#solpod

xx cute noticing, honbon. 

solpod!!!!!! is a long awaited (as in i’m waiting on myself to get a move on abt it) urban magic realism that has a lot of complex and darkly intricate bits that tangle over and around and about each other. it’s sorta about the way that that metaphysics are more like chemistry than physics and it’s sorta about how loving someone doesn’t mean you can’t hurt them and it’s sorta about how cities live and breathe and sometimes even, sing. 

in my head, it sounds a lot like mouthful of diamonds by phantogram 

in specifics, it’s: qp ot5 w lirry and zouiall: harry is a librarian who also happens to be a witch-in-training. sometimes the books talk and sometimes they whisper things that aren't meant to be known. things go sideways and upways and aroundways. 

Yesterday, we left Bali and said our goodbyes.

It took us down to the wire, but we were able to accomplish almost all of our business goals for the trip.

We put together a database of thousands of farmers in the Northwest Region of Cameroon that signed up to be involved in Jola Venture’s platform.

We gathered a massive amount of information on the SolPOD’s performance in the target environment, so the engineers back in Boston can make final modifications for the production model.

We came up with a business model for the beautifully simple corn scraper, which will be launched later this year.

We put together a very comprehensive market study on the business challenges of agriculture in Cameroon and discovered trends that have never been publically documented before. The reports will be coming out soon if you’re interested.

We set up a radio show, “The Farmer’s Voice”, which will broadcast weekly in Bali and the surrounding areas.

We laid the groundwork for the Village Technology & Entrepreneurship Center, which will help farmers, youth, and the general population to learn things like basic accounting, inventory control, and computer skills to help manage their businesses and develop their careers.

I have about a dozen more videos I’ve created over the last couple of months, but the Internet prevents me from uploading them. However, they will be on YouTube soon.

When you leave a place like this, it really makes you realize just how much of a home it’s become over the previous few months.

There are things I know I’m going to miss, like:

Fresh food

When I say fresh, I’m not talking American “fresh”. I’m saying that every time you eat meat, that animal was probably alive a few hours before. The lack of food preservation here guarantees it.

 Buying food here is a completely different experience and I’ve grown to love it. There are no supermarkets – just people on the street selling one or two things. Want fish? You go to Dorothy, the roasted fish lady. Want beef? You go to the Muslim guy that grills it every evening down by the junction. Want some vegetables? Stop by any of the hundreds of people in town that have brought the harvest from yesterday to sell today. I love this kind of community grocery shopping, because it’s a catalyst to building relationships with the people around you. I wish we had more like this in the US.

Having time

In the United States, we operate on a perpetual time famine. There is never enough of it. When is the last time you asked someone, “How is it going?” and they didn’t say something along the lines of, “I’m crazy busy right now.”

This isn’t a bad thing in itself – hard work is good. However, I don’t think we’re too busy. I think we’re afraid of not looking busy.

We occupy our days with tons of noise – lots of little actions that cover themselves up as “work” but really don’t accomplish much of anything. Yet they cause us to feel overworked and that we don’t have enough time. I’m talking specifically about habits that have been broken (with force) by this environment, like:

Checking email enough times that you’d be embarrassed to actually say the daily number in conversation, if you could even count it.

Reading article after article and telling yourself it’s a productive use of time.

At the slightest hint of boredom, whipping out the smart phone and using one of the hundreds of colorful apps you’ve downloaded to have something to look at.

I have to confess - at times, not being able to do these things has been embarrassingly painful. Here I am in an area where people regularly work a farm, a job, and school - not to mention the hours it takes to do daily tasks by hand like laundry, cooking, and cleaning, - and I’m freaking out about 48 hours without an Internet connection.

It’s embarrassing, but that’s what it took. I realized that by occupying my time, energy, and focus with these little US “necessities” I was robbing myself of the time it takes to think and talk deeply about things that truly matter.

People here always have time to talk with you. Yes, I believe this is one reason for the slow growth of the economy, but I think it is also a reason that you don’t see anyone stressed out like you do at home.

