest city and four hours away from the capital, in one of the poorest countries in the world. I don’t like my odds, but I like the challenge.

I also like Victor and have learned a lot of valuable info for my project, so we spend the rest of the afternoon at his house celebrating by watching Malawian music videos. They are something like watching the homemade Spanish music videos made in 1997 for Senora Jackson’s class assignment...except the Malawian versions are lower quality. Victor translates for me and writes down a number of Chichewa phrases that are either useful or come up during the music, so by the time we leave his house I can say “how are you” “do not cry” “problems” “I love you” “don’t fool me” and “feeling sweet/crazy” in Chichewa. We take off on his motorcycle, back through the village, and he drops me off right at the mini-bus that returns me to Blantyre. I know it’s the right bus by the “Fear God” sticker, the same sticker I saw on my bus out of town.

I get back to the hotel and am greeted by a French man who I suspect is “Monsieur.” He speaks slightly better English than the woman who greeted me earlier and though it’s unclear whether or not they are a husband and wife team, it’s quite clear that they both use the same color of hair dye – something between black and purple and looks a little goofy on his Rolly Fingers mustache. After he gets my business card and uses my shoulder to support himself while stepping up on a chair to tack the card next to all the other cards wallpapering the reception room, he generally lets me be. I head back to my room, happy to have successfully avoided the assault on personal space and unwanted pictures I was warned about on Trip Advisor. Safe in my room, I feel pretty good about what I learned today despite discovering the long odds at tracking down the necessary data. I go to sleep practicing my Chichewa. Tseketseke. "I’m feeling sweet/crazy."

Week in Malawi: Part Four

Wednesday, March 16

On our way to the distributor we’re meeting with today, I get a quick tour of Blantyre and am really impressed after being underwhelmed (and even disgusted in some cases) by Lilongwe. The town feels like a real city with a well laid out downtown and a sense of organization that didn’t exist in Lilongwe and I haven’t experienced in any of the other cities I’ve visited. The streets are hilly and green valleys and mountains surround the city, offering nice views on our short trip from the hotel to the distributor. This distributor is our largest customer and hasn’t replied to any of the 8 or so emails we’ve sent him over the last few months. I’m not sure what to expect.

The building looks more like an office than a store and there’s a receptionist sitting at a desk to our right. Her desk is computerless which I’ve seen a lot the past few weeks but still leaves me wondering what these people do all day besides sit and answer two or three phone calls. Like all the receptionists I’ve met, she whispers when she talks and barely makes eye contact. It annoys me, but being annoyed makes me feel bad and 100% American. We’re confident, loud and direct, and I want the same out of this poor girl that’s likely never spoken to a white American. After a couple of inaudible mumblings she leads us down a dirty tiled hallway and into the office of the man we’re meeting.

Nikhil is younger than I expected, probably in his late thirties, born in Malawi but of Indian descent. He studied in South Africa and Australia before returning to the company his father started thirty years ago in Blantyre. The company sells seeds, fertilizers, and farming equipment and since Nikhil started in 2004, they’ve been growing quickly. Next to the office we’re currently in they are building a large, formal showroom and a warehouse for their inventory, hoping the expansion will significantly improve their store foot traffic and sales. He has two phones on his desk and a cellphone next to his computer. While he’s explaining the new warehouse and how they’re growing, all three phones ring at least once. He picks each call up and speaks quickly in some mixture of English and Chichewa, and then returns to our conversation as if there was no interruption. He’s definitely a businessman.

