Debriefing on the Ngaramtoni HIV/Aids Trust Fund

Nicola, the first volunteer in the project, has done a good job a designing and formalizing the different processes. Ten businesses were officially selected and trained before her departure. Mr. Elias, Mr. Kinisi and I then launched the ventures by assisting the participants in bargaining for supplies and setting up shop. We have been visiting the families several times a week to help them with accounting and offer suggestions to increase sales and efficiency. We covered long distances on foot in corn fields and mountains to meet with some of them.

Of the ten start-ups, five were operating profitably, three were making adjustments to reach profitability and two were problematic. Mama Hadija’s home-cooked food has generated enough income to buy the school books and feed her nine dependants a third meal each day. The two ladies selling kangas door-to-door have also generated high profits. The four commodity kiosks have required more attention, especially regarding accounting, which is more complex than single-commodity businesses. Our most successful kiosk operator has developed a great method of accounting sales for each commodity, and was able to teach her young daughter to operate the kiosk in her absence. I observed dramatic changes in these women’s energy level, pride and self-confidence. It is a great pleasure to enable a person to sustain increased standards of living through their own efforts.

As in any pilot project, we encountered several drawbacks and it was an important learning experience for the entire team. This experience has taught me much about patience, leadership and communications skills. Our least successful commodity kiosk was not even built by the time I had left, and we were not able to locate the grant recipient to discuss the situation. Upon auditing another recipient’s books and supplies, we discovered that half of the business’ assets have mysteriously vanished. On the day of a business launch, we discovered that a recipient was not able to read, write or count… Lastly, a kanga salesperson sold her entire stock on credit, exposing her business to a sky-high default rate on loans (but was able to collect most in the end).

Miscommunications were numerous and amusing at times. I did my best to develop a rudimentary Swahili and soon discovered that “ready” and “circumcision” are very close in pronunciation… In Tanzania, people do not like to disagree, admit they do not know, or recognize failure. Instead, they can commit to things which cannot be done or confidently answer “yes” to questions they do not understand. I have so many examples of this! In order to avoid this problem, I have developed a few tricks. First, never prompt them with possible answers, as they will simply the pick that is easy to pronounce. Second, try to formulate the questions so the expected answer is “no”. This way, if you get a Tanzanian “yes”, you know the person did not understand. Lastly, ask the same question to several people to verify the accuracy. I believe that this comes from the current education system, where students get beatings for being late in class, not understanding concepts or failing an exam. They are taught to write down what is one the blackboard and regurgitate it, and can even be punished for thinking creatively.

During my entire posting in Ngaramtoni, I’ve been ruthlessly insisting that everyone be on time and live up to their commitments, to a point where I was wondering whether I was imposing my culture on theirs. Mr. Elias was almost always on time, whereas Mr. Kinisi would often be 2-3 hours late. He would sometimes commit to a meeting knowing full well that he wouldn’t make it because of prior engagements. He would be apologetic and have fantastic excuses every time. My approach was “soft on people, hard on problems” and I would try to stress why being on time is important and what the consequences of showing up late or not showing up at all would have on the project. If a person doesn’t show up to a meeting, there is a tendency to write the day off and go home. Working 9 to 5 here is a “long” work day. In my observation, some people have a tendency to set very small and easy objectives to reach, congratulate each other for achieving them and go home by 11am. It helps to have a good sense of humour and be patient.

During his speech at my good-bye party, Mr. Kinisi pointed out that my obsession with punctuality kept the project on schedule. The next steps include finishing the constitution and registration of the NGO and monitoring the pilot families for the last 5 weeks of the pilot. Mr. Lunch, the director of MondoChallenge, called me to discuss the project’s progress. He seemed quite pleased about our achievements in such a short period of time. I was also informed that a new volunteer has been located to take over the project upon Katie’s departure in about a month. I highly recommend MondoChallenge to anyone. (www.mondochallenge.org)