Lunchboxes and Knapsacks

Thoughts of field trips typically conjure images of small children in matching colored T-shirts bouncing along a path with brown paper sacks or tin boxes glinting in the sun with pictures of Superman, Batman, Barbie, Spongebob Squarepants, or Shrek. Maybe they have those oversized dangling nametags, squinted eyes as they shield them from the sun, and a seemingly permanent painted frown giving them wrinkles in their young age as they complain about their feet hurting, having to go to the restroom, and wanting snack time (all not unlike their wizened counterparts at the opposite end of the age spectrum.) This field trip was a bit different. It was a work trip. Very official. Very…aherm, business-like and all that jazz. Having worked out of the American culture context before, I knew to expect (or perhaps not to expect) quite a number of norms from the American office place. No water coolers, no Starbucks coffee breaks, no automated projection system that lowers from the heavens and clicks magically in place with a blinking blue screen waiting patiently for your Powerpoint or Prezi, no little thingies that remove staples from papers once you’ve stapled them. But with relatively few field trips under my belt, I was admittedly a bit unprepared for exactly what such an outing would entail.

 We were supposed to leave at 8am. Around 9am I started to wonder. At the moment, we were still sipping chai and nibbling on breakfast sambusas (samosas) and hot fluffy rice cake puffs. I wasn’t tooo unhappy at this fact, but still. At about 9:15 the car arrived and we ventured to a shop to make print-outs of the handouts for the day. Finally, ready to go! A welcome ominous sign, the moment we pulled out of the makeshift parking space, boom! Accident. Hmmm. After some back and forth and admission of guilt on both sides (his car looked much worse for wear than our 4X4), we all piled back in and hit the road. The drive was incredible. Up and down winding roads hugging close to the mountains, we made our way down a road cut through the gorgeous Rift Valley, so named after having been created by the tectonic shifts that had given rise to the mountains around us. The view from above was breath-taking and refreshingly crisp to breathe. One of the women accompanying us had grown up in the valley and pointed to squat stone and cement structures that she identified as the valley hospital and one of very few schools. As she demonstrated, children were required to walk up, down, and through the valley for several miles often to reach a school at the far end of the valley away from their homes. Many girls, she informed us, never attended secondary school given the even greater distance from home and the amount of chores needed to be completed in a given day.

We wound on farther and eventually found ourselves in the town of Mbulu in Manyara District. As if on cue, just over a dozen women emerged in colorful bursts from various places around town and followed us to the screening site where we would conduct a series of interviews to select the participants for our pilot project. Eager to get started, I made to pass out the papers we had brought explaining the program—a solar energy initiative targeting rural women who were leaders of a number of local village savings and loans associations (VSLAs)—but was quickly stopped by my colleagues as it was necessary to perform an extended greeting, personal welcome, and introduction first. Strike one against the overzealous American.

I introduced myself briefly in Swahili giving my name and explaining that I was an American working with d.light and was very pleased to meet everyone. As the women approached one by one we went through a series of questions. Excuse me sister/mam, but how old are you? Samahani dada/mama, una miaka mingapi? Do you have a husband? Una mume? Do you have children? Una watoto? We learned that almost all of the women save two had been educated to Standard 7 (Grade 8), were farmers (wakulima) of some sort and entrepreneurs, had no personal means of transport (bikes included), could read and write to at least basic level, and were relatively (professedly) debt-free. One woman explained how she rose at 3am every day to prepare her children for shule (school), take her wares for sale nearly a three hours’ walk away to town, and then return home in time to cook, clean, and set up the house for when her husband returned home. Others, women barely older than me were responsible for families of two and three children and somehow managed to tend farms, prep for market, attends savings group meetings, and still get dinner on the table before dark as few had electricity at home and needed to squeeze the most out of the daylight. When it came to time management, these women were pros.

Consulting my Excel spreadsheet, I tabulated the data, calculating scores for each woman based on traits we thought would embody a strong retailer and community representative for the brand and the project: did she make frequent eye contact? Did she speak confidently? Was she animated? Did she project? Did she understand the role and responsibility? Was she a trusted member of the community? Then we came to the water selling task. As an on the spot demonstration, we asked each women to sell us a bottle of water. She got highest marks for demonstrating the benefits of the water over soda or juice, negotiating a fair price, highlighting the best characteristics of the water, and vouching for it personally as the best drink on the market. Great activity, right? It frequently went like this:

“Okay, now dada/mama, please sell me this bottle of maji (water).”

“You already bought it. It’s on the table.”

“Right. Okay, I know I bought it but now sell it to me.”

“I don’t understand. You have it.”

“No you have it. This is pretend, make-believe so imagine please.”

“Imagine what?”

“That you are selling it. Pretend we are in a duka (shop). I am the mteja (customer). You are the shop keeper.”

“Ah yes. Okay. This maji here is very delicious maji. It costs 600 shillings.”

“That’s expensive and I don’t like water. It’s tasteless. I like soda. Maybe Coca or Tangawizi (a ginger soda).”

“Okay. Wait, can I sell you that instead?”

“Alrighty then let’s go to the next activity.”

Strike two against the foolish American. Silly me, they would be selling solar lights not water. Didn’t I know that? Oof. Imagination is a luxury. When do adults have time for that when they’ve got cows, sheep, children, maize, and wheat flour on the brain? I silently cursed the theater-phile in me for conjuring up the task though my colleagues seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. They were exceedingly patient in managing to explain to each woman just how this activity had anything to do with selling solar products and eventually got through to each one. They were convinced if a woman could sell us this bottle convincingly, she would have no trouble fielding the same questions about the solar lanterns. Activity saved! Task behind us, we moved on and wrapped up the interviews just as the sun sank low behind the clouds and our stomachs told us it was dinner time. The next day we repeated the process first in Hanang and then Babati, two towns also in Manyara district, but not without the foolish American rearing her ugly head inside me again.