After introductions but before we start our meeting he offers my boss and me coffee or tea. We both elect for coffee and Nikhil is happy to make it for us. He gets up from behind his desk and walks over to the file cabinet that is directly to our left and rusting at the corners. On top, a can of instant Nestle coffee sits with powdered milk, four mugs that may or may not be cleaned, and a box of tea bags. Before he goes for the mugs, he bends down to the ground where an electric kettle is sitting next to a dusty black shoe box with a white rubber rain shoe that sits on top. The right shoe is nowhere to be found so the left shoe just waits alone and the cobweb between the wall and shoe suggests it’s been waiting for some time. Nikhil leaves to fill the kettle and returns, placing it right back where he found it, on the ground. While he’s down there, he fumbles with three cell phone chargers that are plugged in before finding the kettle plug and plugging it into the wall. I find it really funny that he keeps the kettle on the ground, next to this suspicious shoe, but his whole office is kind of like this. In the right hand corner, between a bookcase and wall, is a pile of newspapers and thrown about receipts. The whole place looks like it was recently ransacked. The left hand corner features more newspapers and two empty boxes of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. The box says how many bottles it holds (or at one time held), and I do the math quickly in my head: 12 x 750ml bottles in each box, about $200 per bottle. The guy spent something around $4800 on scotch yet keeps his kettle on the floor next to a lone white rain shoe. Very suspicious, and based on what he starts explaining to us, I start thinking that maybe his office looks like it was ransacked because it actually was.

Over the instant coffee that tastes more like chemicals than real coffee, we’re talking about the order they’re planning on placing with us. More than 700 pumps that we’ll manufacture in China and ship to Lilongwe and will cost somewhere north of $150,000. In every meeting we’ve had, we’ve heard about Malawi’s “forex problem.” I don’t fully understand the entire problem but from what I can gather, the country doesn’t have enough American dollars within the economy. So, any business or payments that require American dollars is currently not easily happening. For example, we shipped 300 pumps to a distributor in Lilongwe in January and are still waiting for payment because the distributor’s bank won’t release the necessary American dollars to our bank account. Similarly, the order Nikhil wants to make will require payment in American dollars but his bank won’t make the payment because they don’t actually have the invoice amount in American dollars. His solution to this inconvenience is to assure us that he’ll have his “guy in Hong Kong” pay the invoice, but because he has to use him, Nikhil explains he’ll need 120 days after shipment to make the payment, not the standard 30 days. He’s quite comfortable talking numbers, costs, and payment terms. I get the sense that he’s making a lot of these deals, milking out every dollar and benefit he can with a pretty quick and smooth style. A "guy in Hong Kong" sounds like a guy who might loot an office if Nikhil milked out one too many dollars in a recent deal, and I start to wonder if that same guy in Hong Kong is currently wearing a white rain shoe while sipping on a glass of Blue Label scotch.

We finish up our meeting, not really agreeing to anything but with an understanding that an order will indeed be placed. He takes us out for lunch at a surprisingly good Italian restaurant which plays only Motown music (I proudly point this out to my companions) while we’re there. In every developing country I’ve visited, I’ve found at least two or three places that feel like they should be in the states. It might be a coffee shop that offers wireless internet and comfortable chairs or just a restaurant with really good food and first class service. I’ve seen these places come in many forms, but you know the moment you walk in if you’ve found one. It feels so satisfying and relaxing (and decadent and indulgent!) to step into a place like this and for a moment forget about the developing world chaos and absurdity that exists outside its doors. This restaurant is very clearly one of these places, Blantyre’s oasis. I have fettuccini with a mushroom and tomato sauce and happily oblige when Nikhil asks if someone will order a beer with him. The pasta tastes great after a two week diet heavy on fried chicken, French fries, and Coke, and the environment is just what the doctor ordered after yesterday’s long journey. On our way out, I feel reenergized and motivated. Nikhil feels like how I suspect he always feels - ready to make a deal. “David, do you need to exchange any American Dollars for Malawian Kwacha? I’ll give you a real good rate.” He slips me a business card before we depart.

Week in Malawi: Part Three

Tuesday, March 15th

After breakfast, we head on over to an NGO that uses our pumps in the irrigation programs they run throughout the country. I’ve been corresponding with this group from Nairobi via email and phone and it’s nice to meet some of the people I’ve already worked with. They’ve been remarkably helpful and are much better organized than the NGOs I met with in Zambia.

As a first step in my project, I’m trying to gather the names and locations of all the farmers that are using our pumps in Zambia and Malawi. I figured that the NGOs would definitely have this information readily available and thought it might be as easy as asking them to email me the Excel file. It has proved much more difficult. In Zambia, I found that I’d meet with someone in the capital who would tell me that the info exists but that I’d have to contact the regional office. I’d contact the regional office and they’d say that the info exists but it’s in the hands of the field workers. I’d contact a field worker who would confirm he does have the information but it isn’t compiled in an Excel file or easy to quickly send along to my email. Worse, the names and locations of farmers isn’t sent to the regional or national offices at any point, so getting my hands on this information would mean contacting the hundreds of individual field workers working in remote parts of the country.

