London

Though I am making this post way after my trip, I wanted to capture a brief post on my London experience.  We spent two days in London to visit with our client, debrief the trip to Africa and our work for him, and also hang out for a day or so to see the sights.

The first day, Friday, was mostly spent recovering from the long trip and going over our project.  In the evening, we did go out for a nice dinner before hitting the sack.  It gave us a good chance to get to know our client and his girlfriend during the stay, which was nice, since it has been all business up until this point.

Saturday, Santiago and I took off for the day to try to see some sights around London, but we didn't actually try that hard.  We were mostly wandering, and we went to the National Gallery, had some lunch by Westminster Abbey, and walked along the river towards the Tate Modern, where we stayed outside for a long time to watch the street entertainers.  One of them was a master bubbler, or simply a guy that blew soap bubbles to entertain the kids.  He was very much like the pied piper, but wielded a soap bubble wand rather than a pipe.  In the evening, we played some ping pong and I grabbed some dinner with Henri and his girlfriend before going to bed.  I skipped out on the Agentinian tango night that Santiago found, but that would have kept me up until 3 am.

It was very nice to be back in a modern society after a 3 week run in the rough.

Departing Ngala Safari Lodge

It's now time to depart Ngala lodge in Kruger National Park.  It has been a very fun time and we have seen all of the big 5 animals that most people crave to see.  Last night we checked off two leopards who were getting it on in the bushes and today, we saw a rhino on the runway from which we are about to take off.  Every time we went out on a drive, we saw something new and different.  It was somewhat grueling to endure the cold in the mornings and the long bumping terrain, but it was a lot of fun and well worth the time.  

Cheetahs at the kill

This morning was another exciting game drive.  We got up at our usual time of 5:30 am to grab some hot chocolate and head out on the savannah to try to see some animals.  After an hour of struggling to stay warm under blankets and then taking a small break for some more hot chocolate, we found something cool.

Off in the distance to the side of the road were two giraffe heads sprouting out of the tall grass.  Instead of the usual glares straight at us, we saw them facing the opposite direction, which alerted our guides to the fact that something was up.  We turned off the car and promptly heard some impala grunting and making alarm sounds.  So we took to offroading into the bush.  Soon, we saw a hyena galloping along the right side of our vehicle, then another from the left crossing our path.  After driving a bit farther, we spotted the cheetah at the site of the kill.  We were there in just in time to see two more hyenas chase the cheetah off and grab the impala and start furiously devouring it.  They were ripping it apart from limb to limb, gutting it, and gulping down all the internal organs.  It was super gross but raw and uncensored Africa.  As we watched, we saw the blood flowing, heard the sound of skin ripping, and smelled the disgusting internals of the ripped open intestines.

The cheetahs, were slowly trotting away as they gave up their kill.  There were 3 of them in total, young males who were most likely family.  As they wandered off, we followed, to watch them cleaning and relaxing in the morning sun.

Project is finally over, mostly

We are sitting at the Fedair terminal in Johannesburg ready to take off for Ngala for our Krueger Park adventure.  It's rather exciting to finally start vacation and be done with this project.  Over the last two months, we have put in countless hours working on this project and it all culminated with a final business plan that we finished yesterday, not without a bit of stress as we should have probably finished up the day before so that we could be free a bit.  There was always just one more thing to double check though.  After this adventure for 5 days, two of us are going to London to talk about the final deliverable, which is a bit more work.

After taking a few weeks break and finally enjoying a summer vacation from school, I could see myself becoming an advisor on this project and working on it again, but for now, I could use some time off.

Africa Poem

Africa, Africa, rugged, rural, and raw.

We came, we met, we conquered, we saw

How to do business here, how to do agriculture and how to do education,

All the while we were hoping for a two week long vacation.

We met with ministers, with vice chancellors, and with department deans

We saw that they had great opportunity but lacked significant means.

We can help these people we said

We’ll bring them education in agriculture to keep them well fed

There is nothing that’ll stop us as long as we pursue

The good project that we came here to do.

All our good hopes, inspiration and dreams

were somewhat tempered by the encounters and scandalous schemes

that we ran into some times in our adventures out

after dinner when we took a most disastrous route.

It took us by policemen each carrying a rather large gun

They stopped us and decided to ruin our fun

They wanted our passports, a bribe, threatened to take us away

We proclaimed this is not a warm welcome which could entice us to stay

After a half hour of sublime and subdued protest

They could save face and finally gave us some rest.