Working lunch. \WER-keeng Luh-nch\ Noun. Definition: a meal around midday completed while performing tasks related to one’s job or occupation. Origin: Somewhere due West.

To be fair we were already an hour behind. We were wrapping up the interviews in Hanang which had taken longer than expected as extra people showed up eager to be interviewed and possibly selected. Babati was about 45 minutes to an hour away with bat out of hell race car driving. We were all starving and I suggested calling ahead to the next group to say we were running late and getting food on the other end once we arrived. Negative. My colleagues were bent on getting lunch in our current location. Fine, then, I reasoned, let’s just get it to go and eat en route as we drive. EEEEENNNNNHHHHH. Somewhere a million buzzers went off. Eat as we drive? Eat as we drive? What absurd recommendation was this? What bizarre machinations was I plotting such that we needed to eat in transit? But, but, I stammered. Didn’t we eat en route yesterday? Ah yes, but only to beat the darkness back down the mountain. There was plenty of light now. We would sit. Forty minutes later we were almost two hours late and still an hour from the site. We piled into the car again and took off. Flying down the road. I buckled up and held on for dear life, a silent prayer escaping my lips at some point, and then as quickly as we had begun we stopped. It was time for muwa. I cringed as I looked out the window and saw the man running with the cart of sugar cane sticks. My colleagues pulled over and asked for six. Now mind you, these things are about six feet long and he has to hack them down to manageable two feet size with a machete. That’s six feet and at least two cuts per stick for six sticks. My head was spinning with the math that screamed We’re already going to be three hours late!! I said nothing. Sensing my inner turmoil perhaps, a colleague assured me that a few more minutes would not hurt that much. I breathed. I calmed my Western anxiety, remembered my own role among friends as the erstwhile latecomer, and relaxed…a little. Strike three against the uptight American!

Eventually we made it of course. As in Hanang, the Babati group was a bit more mixed than our first town of Mbulu with men and women, producing an interesting dynamic between the male interviewees and the female interviewing team questioning them. Most men, not surprisingly, had no trouble with eye contact whatsoever and typically barreled through the questions with ease. Like the women, most all were married farmers/entrepreneurs with several children and had completed Grade 8 though a few had gone on to Form 4 (secondary school). As leaders of their VSLAs, like some of the women, they had remarkable reach into the rural community, accessing as many as two and three hundred individuals on a regular basis. Jackpot. This was exactly the rural penetration we desperately needed where our local distributors had no reach. I thought back to the houses dotting Rift Valley and pictured each of these village agents making their way through communities we didn’t even know existed on roads far from any map I’d ever seen. And guaranteed just about each and every one of those houses goes dark when the sun goes down, hauling out smudged and dangerous kerosene lanterns and jerry cans that cost them hundreds of shillings per day to burn. With solar energy, the possibilities were staggering.

We wrapped up the screening, jotting down notes on scribbled pieces of papers and print outs and headed back to Arusha. I was pumped and ready for action. This was why I wanted to be out here in the field doing this sort of work. We had spent several weeks being bogged down in bureaucracy. It’s bound to happen with so many cooks in the kitchen on a single project, too many organizations with conflicting agendas just trying to make sure their best interests are kept in mind. Getting out there reminded me of the people on the other end, miles and miles away from headquarters and conference calls and absurdly long email chains where sometimes very little actually gets done. Instead as the field team, we are the ones getting regular calls from these farmers and entrepreneurs wondering what was taking so long? When were the products arriving? Why had we come and visited them two and three times with no results to show? Would we be like that last organization that came through with so many promises and never followed through? 

I cringed when we had to call them back to notify them that there was yet another delay at HQ and we would be pushing back the training one more week, maybe two. But didn’t we know harvest season would end soon and the money would dry up? Who would they sell to then when everyone was pinching shillings again? Those are the moments that make this work difficult, not just from a logistical angle, organizing meetings and interviews and trainings, but from an emotionally taxing perspective as well. We are here on the ground because we want to help, but how much help can we be when our hands are so tied by donors and board members, country directors and distributors, and the like? The money is not in. The board doesn’t agree. The MOU hasn’t been signed. The team is not assembled. All these are typical development problems, and necessary evils most would say, but it leaves you wondering: is there ever an easier way to just take action? To get things done and provide the services needed without a cadre of squabbling figures like crabs in a barrel, clawing for this interest or that? Perhaps no because we need the funding. We need the support. We need the technical expertise and resources. At the end of the day, frustrating though it may be, perhaps it’s just enough that the work eventually gets done, no matter the creeping road to get there. 

A week later on a flight, I sat down next to a woman in a beautiful colored kanga wrap much like the women we had interviewed. I asked her where she was from. Mama, unatoka ni wapi? She told me Manyara, Hanang specifically. Excitedly I tried to explain that my work was in solar with the sun and did she know of our company? Kazi yangu ni solar, na jua. Unajua d.light? She said that she had not, but was very happy to hear we would be coming to her hometown. She did not have electricity and wanted light at night. She said our work was good, very good, and thanked me for doing it. I paused for a moment. Even though she hadn’t seen the work and had no idea of what our products were like or when she would see them, even so she was grateful the work was being done and that someone wanted to invest in her town. That alone was validating. I smiled and thanked her, adding Mama, nafurahi kukufahamu. (Mama, I am happy to meet you/It was a pleasure meeting you.)

Truthfully, it really was.