People that call you “brother”, “son”, and “uncle”

Family relationships in Africa have been the most amazing surprise to me, because they go so far beyond your actual family.

I wrote this the first week I got here –

We talk with Peter, a neighbor, family friend, and former school principle that tells us, “In our dialect, we have no word for uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, or cousin. Only father, mother, son, daughter, sister, and brother. If you are my father’s brother, you are my father. If you are my mother’s sister’s son, you are my brother. If you live nearby and you come to our door while we are eating dinner, come and sit with us. You are our son.”

 In Bali, this became real.

The neighborhood kids called me “Uncle Andrew”, my close friends would call me a “brother” and I would do the same, and older people would either call me “papa” or “son”. The Fon gave us Bali names last week, so people also started calling me “Bobga”. It’s hard to put your finger on what this does to the community, but you can feel the strength, like a tightly weaved basket.

And going along with my last point – people here have time for their family. If they don’t have it, they make it.

Now, I’m ready to get the next chapter of this thing started. It’s been a long 3 ½ months and I’m excited to go home, see everyone again, and to take back these lessons I’ve learned to incorporate them into “real life”.

This experience has given me “wow” moments, it’s been scary at times, it’s made me uncomfortable, and at times it has given me clarity that can only come when you’re forced into the unknown. Most of all, it’s humbled me in ways I can’t describe, and I’ll never forget it.

Last week, I mentioned the month-long lack of rain. That continued for about a day, right up through a big meeting we had planned with the Bali Farmer’s Federation.

It was an outdoor meeting with the leaders of about 130 farming groups in Bali. It’s a huge deal to get the support of these leaders, because that means we have relationships with thousands of farmers here, and we can use it as a model to replicate.

Of course, during the meeting, the heavens opened up and we all had to huddle under a small porch nearby. 

Every day since then, it’s been a downpour for at least a few hours. Somehow though, we still don’t have running water, and the electricity goes out all the time. Two months ago, this would have annoyed me. Now, it’s just life.

The next night, when the rain subsided, we had a barbeque for the community (it took us a while to throw a housewarming party). Nobody knows what barbeque is here. I’m surprised, because it really doesn’t take anything but come cinder blocks and a metal grate.

Jason is now raising a bunch of chickens, and we christened the new homemade grill with one of them.

As I’ve met and spoken with more farmers from Cameroon, I’ve discovered this ongoing battle between them and the cattle herders.

The cows are literally walking around all day, every day, eating grass. Sometimes (actually pretty often), they cross into a farm and completely ruin the crops.

This happened three times in the last two months to Beatrice, a hardworking farmer I met a few days ago. She had a field full of vegetables, and a month into their cycle, a bunch of cows came at ate them. She planted again. Cows came again. Then she built a fence around the field and planted again. The same cows ate it all again.

You can imagine how this is not only tremendously annoying, but really damaging to her business. Still, she has reported the issue to the counsel but nothing has been done.

Somehow, I was invited to be a guest musician on Bali’s local radio station.

In the western world, we’re used to a Top 40 list that gets annoying. In Cameroon, it’s a Top 5, and nobody ever seems to get sick of the songs. Rather than resist, I’ve tried to like these 5 songs.

For the radio show, I played an acoustic version of “Chop My Money.” “Chop” is “eat” or “food” in pidgin.

Yesterday, I had ants in my pants. Fire ants. I suppose it could have been worse, right?

The more I collect data from these farms, the clearer (and more confusing at the same time) it becomes to me why there is such a cycle of poverty here, and really in places like this all over Africa.

I’ve been interview a bunch of farmers to find out every detail of their input costs, as well as their production and market prices. Doing this has given me a better idea of what the most profitable crops are (and often, that means the crops that end up causing less of a loss).

More than half of the farmers I've spoken to seem to be losing money farming on at least one of their main crops. The numbers just don’t add up. He’ll rattle off the costs of labor, tools, fertilizer, transport, etc. and then I’ll stack it up against what he would sell in an ordinary market and the estimated costs always exceed the revenue, even in a decent market. It just doesn't make sense.