But all is not lost with this country, Mozambique

It is worth some investigation before a critique

The people in general are kind and sincere

They are simple, lack knowledge and also lack fear

This in itself is entrepreneurial enough

We just have to find the diamonds in the rough

Who are enterprising and willing to do what it takes to succeed

Who have the abilities to learn how to prosper, how to follow the creed

Of those who find capital, invest, make crops to sell

Rather than being a part of a drug cartel

For in the former is the future, in the latter is the past

While we bring this to Africa, we’ll have quite a blast.

Africa, Africa, rugged, rural, and raw.

The place of hope, change, and awe.

Maputo Special Elephant Reserve

Yesterday was our first weekend day and that meant that we finally get some free time.  To spend the free time, we booked a guided trip to the Maputo Elephant Reserve, which isn't too far away from the city and is a small wildlife sanctuary where they are reintroducing animals to the region.  Many of the animals were killed during the civil war for meet and there are virtually none left in the area, so this reintroduction program brings some herbivores back to the area.

The day started at 5 am when we met with our guide to make it to the ferry for the first ferry ride across the bay towards the reserve.  It was a pretty chaotic scene at 5:30 in the morning.  While talking with the guide, we saw a crazy driver speeding down the road (probably drunk) in a Lexus.  He ran straight into this barricade that was protected the department of defense, which was probably not the best place to run into.  The Lexus hopped up the curb and somehow managed mount a 3 foot tall cement post before coming to a stop.  Lots of people rushed to the scene and amazingly nobody was hurt.  The army guards on duty were there and eventually the driver had a friend pick him up and they went screeching away in a new vehicle, where they peeled out for 5 seconds prior to the departure.  They left the Lexus as is.  Perhaps there was a lower class employee of the driver that came to the scene as a stand in for the driver to take the rap.  During this time, the police arrived on the scene in 5 minutes, but they were only interested in giving a parking ticket to some taxi driver that had parked nearby illegally, and they commenced their corrupt extortion practices.

So, that was a morning started with a bang.  The ferry ride over the bay was fun, and on the drive to the reserve, we saw the sunrise, which was very pretty.

Most of the day was spent driving through the park on tiny dirt roads, through bushes and over grass, to try to spot some animals.  We saw a group of giraffe, some zebra, a couple of hippos, a family of bush pigs, and even 4 elephants off in the distance in tall tall grass such that we could only see the tops of their heads.  It was a lot of effort to see the animals in this park compared to my other experience in Tanzania and Kenya.  I hope that Krueger Park is a lot better.

On the way back, we had a really hard and long time finding lunch, which was included in the tour but not easy away from the city of Maputo.  It became 3 pm before we had our first meal of the day.  Things move so slowly around here and workers seem so unmotivated to get anything done with any sense of urgency that it is rather disappointing.

On the way back, we had to wait for the ferry boat which has the capacity of about 22 cars to go across the river.  This process took about 2-3 hours, but it comes while surrounded by a bustling market of fish, shrimp, drinks, pool tables, alcohol, and random electronics shops.  People coming back from Maputo are ready to buy dinner for their families and there are eager merchants trying to make a buck or two.  I think that we got home at about 7 pm and were so tired that we crashed until now, where I am at breakfast enjoying the buffet at 8 am.

Friday, first work day in Maputo

It's nice to have the whole team together and to be exploring the city a bit, though most of our days are filled with meetings and collaborative work on our project.   We had a couple of meetings with representatives of the private sector and also had to get formally dressed for our meeting with a member of the department of agriculture focused on promotion and support of agriculture in the region.   We also had a chance to share some of the learnings and insights from our respective sub team destinations.

The evening brought freedom again and we just went out to dinner at a pretty popular place called Dolce Vita which promised to have a healthy group of expats and working people.  It was a good dinner, and we decided to call it an early night because of our plans for Saturday.

Travel to Maputo and our run in with the police

Today was an early day as we had to rush to the airport to catch our flight.  It's a good thing that we left early since we got stopped by the police from Kampala to Entebbe.  Apparently, our taxi driver almost ran into them, but I don't really know since I wasn't paying attention to the road at that point.  They stopped us for a good 15 minutes and tried to make our driver pay about 20K Ug shilling ($8), which he didn't have at that time.  They finally let him go when he promised to leave his phone number and come back to deliver the money to them.

Our flight was very smooth and we had the chance to process the survey data that we had and sync up with our client at the business lounge in Johannesburg.  The survey processing was far to arduous a task, but we finished it by the evening.

