Coming Home

I’m coming home. We’ve been in the air now for about an hour and a half. Looks like we are just crossing the Ethiopian border into Sudan. I still have a full 22 hours left on my journey back to Chicago so I figured I’d use this time to catch up on two months of blogging. We will start with my internship experience with Victoria Boda Boda SACCO.
Working at Victoria Boda Boda SACCO was an absolute roller coaster. Just when I thought I had things figured out, everything changed. Then just when I thought I’d seen an issue from the correct angle, I’d find out someone has been lying to me the entire time and my original thinking had been correct. That was of course until I found out about something else. Yeah, that’s what it was like. For starters, the first three weeks or so of my internship was dedicated to meeting as many of the clients as I could out in the field. This involved a lot of travel by piki piki (motorcycle). Many of the villages we visited were so remote that not even matatus went there on a regular basis or even at all. Sometimes we would take a matatu for an hour to one place and then have to piki piki our way for another hour to finally reach the clients. It was a lot of fun at first but then my butt started getting sore so it lost some of its zeal. Meeting the clients was an interesting experience because most all of them had the exact same story: they were pissed off that they weren’t getting their money, whether it was in the form of a loan or their savings. One of the more frustrating aspects of meeting with clients was the language barrier. We spent two months in Nairobi learning Kiswahili and it was rather useless in most places that we went. Some villages were so remote that they only learned their tribal language (Luo) and did not learn English or their national language, Kiswahili. It felt like I was back traveling in Ecuador or Mexico with Irving. I needed a translator everywhere I went. After compiling weeks of complaints, I moved on to the administrative and managerial parts of the business. I got to go through “the books”, sit in on board meetings (obviously I couldn’t just “sit in” on these meetings. My views were clearly known at all meetings) and work side by side with the manager. Victoria Boda Boda SACCO is going through some very difficult times right now. There is a 39% default rate on loans, employees are not getting paid and money is not being dispersed at all. There is a total freeze on all lending. After spending time with the staff and clients, I concluded that the problems were the managements fault. After spending time the management, I concluded that it was the staffs fault. After looking at correspondences between Victoria and the government, I concluded that it was the governments fault. And finally after I did some serious Professor Vasquez “critical thinking”, I concluded that I am happy that I do not run, work for or depend on a business in Kenya. Victoria is in a wild wild west showdown right now and neither side is blinking. The staff gets paid so little, if they get paid at all, that they have to look elsewhere for work or decided not to do their jobs to the best of their ability. They get paid the equivalent of about 30 bucks a month. Yes, a month. To live on your own and make just enough to get by, someone in the Kisumu are would need to make the equivalent of about 475 dollars a month. That’s just to get by and the staff at Victoria is only making 30 measly dollars a month. As of right now, the staff hasn’t been paid for three months. And if you are wondering if those lost months of pay get made up in the future, the answer is no. On the other side, the management is not getting the collection of money from the staff to pay them and the default rate is so high partly as a result of poor work done by the field agents. And the management sees no incentive right now to pay the staff more if they are not doing their work. Then the government came in and made everything worse. They made a promise to give Victoria a 10 million Kenyan shilling loan… two years ago. The money has never some. The management made a truly awful decision to sell hundreds of loan request forms to members to jumpstart the process. They figured that if the applications were completed before the money came, that when the money did actually come, all they had to do was distribute the money. While it may make sense to everyone across the pond, trusting the government is a fool’s mistake. I asked our manager, Richard, about why he did this many times and he never really had an answer. I had been in Kenya for a few months now and had the knowledge not to trust the government with a piece of paper but Richard, who has lived in Kisumu for over fifty years, decided to sell these forms without having a check in hand. Members paid 500 shillings to get these forms and the vast majority has never received a loan. That’s a lot of angry people who live on around a dollar a day. What was cool about my time there was that they truly valued my opinion and wanted my input on everything. This was not because I had proved to be a good problem solver or a good businessman (im a political science major if you forgot) but it was because I was white; a mzungu. They trust white people because they believe we all come from the riches of the west. One thing I did not realize until I got to Victoria was that I had a ton of business experience by virtue of living in the US for over twenty one years. We know what a good business is and how one works. We can look at an issue, like stealing from collections or not documenting petty cash expenses and know that’s not the way things are supposed to work. There was definitely not a shortage of issues to point out. At the end, I got to share my experiences with the board by reading through my final report. My final message to them was that if they wanted to run like a real business, they had to start acting like it. It starts with showing up to work on time, or at least being less than three hours late, doing what you’re told and actually giving a damn about the work you are doing. At that last point, I kindly motioned toward two board members who were sound asleep with their heads on the table. For those who were awake and were listening to my “New Way Forward” presentation, they were very receptive to my ideas and actually planned to implement a few of them right away. The most frustrating part about my time at Victoria was that I felt like I cared about the business and the livelihood of those who depended on it, staff and clients, more than the staff did. This is typical of Kenyans though, I am sad to say. Many who find themselves in a bad situation feel they have no resources or means to get out of it and end up becoming content. It’s frustrating because the way out is a clearly marked exit door with an instruction list attached to it. So that’s enough about my internship. If you want to hear more, believe it or not but there is a lot more. There are two reports and a ten page paper. Ps, I had a chicken pot pie for dinner. It was pretty good but as always, ill check back in a few hours to see how it’s doing.