The NGO we’re meeting with now has a similar situation – the names and locations of farmers they work with reside in the hands of their field workers. Hearing this news this morning, in a second floor, horribly hot office, makes me want to bang my head against the office wall. I’m deflated, but before I can do anything rash, Olivia, the woman we’re meeting with, gives us some great news. They like the idea of gathering this detailed information and have started to require their field staff to send in the required data. She opens an Excel file where they’ve already organized the names and locations of 900 farmers, a far cry from the 3000 or so pumps they’ve bought in the past two years but a great start. Better yet, they’re using the exact data collection template I created, meaning everything that I’ll need is included, and they’ve hired someone who will compile this information on a quarterly basis. I feel like giving Olivia a high five and a giant bear hug. Instead, we simply finish up the meeting and say goodbye. Once out of the office, my boss describes the meeting as “very fruitful” which makes me silently laugh. I find it a funny adjective to use to describe a meeting but don’t disagree with the assessment.

I like travelling with my boss. We spent a week in Zambia together and now will spend this first week in Malawi together. He’s Kenyan, in his early fifties, and has a tendency to follow up any sentence with a very audible and somewhat long “mmmm.” He’s the director of the export program so most of his job is sales related, trying to secure orders from private distributors, governments, and NGOs that are in countries where we don’t have staff. He travels a lot throughout Africa, and in our first week in Zambia, I could quickly tell he’s used to being on the road, making friends with everyone we come into contact with and expertly negotiating all of our taxi fares. I love letting him handle the taxi fares as I find the negotiation it requires awkward and stressful. I’ve picked up that his favourite tactic is starting with “I have my price and you have your price, so we’ll start at your price.” The price given is always scoffed at and my boss replies that we’ll pay half the stated fare, but we usually pay about 60% of the initial quote. Besides being a good negotiator and an outgoing salesman, he also strikes me as a little clumsy, though I’m beginning to think that it might just be the ridiculously pointy dress shoes he wears. I’ve watched him trip over stairs on two different occasions and had to grab him once after he slipped in the hotel hallway. After saving him from a fall, my hand still snugly in his armpit, he says “Ohhh, thank you! Mmmmmmmmm.”

Today we’re headed to Blantyre, Malawi’s large commercial city in the southern portion of the country. I’m told it’s a four hour bus ride which doesn’t seem too bad, and I’m actually looking forward to a trip into the country. Before we leave for the bus stop, we stop by the distributor we visited yesterday to try to get the additional information they said they would gather. Not surprisingly, the information isn’t waiting for us and we spend thirty minutes waiting while they do what they said they would. Yesterday after explaining what we’re looking for and presenting a few examples of how me might go about working with them to get the data we require, the man in charge reminds us that they’re very busy and doesn’t seem too keen on doing anything more than what they’re currently doing. The “we’re too busy” is a response we’ve gotten a lot over the last two weeks and though I appreciate that we’re asking them to do extra work, I find “busy” a generous way to describe their day. Today, the same man that described his business as “very busy” is busy reading two newspapers while his staff of two handles the heavy foot traffic in the store - one person in the 45 minutes we’re there. Nonetheless, we get the info we were looking for and head over to the Lilongwe bus station.

I’ve found that bus stations in developing countries are terribly vile things and would recommend, if you’re visiting one, that you wear closed shoes and jeans. Anything to distance yourself from the filth. Lilongwe’s “station” certainly falls into this category. It’s a disgusting mud filled lot with around 50 beat up buses waiting in an unorganized fashion and hundreds of people aimlessly wandering about looking like they might steal your bag. The moment we exit the taxi is the moment I want to leave. Predictably, there are 8-10 dudes surrounding us right when we get out of the taxi, each yelling, asking, directing. “Where are you going? Yes, boss! Going to Blantyre. This bus, this bus, this bus, this bus. We’re leaving now!” We’re more or less pulled to a bus where a guy quickly starts to scribble a ticket. I know better than to believe this guy who keeps telling us that they’re leaving now and will be in Blantyre in three hours. I’ve learned from very hard experience that these guys will tell you anything you want to hear to just get you on their bus. The bus isn’t leaving now, it leaves when it fills up, and the trip will take double the amount of time he’s telling you. But you’re easily overwhelmed with everyone screaming at you and always think that the easiest way to get everyone away from you is to just buy a ticket. This is exactly what we do, and I regret it for the rest of the day.



