Lilongwe Hotel

I’ve stayed at the Bridgeview Hotel the last two weeks and for at least half of those nights, I was the only guest. I’d walk downstairs for breakfast and there’d be a staff of eight to wish me good morning, two or three of whom would be dedicated to fanning over me during breakfast. A little overwhelming and unnecessary but it made it pretty easy to get to know everyone, and at this point, after two weeks, they feel like family. 

David is one of the breakfast servers. If he weren’t so terribly nice, I’d get annoyed that it takes him thirty minutes to make toast in the conveyor belt toaster (he insists he do this for me). It’s unclear what Victor does, but I think he’d serve as a bellhop if there were any guests to escort to the room. Because I’m the only one here, he just hangs out in the reception and smiles. Oswald runs the reception and is quiet, unamused, and not terribly helpful, but he’s better than Salima, who sits behind the reception desk, plays solitaire and doesn’t even offer the redeeming smiles of Victor or David. My favourite character is Nigi, the cook, who’s from Northern India. My co-worker who was with me during a portion of the past two weeks is also from India and initially befriended Nigi by speaking Hindi to him. Nigi was happy to have an audience to cook for and personally brought out each of our homemade Indian lunches and dinners the past week.  He very proudly gave me a tour of his kitchen last night which because we couldn’t really speak each other’s language was more of him smiling broadly, holding my hand, showing me where he makes naan (“very hot, very hot!”) and guiding me into the store room, around the burners, and into the dish room. He seemed sincerely sad when I wished him goodbye. "You leave?!? Now?!? Don't come back??!" 

Last time I stayed at a hotel for an extended period of time, Amon, one of the waiters told me that he would miss me. It was cute, but I can’t say I shared the same feeling. The Bridgeview Hotel staff, yes, I’ll miss you.

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.  

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.