I think it ultimately comes down to culture – and these farmers have developed a culture of subsidizing the country (and the world) with their labor. There’s no accounting for one’s own time in farm work here. What needs to be done simply gets done. Unfortunately, when you calculate a value for their time, you find that it causes people to literally generate pennies for every hour of labor.

That’s why these simple technologies we’re bringing over, like the corn scraper, are so impactful. They would be useless in the U.S. but in Cameroon, a simple, cheap piece of plastic can save people hours every day, and can save their hands from the tough repetition of grinding thousands of ears of corn.

Seriously, I’ve been amazed by the farmers’ responses to this little thing. I walked into a village with Marie to demonstrate it, and within minutes, we were surrounded by about 30 people and thunderous applause.

What’s even cooler is their response when we say it’s going to be somewhere between $2 - $4. I wish we had a few thousand to sell right now.

One eerie thing I’ve noticed here is how big the funeral business is here, and how consumerized it is. To give you an idea, I recently saw vehicles for these two companies:

Big Frank’s Funeral Service

Yesterday, I had ants in my pants. Fire ants. I suppose it could have been worse, right?

The more I collect data from these farms, the clearer (and more confusing at the same time) it becomes to me why there is such a cycle of poverty here, and really in places like this all over Africa.

I’ve been interview a bunch of farmers to find out every detail of their input costs, as well as their production and market prices. Doing this has given me a better idea of what the most profitable crops are (and often, that means the crops that end up causing less of a loss).

More than half of the farmers I've spoken to seem to be losing money farming on at least one of their main crops. The numbers just don’t add up. He’ll rattle off the costs of labor, tools, fertilizer, transport, etc. and then I’ll stack it up against what he would sell in an ordinary market and the estimated costs always exceed the revenue, even in a decent market. It just doesn't make sense.

I think it ultimately comes down to culture – and these farmers have developed a culture of subsidizing the country (and the world) with their labor. There’s no accounting for one’s own time in farm work here. What needs to be done simply gets done. Unfortunately, when you calculate a value for their time, you find that it causes people to literally generate pennies for every hour of labor.

That’s why these simple technologies we’re bringing over, like the corn scraper, are so impactful. They would be useless in the U.S. but in Cameroon, a simple, cheap piece of plastic can save people hours every day, and can save their hands from the tough repetition of grinding thousands of ears of corn.

Seriously, I’ve been amazed by the farmers’ responses to this little thing. I walked into a village with Marie to demonstrate it, and within minutes, we were surrounded by about 30 people and thunderous applause.

What’s even cooler is their response when we say it’s going to be somewhere between $2 - $4. I wish we had a few thousand to sell right now.

One eerie thing I’ve noticed here is how big the funeral business is here, and how consumerized it is. To give you an idea, I recently saw vehicles for these two companies:

Big Frank’s Funeral Service

Last week, Jola was a finalist in a business plan competition that was co-sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I made this video for the presentation, and after literally days of running around, I was finally able to find a decent Internet connection to upload it. I want to share it with you because I think it’s really powerful to just hear what’s going on from the farmers themselves.

Since my last post, we’ve also added another, making a team of five. Jason flew in from Switzerland to help with the market studies and micro-financing. He’s been all over the world and is one of the few people I’ve met that fully embraces the philosophy that short-term discomfort = great long-term story.

2/29/12

Finally got the chance to spend some time in Bamenda, which is the main city of the Northwest Region.

Randomly, Marie and I found ourselves being dragged into a school by a bunch of little kids. They were just amazed at our skin color - "Why are you yellow?!?!"

They were proud of their school, and proud to sing us welcome songs.

I hate shopping at home. But here, I love it. It’s a game. Most people give me the white guy price, which is general 2x to 3x the normal price. Knowing this, I get a great chance to practice negotiating. My high score that day was bringing down something from 2000 francs to 700 francs. Part of me wishes shopping in the US was like this, but the wiser part of me is glad that it isn’t, because I would be broke.