We get on the bus. There are 4 or 5 other people who have already boarded, meaning we’ll be waiting for a long, long time. 2 hours, in fact, sitting in the worst bus station/market I’ve come across in my travels. By the time we leave, it’s 2pm, I’m crammed into a window seat with a 200 hundred pounder nestled in next to me, and the sun is at its peak intensity, sending its piercing heat onto my side of the bus. I put in my iPod and try to forget where I am.

It’s really no use. Every fifteen minutes we stop to pick people up and let people off. Each stop has an army of street hawkers, 20-30 strong, that swarm the bus selling everything imaginable, screaming their prices and products. Potatoes, tomatoes, onions, water, soda, peanuts, bags of French fries, cabbage, cookies, cell phone air time, fried chicken, eggs, raw chicken. The stops are about five minutes in length, enough time to thoroughly bake in the sun and for my fellow passengers to buy all the shit that the street hawkers are trying to push through each window. An hour into my trip, the woman in front of me buys a plastic bag of potatoes which are shoved through my window. The bag is too small for the potatoes and at least 10 of them fall into my lap. I begrudgingly gather them and hand them to the woman, disgusted that anyone would buy any of this crap. She rewards my good deed by buying a small bag of strongly smelling onions, adding a new note to the bus’ current cologne which as best as I can tell is two parts halitosis and one part decaying organic matter marinated in stagnant swamp water. The only saving grace is that I know that this portion of the highway forms the border between Malawi and Mozambique and the views into Mozambique are a nice diversion from the otherwise horrifying trip.



We reach Blantyre at 7pm, five hours after the bus started the trip and seven hours after we arrived at the Lilongwe station. In tourism brochures, Malawi is described as “The Warm Heart of Africa,” and after this trip I can agree with the warm part. I’ve got a sweat drenched tshirt to prove it. I think, however, that I might have trouble finding the heart. The man that first convinced us onto this nightmarish bus is as close to a heartless man as I’ve ever met. No one with a beating heart would wish that trip on another fellow human. I get to the hotel and take a shower, scrubbing myself with soap three times before losing the soiled and violated feeling I’ve had since noon. I hope for a better day tomorrow.

Week in Malawi: Part Two

Monday, March 14th

I wake up around 7am and on my way downstairs for breakfast I notice that Lilongwe has somewhat awakened as well. There are people and cars moving about on the street outside the hotel, a big change from Sunday’s laziness, but it still pales in comparison to Lusaka and Nairobi.



I’ve been paying about $50-60/night at the hotels and this price includes a breakfast. Kiboko Town Hotel is no different, so I start my day with a bowl of cereal, fruit salad, orange juice, toast, two eggs, and coffee. My boss is getting in from Nairobi around noon, so I have a few hours and decide to venture out into Old Town.

Just outside the hotel, there’s a paved lot on the right hand side of the intersection where a craft market has sprung up. There are roughly 100 or so “stalls” where merchants are selling wood carvings, paintings, and a bunch of other souvenirs that I’ve noticed in all the African cities I’ve visited. I guess if you’re just visiting Malawi or just visiting Zambia you might buy a wood carving thinking its design is unique to that country. It’s not. I walk by the market and am approached by no less than three guys all greeting me with “Hello, friend, how are you? Where are you from?” I amuse them at first, but by the time the third guy comes to me and says “Hello, friend,” I’m annoyed enough to have a strong desire to reply, “First of all, I’m not your friend. ‘Hello, stranger,’ would be more accurate and second, I’m not interested in anything you’re selling.” They are all selling the same things and seem to use the same strategy. They show me some carvings. I’m not interested. They show me some paintings. I’m not interested. Okay, maybe something small, just a small souvenir for someone back home. I carve these key chains. You can tell me the name of the person, I’ll make a special one for him or her. No thank you. It makes me angry that they're all selling the same things. I want to ask each one how they differentiate from their competition. What’s your marketing strategy?

