Claude and the 20,000 Shilling Challenge

No month would be complete without a Claude update... All the volunteers were doing a ’20,000 shilling challenge’ last week as part of their training. They were given 20,000 shillings along with 24 hours and they had to pretend to be entrepreneurs, be innovative and make a profit. At the end of the challenge they must give back the 20k, but could keep the rest. The scenario that Claude's group were given was that they had to innovate a salon. They didn’t know the first thing about African beauty, not even what different hair styles were so they decided to make bracelets out of braided synthetic hair. Unsurprisingly they were having trouble selling this innovative new product. It’s particularly hard to do when you have only 12 hours and no shop front from which to sell from - all the volunteers went out on the streets to try and catch passers by. With time running out they needed a new sales strategy and so they approached a friendly music shop owner, who put on some tunes and the whole team started dancing. None more ferociously than Claude. A large crowd very quickly gathered to see the white people dancing (in fact I was passing on a motorbike and it was pointed out to my by my driver. Knowing that a white person causing a scene was likely to have something to do with my team, I ran over to see what was going on, swelling the ranks of onlookers further). The team used this opportunity to sell bracelets to the crowd, who struggled to comprehend that a white person would be dancing for business...They didn’t actually make a profit at the end of all this, but they made less of a loss than they would have otherwise made.

In the field I'm still not streetwise

Yesterday we met our entrepreneurs for the first time (quick recap on why this is important: I'm in Kenya to work with a group of five and I've spent the last week in training to get me ready for this moment). I'm not going to lie, it wasn't a glorious moment, it was actually quite awkward as I tried to ingratiate myself with 5 strangers  at once none of whom spoke English as a first language, and in the certain high-pressure knowledge that a trust relationship is essential to working partnerships here.

After this session one entrepreneur invited us back to his shop. Are we happy to walk, it's a kilometer away? Of course we are! This was a great opportunity to get to know him better, overcome the language barrier through  seeing and doing and ultimately build the all-important bonds of trust that I keep being told are so important.  An hour and a half later, still following our entrepreneur across fields in the midday sunshine (sun cream in hand, reapplying anywhere that felt 'too hot') I was beginning to feel less enthusiastic.

However, when we eventually arrived we were rewarded with panoramic views of Kenyan plains, we saw the shop space he had built (a little wooden shack by the roadside), walked around his house (an old colonial mansion), met his puppies, were shown his fields, his aunt's house and the junior school he attended. On the way back he told us about his history: He went to Njoro boys school and had previously worked selling cars. Great! Were really getting somewhere.  I was tired, extremely grubby (I didn't need sun cream from the knee down, such was the covering of dust) but very pleased we'd made the journey to see his village and get to know our first entrepreneur.

The next day, my group discussed the experience. There is one Kenyan (Paul) and one English chap (Matt). This mix of cultures is absolutely  invaluable as Paul went on to demonstrate: He pointed out that there's a certain lack of evidence the house we were shown really did belong to the entrepreneur (he may have just picked the biggest house in the village and claimed it); the wooden  shack didn't look like it was freshly built and there's no proof he owns it as he didn't produce the key to it while we were there; Njoro boys school is a good school and his level of English isn't of the standard of their graduates; cars are expensive, claiming to be a car seller to impress a stranger here is a bit like meeting a guy in a UK night club pretending to be a banker, it just sounds prestigious and may not be true. Oh my God!

You can take the gullible idiot out of England but you can't change her in the slightest. I may be too wise nowadays to follow a someone home because they've offered me a bacon sandwich but I feel like I still have a lot to learn...