Like I said, most people with something to sell try and take advantage of the foreigners, and by virtue of being white, the perception is automatically that we are wealthy. BUT, there are some people that don’t. One of those people was a woman in Bamenda that owned a restaurant where we decided to eat. She had hearty, filling, African-style dishes at the regular price of 500 francs ($1.00) per plate. So food and drinks for 3 people was a grand total of $6.00. On top of that, she gave me extra plantains because she only had a little bit left of the kind I asked for. Most people with these little businesses here either don’t understand or don’t care about the lifetime value of a customer, especially for visitors. But she delivered customer service in a place where it seemingly doesn’t exist, and we’ve already been back again – and I intend to many more times.

3/1/12

This started off as a weird day. I woke up at 4:30 in anticipation of visiting a farm early, but for some reason it didn’t happen, and I ended up just going for a long, long walk.

That’s when an elderly woman saw me and called me over to her compound. She was only speaking in pidgin, so I could barely understand what she was saying, but she motioned over to a pan she had cooking over an open fire. She was roasting some nuts, and I realized that she wanted to share them with me.

She picked up the pan, and I don’t know what I was thinking, but I cupped my hands out for her to pour some nuts. Yes, the pan that was just over an open fire with nuts that were audibly sizzling. As could be expected, it was pretty painful when she poured some of them. But I simply couldn’t drop them on the ground. Here’s this very poor looking woman who is thrilled to be sharing HALF of her breakfast with me. What kind of a person would drop it because it’s a little too hot? Nearly crying, I squeezed out a “n’jika n’jamma” (thank you very much) turned back on my walk, emptying the nuts into my shirt as I held it out like a basket. A few minutes later, they ended up burning a hole through it, but I was able to salvage some – I ended up with a handful of roasted ground nuts and one of the most painfully awkward situations I’ve ever experienced.

Later in the day, I visited my friend Aloys’ chicken farm. It’s actually a pretty cool business. He raises about 1000 at a time, and they take 3 months to get to full maturity. But what’s really interesting is the risk-reward aspect that goes with it. I learned that the older a chicken is, the higher its price. However, the longer you keep it, the more likely it is to get sick and die, so you wind up with a pretty big loss. It’s like a micro-stock market.

3/2/12

Early in the morning, I took about an hour ride out (plus a half hour walk) to the biggest farm I’ve seen here so far. The middle of nowhere doesn’t begin to describe the location, but the landscape? Among the most stunning I’ve ever seen.

The farmer was explaining his biggest problem – financing. He had a very clear understanding of what he could do with some extra money, but he’s just completely handicapped by his lack of capital. It prevents him from planting, cultivating, harvesting, and selling produce all at once, which would be the most efficient and profitable way, because he simply doesn’t have the cash to pay for the labor involved (it’s more concentrated instead of dispersed over a longer period).

This was evident in his fields. It was a rolling checkerboard of harvested, semi-grown, and recently planted crops. If you saw it without knowing the reason, you’d say it’s disorderly and inefficient. But it’s the result of some serious institutional neglect.

3/3/12

As Tyler, Marie, and I headed back from another farm on the backs of a couple of motorcycles, we got caught in the hailstorm of the century.

It was pretty funny at first. But then they began to grow. Marble-sized pieces of ice flying into your face when you’re on the road have a way of sucking the humor out of things. Luckily, we were close to the farmer’s house. She said that this was the official beginning of the rainy season.

3/4/12

We went to see a group of women practice a bunch of traditional dances and songs for their Women’s Day performance this Thursday.

Dancing is one area where this world is so vastly different from ours. People just get up and shamelessly move their bodies (without any influence of alcohol). It’s totally not weird to see some guy randomly get up from his chair in a restaurant and start dancing by himself.

So this is the “I can’t believe it’s February” edition. We spent the week in Limbe, which turned out to be a beautiful, unique place. The beaches were unlike anything I’ve seen before. All of them have this thick, smooth, dark volcanic sand that feels kind of like play-doh.

The city is built on the coast right at the foot of Mount Cameroon, which last erupted in 1999, making it a very active volcano. You could see the enormous crater on the side of the mountain – just a huge hole that faced the ocean.