I make it across the street and away from the market. There are two large shopping plazas that look like they’d be at home in suburban US. I wander around each. There are several currency exchange bureaus, a few travel agents, a grocery store, two office supply stores, and a few clothing shops. I go into Game, a South African chain store that is similar to Wal-Mart, although much smaller. I walk the aisles and find the store to be well laid out with pretty good products. It wouldn’t be out of place in the US which is weird because it’s directly across the street from an informal market where hawkers sell goods from the muddy ground.

I get back to the hotel just in time to meet my boss who will be here for a week to introduce me to the distributors and NGOs we work with in Malawi. We have lunch at the hotel and then walk across the street to one of our distributors.

In Zambia the private distributors we sell to were much bigger companies than I expected. Two of them have agriculture/farming/hardware stores throughout the country and a large sales force that works in the more remote areas. In one case, the sales force alone totals 900 people. The other distributor has just one shop in Lusaka, but this shop has a huge showroom and warehouse. They sell mostly to large scale commercial farms and have everything you might expect: huge tractors, irrigation systems, and farming machines that are impressive in size even if I have no idea what they do. The biggest distributor we work with generates $10million/year in revenue, a far cry from the mom and pop shops I was envisioning (though even the largest distributor’s stores in the towns feel like mom and pop operations). The distributor we meet with in Lilongwe is much closer to what I had anticipated.

You wouldn’t even notice it was a store if you hadn’t already known. The name of the shop is painted above the door but it could use a touch up. Most of the letters are peeling away and the royal blue paint is deeply faded. When you enter the store, there’s a blue irrigation pump to your right, a hallway in the back right corner, and an office directly in front of the door. It’s a large rectangular room with nothing on the unpainted cement walls and a small wooden school desk in the middle of the room. It feels more like a classroom than a store. There aren’t any products displayed save for a large piece of cardboard that rests against the back wall, next to the desk, with little baggies of seed and fertilizer stapled to it in rows. The cardboard seed display looks like a 4th grade science fair project. We meet the two main guys that run the store and sit down in an office.

My project is to try to develop some sort of system for tracking the pumps we sell to distributors all the way to the farmers they are selling the pumps to, so I’m here in Malawi meeting with the distributors to find out what customer information they capture when they sell a pump. In Zambia, most of the distributors are big enough to use a fairly sophisticated computer system to track sales, inventory, and customers, making my job a little easier. I don’t have to ask too many questions of this distributor before figuring out that it’s going to be much more difficult here. All sales are tracked with paper receipt books, and from the look of this guy’s office, I don’t hold out much hope that all receipts and invoices are organized in any reasonable manner.



Even so, we get some good information and plan on coming back tomorrow morning so that they can pass along some additional data. My boss and I return to the hotel and have an hour to catch up with some emails before dinner. Kiboko Town Hotel has a nice second floor sitting area with a relaxing bar and a comfortable environment. I sip a Malawian beer called Kuche Kuche and while firing off a few emails, listen to the bartender’s soundtrack. KC and Jo-Jo, Eminem, and R.Kelly. Who can argue with that?

Week in Malawi: Part One

Sunday, March 13th

I’ve been in the Lusaka Hotel for the past two weeks. It describes its vision as “to restore the hotel to be the leading city centre hotel in Lusaka.” This statement is prominently written on the service directory that sits on the desk in my room, a dimly lit, pink painted rectangle with a rather lumpy twin bed and a mosquito net that once upon a time, before being covered in dust and dirt, was probably white. I keep reading it while I brush my teeth each night and after three days at the hotel, I put the service directory in the corner, flipped upside down so that I don’t have to continue reading the “vision.” It depresses me. The hotel is a long way from leading anything, and I consider telling the staff that a good place to start on their long journey to become a leading hotel would be to install a real shower. As it stands, I’ve been “showering” each morning by squatting down in a pink tub and holding a stupid hose above my head.





