Your first impression is always the best

Yesterday was an exciting day as the group met the entrepreneurs from Zanzibar and every sub group got an entrepreneur assigned to them. Yet, today brought new challenges that had to be faced as we went to the entrepreneurs themselves. Helping entrepreneurs starts with collecting as much as information as one can get and to observe the situation thoroughly.

The morning started as they have been starting so far, Selma and Aurelia arriving early and preparing a delicious breakfast. Everyone was very intrigued in the day but at the same time tensed. Several unsecure questions were passing through everyone’s mind: “how will the location look like, what information will we get from the interviews, will the entrepreneur feel relaxed, will I feel relaxed?” Some subgroups had early morning meetings and some had the privilege to wake up late, as they would only meet their entrepreneur in the afternoon. Those who had to leave early, discovered that the African rules of life weren’t just fairy tales. One of the tour guides at Khaya, Lamek, was supposed to be driving subgroup 1 (Skadi, Stijn and Nikolas) and subgroup 2 (Marleen, Lisanne and myself) to their locations but unfortunately Lamek was late. After having dropped subgroup 1, Lamek totally forgot about the second group in the back of the van and just drove back home…. Confronting Lamek with a somewhat annoyed attitude, he apologized and told us we were just 5 minutes away from the location. You might have guessed it already that that statement was a lie. That’s the way they deal with things in Africa, in other words: this is Africa.

Marleen, Lisanne and myself visited a private primary school called Flora that was located in a small part of a village close to Stone Town. From the outside it didn’t even look like a school but a simple concrete building. Besides the neglected look, the headmaster and the other teachers were very hospitable. The school was set up by the mother of the headmaster with the intention to help poor kids who couldn’t afford basic education. The school had 116 students from which 20 were orphans and didn’t have to pay school fees that were already very low. The headmaster was building a store inside the school but didn’t have the financial resources to buy supplies for in the store. Surprisingly, but somewhere understandable, the headmaster wasn’t planning to make any profit from the store as parents could barely afford school fees. After having interviewed the headmaster with a translator it was clear to us that we had to change the mind set of this headmaster to make a little bit of profit in order to save and later on invest it in the school. Additionally, we could come up with a plan for the school to approach sponsors to fund extra resources. Fortunately all the kids still had smiles on their faces and we could clearly see that the kids were happy to be in an educational environment. They sang and danced for us and eventually we performed our own Dutch ‘kabouter-plop’ dance that they found hilarious.

After a hectic day for all the sub groups we all met at the beach where we evaluated everyone’s case with a nice beer. All the stories of the entrepreneurs were different and interesting in their own way that will become clear throughout this blog. It’s up to us to investigate every situation and come up with a first step to help all the entrepreneurs. Game on!!