We went to one of Roland’s in-law’s houses for lunch, and she made us this incredible dish called Ekwang, which is supposedly reserved for special occasions. Best. Thing. Ever. I don’t even really know what it was or how to describe it. Just thick, green, and a little mushy. But it was heavenly. I didn’t have time to take a picture between bites.

We also got the chance to present to students at the University of Buea, one of the larger schools in Cameroon. It was surprising to see just how interested and ready to help many of them were. Simple things like extra-curricular activities are not too common around here, and people are naturally excited by the chance to get some hands-on experience. [Insert Northeastern University marketing statement and value proposition here].

Two days ago, we made the 7-hour trip back to Bali to get back to real work.

Just a totally random observation - Animals replace clocks here. Roosters start yelling at exactly 5am every morning. At precisely 1am, all (I mean ALL) of the dogs howl at the moon. At 7pm, crickets chirp. Every single day.

We met with the leaders of a large farming federation in Bali that represents over 1000 individuals and groups. It’s really amazing how much they are anticipating the SolPod and other technologies we're bringing. After just a quick description of what we’re doing here, they were overwhelmingly joyful, saying that this was literally an answer to their prayers. That’s a humbling thought – and it also made me realize how real this is. People have been waiting and waiting, and this technology is a catalyst of hope for them. It’s going to take a whole lot of work, time, and people that can do far more things than I can, but in the end, I honestly think Jola is going to help lift thousands, if not millions of people out of this poverty cycle.

We had a really sad reality-check this week though. In Bali, we had given this woman from a nearby university a ride home. She was 9 months pregnant with twins, due any day, and she seemed really happy. A few days after we left, one of our friends from Bali called us to tell us that she died in childbirth. That was tough to hear, but it’s also a big eye-opener to the real life problems in places like this. Things like this are just way too common.

The biggest adjustment to Cameroon so far is time. It’s a completely different concept. People here don’t place a value on hours like we do in the U.S. It does not equal money. People aren’t paid hourly. Things just take as long as they need to take.

2/10/12

I got invited to go on a morning run with a new friend, Alloise, who happens to be an aspiring professional soccer player. He was a little bit harder to beat than the kids that were chasing me in the forest the other day. I’ve started to shadow a bunch of farmers in Bali, following them around to learn more about their lifestyle and what it takes to plant, cultivate, harvest, and sell their produce. To tell you the truth, I think their concept of time is part of what keeps them in poverty. Something like scraping corn by hand can take 3 hours – this is just a fraction of the time that goes into preparing and selling a bucket of corn, which typically sells for around $7.00.

I’m going to go deeper into this to find out exactly how much time is spent doing things like this and how much of it can be replaced with the introduction of simple technologies. Time saved is time that can be put into increased production and more income.

2/11/12

On Saturday, it was National Youth Day in Cameroon, which is actually a pretty major holiday here.

All across the country, in every city and village, there’s a parade that literally everybody attends. All the kids dress in their school uniforms and they march up and down the street. Then there’s a competition where they perform songs and dances.

And they all love the President.

Every village in Cameroon has a specialty food. Here, it’s foo-foo. Foo-foo is unlike anything I’ve seen in America. They take either cassava or corn and somehow make it into this big sticky ball that you pick at with your hands and dip into vegetables. It really goes with everything, and I’ll be sure to figure out how to bring it back with me.

2/12/12

Church is very different here. Everyone is organized into men and women’s groups, and they all have matching uniforms. Service lasted 3 ½ hours, a good portion of that being the different groups standing up to lead worship songs. There are no instruments - just loud singing. Half of the service is in Mungaka - the local Bali language that only people from this village know. And what church service is complete without a chicken auction afterword?

But still the same Bible and the same Jesus.

2/13/12

We’ve been testing the SolPod daily, and the results have really been interesting. Some things, like peppers, take a couple of hours to dry, while others, like pineapple, take a couple of days. We’re hoping to improve the design so that nothing takes more than a full day, but it’s still a huge improvement over the weeks it currently takes to dry things. Right now, people leave their fruits and vegetables out in the sun on a metal sheet. It sits there for weeks, exposed to bugs, chickens, the weather, and anything else crawling around outside.

2/14/12 – 2/15/12