For all its shortcomings though, the hotel has been an alright place to spend the last two weeks while working in Lusaka. It’s a good location for business downtown, and the staff is exceptionally nice and most, at this point, greet me by name. Amon, one of the servers in the hotel restaurant where I’ve had breakfast each morning, knows it’s my last morning. When he brings the bill over, he wishes me a good journey, tells me to friend him on Facebook, and says, “I’ll miss you, David” which is actually kind of cute despite it coming from a 28 year old man.

All the taxi drivers outside of the hotel know me as well. I’ve scattered my business around through the two weeks, picking up rides here and there with a number of different drivers. Throughout the two weeks, they’ve all been vying for my eventual trip to the airport since they can make a better amount on the long trip than the short trips I’ve been making around town. I’ve decided to go with Richard who is about my age, exceptionally skinny, listens to decent music, and offers something none of the other drivers can: a twin brother. We’ve enjoyed this common characteristic the last two weeks, and this morning, he’s waiting for me outside the hotel. We leave for the airport around 9am.

The flight to Lilongwe, Malawi is about 2 hours, an easy trip on Kenya Airways. I get to Lilongwe around noon. Customs is very easy, not even requiring a visa, and I manage to change some American Dollars into Malawi Kwacha before grabbing a taxi into the city’s Old Town where I’ll be staying at the Kiboko Town Hotel. During the ride into the city I notice that the road feels more rural than urban. There are none of the giant billboards advertising cell phone networks, Coke, and Samgsung, that dot the highways into Nairobi and Lusaka. Instead the road offers giant rolling hills of corn and mountains in the distance, all of which make a really pretty drive into town. After a twenty minute drive, the driver says that we’ve entered Old Town, and I almost respond by asking “where?” There’s nothing really around besides a medium sized shopping complex and two or three banks. With little traffic and very few people out in the streets, a striking contrast from the crazy streets of Lusaka, Lilongwe strikes me as a very sleepy, small town rather than a capital city.

After checking into the hotel, I take off on foot to find some lunch and mostly find that everything is closed. I end up finding a place about a five minute walk from my hotel and after eating, I return to my hotel to do what everyone else seems to be doing on this lazy Sunday. Lilongwe has greeted me with a giant yawn, so I waste the afternoon with a long nap.

Week in Malawi

I've been out of Nairobi for the past three weeks, spending two weeks in Zambia and this past week in Malawi as part of the project I'm working on. It's been a great trip so far. I've seen a lot and definitely learned a lot to help with my project. The next few posts will be a summary of what's been going on during this past week. Where I've been, the work I'm doing, and the country I'm visiting. A Week in Malawi in several posts...

Lusaka View From Above

After a long and miserably humid day yesterday, my coworker and I went looking for a bar to start the weekend with Zambia's thoroughly mediocre beer, Mosi. Just down the street from my hotel there's a 12 story Soviet style looking building that reportedly had a bar on top, so we walked on over and rode the elevator up to the 12th floor. Exiting the elevator, after a nearly five minute ride which felt less safe than I would have liked, we found ourselves at the entrance to the studios of Radio Phoenix, a local radio station on 89.5. We asked the older guy "guarding" the entrance if there was a bar somewhere. He mumbled something and either didn't hear us properly or was just dangerously indifferent to his job, sitting there as we ignored him and started climbing the stairs we found next to the elevator.

The stairs didn't go to a bar, they just went right up to the unprotected roof that we explored without anyone caring. And though we didn't get the beer we were looking for, we got some cool views and pictures of Lusaka.


Cairo Road, Lusaka's main drag, has a tree-lined pedestrian boulevard that cuts through the middle of the wide, always busy street. I've found the pedestrian walk to be one of the nicest features of downtown, which otherwise leaves a lot to be desired. My hotel is the red roofed small building in the middle of the picture, just beyond the second tallest building on the left hand side. I only wish it were as nice as a Red Roofed Inn in the states.


One of Lusaka's many confusing roundabouts clearly shows the Friday afternoon rush hour, complete with the blue minibuses you find throughout the city.

