Gong Gongs and Power Outages

The last two days have been somewhat eventful despite being mostly filled with the often dull labor of an accountant. Let me tell you, Africa has enough in store to spruce up even those days. Before we began work on Monday, we got to go to a gong gong on Sunday afternoon (afternoon officially ends at 4:59, at which point the appropriate greeting becomes "good evening"). We rode about 15 minutes on main roads before picking up one of our agents -- an employee who receives a commission for exchanging batteries -- and following his directions down a typical village road. 10 minutes of dust, potholes and false stops later we arrived in the center of Aukoani, with Max blaring in English on the Burro truck's loudspeaker what could only have meant "loud white people have arrived" to the villagers.

The people were unaware of the gong gong, but still came out in decent numbers (perhaps simply to investigate the strange bright green truck parked in the middle of their village). Most of the attendees were very young children -- not good for Burro's expansion campaign but great fun for me, I must admit. While Rose spoke to the members of Aukoani in Twi about the benefits of using Burro batteries as opposed the entrenched Tiger Head brand, Debi and I explored the powerless village and saw where the palm oil is made and the many fowl, goats and dogs that wandered freely. Next, the townspeople bombarded us with questions (although they quickly gave up on asking me) and sought to try out Burro batteries. It was fascinating to see the doubt they originally had in the Burro brand (Tiger Head batteries have a near 100% market share.) begin to dissolve as Burro batteries charged their phones and the customer-friendly pay strategy was explained. Brand loyalty is perhaps more important here than anywhere else I have experienced, which is why many customers choose to stick to Tiger Head despite its pricing and reliability shortcomings. After witnessing some of the practical challenges facing Burro in the days to come, we retired somewhat early in order to prepare for our first day of work.

We drove in to work at 8 the next morning and began to get setup, facing the typical challenges a modern business faces. We had to get added as users, given permissions, set up on the network, software installed... Oh, right. And there are periodic power outages that shut down all network activity. At completely unpredictable times, the power simply shuts off for periods of up to an hour or so. This leaves us without internet, files, and most importantly, ceiling fans. Oftentimes I notice the lack of air flow before I notice that my internet is out.

That has kept work interesting, and we are still working on the way to be most efficient when we do have power (maybe 2/3 of the time) versus when we don't. We also were privileged enough to see our first major rainstorm yesterday, which lasted a few hours and limited almost everyone besides two very out-of-place looking Seattlites to cover. On the plus side, the rain severely cooled the air, making it the first day I could walk outside without feeling like a UNC underclassman in early August.

We also heard a presentation on marketing and HR from two BYU MBA students yesterday, and they left this morning to return home to Provo. It was a great overview and future vision for the company, and it included much discussion that taught us about Burro. They also left behind two peers who will remain until the end of the month. Although our job is mainly to get the books up and running and the projections as accurate as possible, it will certainly help to understand the vision, and yesterday's meeting was integral to that effort.

The most exciting part of the last two days for me has been the Twi language lessons we began last night. Debi's horrific Spanish, for which I stupidly agreed to facilitate her lessons, fizzled into an impromptu set of lessons in the local language from Rose and Priscilla, our other housemate. Debi made quick work of proving the psychological theory that one's capacity to acquire language skills expires at age 25, while I did my best to learn phrases in the "we" and the "I" form so that I can speak for the two of us. The best thing I learned is how to respond to the little kids who call me "obrohni" (white person) all day. My response -- obibini -- means "black person" (don't worry I made sure it's not insensitive or rude) and receives ceaseless laughter and joy without fail. To listeners and speaker.

At any rate, we've had another full day of work today (going on 22 hours of work in the last two days), but it's fun, relaxing and our coworkers are fantastic. They've helped us explore the local cuisine such as it is, which has produced successes and failures (all of them spicy, which limits how bad any meal could possibly be). We're trying to plan a trip this weekend to where Debi can see monkeys, which seems to be all she can think about thus far. So hopefully my next post will be a bit more eventful than this past one. Hope all is well at home and that everyone's rooting for the big Mariners turnaround.