For dinner, we explored the downtown area of Maputo. On the way home, we were walking back from dinner and 2 police with large guns came over and asked us for our passports, which we left at the hotel.  The promptly told us that we had to carry our passports and show them so that they could know that we weren't hear illegally.  My reply was "Really, how could we be here illegally", but that wasn't the right way to go.  It was clear that they were just giving us a hard time.  They said, they wanted to take us to the police station or "handle it right here" (i.e. get a bribe, which they never directly asked for).  They told us how much the fine was at the police station to try to scare us.  Vishal and I used our negotiation skills to slowly move the conversation over 30 minutes from the topic of taking us to jail unless we pay them off to being us being new tourists and guests in their country where they should try to help us get home because we are lost.  We came over to find them because we were looking for some advice on how to get home.  After a long long time, the policeman who could speak English the best was able to save face and directed us to the taxi where we went home and called it a night.

Survey gathering at Makerere University

Signing up to do a student survey during our project is an extreme challenge if not a regrettable mistake.  It has proved very difficult to get anybody in Uganda to respond to our survey, or for that matter to get any professors to actually send out the survey to the students.  They all claim that students are gone for the summer, which I feel shouldn't be a barrier to getting the word out about the survey since everyone has email addresses.

Tuesday / Wednesday
Aside from other meetings today, we did have an adventurous time trying to get some surveys from students that were doing summer training at the Makerere Research Institute, which is basically a place for students to get hands on agriculture experience at a farm owned by the university.  The students were residing at the institute so Vishal and I traveled there to manually administer the survey to the students that we could find.  With the help of the custodian, we were able to make about 20 students sit down and take the survey for us.  It was long and arduous, but at least we have some data now.  A little later, we were able to get in touch with a helpful professor who facilitated us in getting a few more surveys done.  

She promised to bring us these surveys before the end of our trip, but that didn't really get done without a large hassle.  Noone was able to bring us the data before the end of our trip on Wednesday so we had to pay a driver to go get them for us.  We were pleasantly surprised to get more data than we expected and processing it took the two of us more than 3 hours.

My advice for surveys is to avoid them when you are on a short term project where you need to deliver much more value than just the data.  Hopefully, we can do both on this trip, a task that definitely exceeds expectations.  

Meetings with other team

It has been fun while in Uganda to sync up with the other Uganda team working on their project to facilitate distribution of solar lamps to rural areas in Uganda.  They have a great team to consult with and I wish them well.  They have been a great connection to the other IBD teams as well as some fun people to hang out with during our trip.  We get to share our respective projects and find out their learnings during the day.

Kampala Time

The first day in Uganda was pretty packed and I didn't get too much sleep.  We spent about 5 hours sleeping in our hotel before having to get up and get ready for the first meeting of the trip.  I guess we really started our work week with a bang.  Though it wasn't much of a sleep, it was right next to Lake Victoria, which brought mosquitos to the room and after hearing the buzzing a couple of times near my face while trying to get to sleep, I spent the rest of the night completely under the covers with just a little air space for my mouth.  This is how my wife likes to sleep normally, but it's rather a difficult task for me.

We are meeting people from various universities and private companies for our project.  Our lives the last few days have involved crazily trying to schedule meetings and following up with people in email.  It was quite hectic, but we are finally getting some success.  It helps to know that people respond to phone calls and texts much better than email, so getting a local phone number is crucial.  Waiting for 24 hours for it to register is rather annoying though, but finally, we have things working out.

We have been able to connect with the other Haas team stationed in Uganda and caught up with them.  They seem to be having a lot of fun, since they didn't have to work on the weekend.  Lucky guys.  We grabbed some dinner and talked about our adventures here.

We are half way there

We are half way along on our journey to Uganda.  It has been a long long day.  The last flight was 10.5 hours without any sleep, and it's still morning.  We have about 10.5 more hours to go, and our flight is delayed an hour, but Amsterdam is fun.  We went around to a couple of chocolate shops and got some free chocolate samples to keep us busy.

Off to Africa

I'll be heading to Uganda and Mozambique for my International Business Development project.  The goal of this project is to start an MBA program around Agri-Entrepreneurship in Maputo, Mozmabique.  I have been working very hard the last couple of months to put a feasibility study and business plan together and now it comes time for the fieldwork and primary research in country.  Wish me luck.  

Here is our project description:  https://sites.google.com/site/apsaraibd/