Mosi-a-tunya

Read any travel guide about Victoria Falls and it will say something like “you WILL get wet,” which would have been a nice warning to heed before I set out for the falls dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and carrying a backpack with a laptop, a Kindle, and an iPod. I was in Livingstone, Zambia, after a 7 hour bus ride from Lusaka, Zambia’s capital and where I had just finished up my first week in the country. Besides knowing that you had to get to Livingstone to see the falls and that the park entrance would run $20, I didn’t know what to expect, what to see or do, or, most crucially, what to wear when going to the falls.

The hotel told me I could take a taxi or bus to the falls, and I elected for the bus which departed from a chaotic mud filled market about five minutes away from the hotel. Bruno, a guy about my age with a severe gap between his two front teeth, walked me to the market while aggressively trying to sell me the poorly made knickknacks he kept pulling out of the deep pockets of his baggy jean shorts. When I wasn’t interested in buying anything he suggested that we trade my Detroit Tigers hat for a crudely carved wooden elephant. No thanks. As we approached the market and waiting buses, he was desperate. How about your socks? I declined though had I known what waited at the falls, I likely would have taken him up on the offer. Anything to rid myself of the poorly chosen and ill suited outfit I was wearing.

The bus trip was about 10 minutes out of town and by the time we reached the bus’ final destination I had gained another friend, Taurai, a Zimbabwean on his way home from his field work just outside Livingstone. I’m glad he was there because there was no clear indication where to go to get to the falls. As far as I could tell, we were at the end of a small road with nothing but surrounding forest. He guided me from the bus to the park and during the five minute walk, he convinced me that the falls were better seen from the Zimbabwean side, so I followed him to the border crossing which sat just 50 yards from the Zambian park entrance. Unfortunately, my Zambian visa was only single entry and not wanting to pay for an additional visa upon my return, I chose to bid Taurai farewell (he was headed to his home which was just a few kilometers beyond the border), and returned to the Zambian entrance to the falls. Thanking him for helping me get to the park, Taurai did what anyone might do with a new found acquaintance: “I’ll friend you on Facebook. Are you on Twitter?”

The Zambian park entrance was nicely marked and after walking down a small paved road, past a number of souvenir shacks each with two to three beckoning hawkers, I got to the gate and was charged the $20 entrance fee. I read on my ticket after getting back to the hotel that park guests were not advised to pay any unofficial guides within the park, but since I didn’t read this upon entering the park, I did exactly that, “hiring” Joe because I didn’t know where to go and more importantly because he was wearing a royal blue Henry Ford Health System t-shirt.



Turns out, you really don’t need a guide. The park is pretty small and the walk-able paths are all very clearly defined. Joe led me down each and every path, something I could have done very easily alone, and really didn’t offer much more than what you’d read in a guide book: with width of 1.7 kilometers and a height of 108 meters, Victoria Falls is considered the largest sheet of falling water in the world. It’s traditional name, Mosi-a-tunya, means “the smoke that thunders.”

He, of course, also offered the novelty of being led through the park, gazing at one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, by a Zambian man wearing a t-shirt whose first owner was a fellow Michigander. It wasn’t hard to convince myself that I had run into Joe’s t-shirt before, that its previous owner worked at a GM plant and shopped at Meijer. This little slice of home, stumbled upon just yards away from Victoria Falls, was well worth Joe’s tour charge of $15.

The falls themselves were awesome in the most traditional sense: extremely impressive and daunting, inspiring great admiration and fear. To describe them much further would be an injustice. Pictures too, as they often are, are underwhelming compared to experiencing it in person. Even when you end up leaving the park wearing jeans that may as well have just gotten out of the washing machine, shoes that won’t dry for two days, a water logged passport, a ruined leather wallet, and a firmer belief in God after finding your laptop, Kindle, iPod, and camera safely dry, shielded from the “smoke that thunders” by a trusty backpack worn underneath a fairly weak rain coat.







If you go, wear a swimsuit and flip flops and pack a poncho. Bruno may or may not be able to be found near the Jollyboys Hotel, though he’ll likely find you first. You can friend Taurai here, and feel free to hire any unofficial guide wearing a tshirt from home. Leave your electronics at home and it’s probably better to read a guide book first. Enjoy.

We Intend 2 Cauze

Found this bus ticket shack on my way to Livinstone, Zambia. I wish I had chosen to ride Shalom Bus.

We Intend 2 Cauze:



Shalom Bus Services We Love All: