Vancouver T-shirt Sales

Thank you for checking out the site - every time ten of our t-shirts sell one month of rent for our beautiful Nairobi studio gets paid and the team can keep designing. If you would like to buy our TRADE NOT AID recycled hand-made t-shirts in Vancouver please head to -

ark clothing - 2549 Main Street (NW corner @ West 10th)

www.arkclothing.net

Ask for Celise

604 872 1144

If you want to email or visit our Nairobi studio please contact -

Susan Standfield

jumpstartrevenue@gmail.com

Vancouver 604 726 7826

Asante Sana (thank you!)

Salaama (peace)

Kwaheri (goodbye)

Rafiki (friends)

The Georgia Straight

Halfway through writing this book I realized it was going to be hard to decide the ending. After completely re-engineering my life and transforming everything I believed in how was I possibly going to 'end' this story? In my soul it feels like things have just begun. So I have waited patiently for the end to find me.

I think today it has come in the form of a newspaper interview I have been asked to do about the t-shirts and the studio in Nairobi. For a change I will be able to advocate on behalf of the people and youth I so believe in - to afix a huge spotlight upon them and not me and encourage people in Vancouver who are fair and kind that this new little business in Kenya is a cool thing. And that is the best way for me to interact with the world - to stand off to one side quietly and passionately empowering those who no one else will believe in. The people we dare not invest in, those of us who in some way are falling through the cracks.

So the end is my own private moment I guess. A summary of what the last few years have been like while I became what I refer to as a wealth activist. When I am sitting at my computer in dirty socks. When I am late getting to a movie. Not some party with balloons and a pay package. Not a huge new door opening to the next world of opportunity I thought might come to me for all my hard work. Not even a jittery feeling of excitement when I get into bed.

In this interview I hope to be able to tell the real story behind my story of t-shirts and orphans, the more interesting and painful story that although we all know is going on in the world we still turn away from and say we just don't know what to do. My story of why I believe poverty really exists and those of us who maintain it either consciously or in ignorance. The Africans story of why after so long and so many billions of dollars that could transfer themselves at the speed of light into communities of darkness, people still live in the shame of not being able to provide for themselves. Why even though we are so smart and sassy in all those home decorating shows there are children sleeping in cardboard boxes addicted to glue and being raped by other children. That's the real story of poverty - not how it still exists, but WHY it does despite every dream of success the world makes come true. Why our collective human morality is letting this pain continue. Why we are turning away from suffering.

We don't share. We hoarde and gloat and in our own fear of scarcity forget that life is to be given away to perpetuate it's abundance. Like a river that is damned, the beautiful energy that moves between all of our lives nourishing and feeding us has become far too stopped. Those of us who can are hijacking capital out of the economy so we can wear it like a badge at a coming out party for all the people in the world who were smart enough to succeed. But how can we begin to revel in our wealth on one side of the world when there are millions of people in the light of another time zone who are desperate and terrified and on the brink? When these people are our neighbours a short drive across town?

I think we do this because some manufactured idea is bullying us and it's making us greedy. When I see all those books written by leadership experts on how to make yourself a millionaire I think of my friends in Africa and feel so proud that some of them are merely just trying to hang on because that's the better party to be at. Because no one person is more valuable than another even when they can buy the rights like a celebrity on a red carpet stroll to even hint or suggest they might be. That's why everything is so fucked up. That's the idea that we have to stop investing in so we can value all of our lives equally. Because we are all equal despite our differenes in resources. Aren't we?

The dignity we choose to afford each person on the planet is right there for all of us to see in the transparent margins of how we trade. It's the only thing that has ever evened out the differences. It is the immediate opportunity right in front of us. It is the free giveaway gift that has the ability to harmonize what has become such a teetering fragile imbalance affecting each one of us in subtle shameful ways.

Let's trade and not aid because it doesn't work.

That is what I learned from doing business with Africa.

Na Heshima.

Salaam.

THE END

for book enquiries please contact
jumpstartrevenue@gmail.com

Transition Financing

Sitting on the edge of my rented and completely uncomfortable bed, I finally made the tortured yet suprisingly instantaneous decision that I had accomplished what I set out to do. After 3-4 months of a much loopier rollercoaster ride than what this whole experience used to be, and what felt like a very minor heart attack, and what felt like a split-second attempt to be robbed on the streets of Nairobi I closed my tired green eyes and asked myself if it was time.

I suppose most people who start businesses imagine future growth and excitement about the day to day operations but for me, much of this part has been excruciating. To know deep inside that I am not a business person per se, that I will always be looking for the exit sign, the opportunity to close my eyes and have all these worries go away. So for me this has been harder because my motives were always so different. All I really wanted was to put my idea to test that what Africa needs most in investment partners and now, they are coming in droves.

Finally the dilapidated railway system is getting a 6 Billion Shilling investment from the private sector arm of the World Bank as long as the Germans come to build it. If Germans can't get this old tired maze of steel up and running I don't know who could. Rift Valley Railways - light rapid transit to see the future of Kenya whizzing by through a clean window with a cold drink.

When I made that decision there was very little to do but get out of the way and see if the past 2.5 years were worth it. Everyone was shocked. One felt abandoned. Another confused which I sat and listened to and understood but underneath I was smiling. They don't need me anymore and they are the last ones to know this. They have everything they need.

Ever since I had said I wasn't going to pay salaries anymore things changed in the studio. The conversations were faster and angrier and things were being talked about in much more crucial ways than ever before. And after telling them I was returning to Canada even more so, I think the whole team was at work by 9am. So even though is it awkward and terrifying for them I know in my heart it's the right thing to do. They are becoming their own business and I am helping to cut them free from mine.

more later

Kariobangi South

Something has changed in the studio. Everyone is tougher and more motivated to save money, find different vendors, create online orders and design an affordable product for the local market. Because they can see now after all their hard work starting in April that this business has the ability to grow for them. At first everyone was happy and grateful for the work but now something is different because I am slowly and carefully handing things over and each time I do this they come up with something innovative and colourful that will work here. That uses the local capital available for their own trading advantages.

Sometimes people criticize me because I focus so much on income and sales and profit for Africans, but really and truly that is how poverty does become history. It doesn’t happen by a fundraiser whose donations run out. It doesn’t happen after a massive press conference to shock us all by the statistics. What really works are the small local things that Africans are building for themselves. They are tired of saying thank you. They don’t believe the hype anymore. They want to live in their own private dignity of self-sustainability like the rest of us. And they know this is their right to do so.

Mary is the one leading this charge. She is the one who says that we have to save a little bit from all our revenue for the future. She is the person Uchumi obviously didn’t have on hand when it was forced to shut it’s doors last spring. Quietly yet with pride she tells me about her dreams of moving to a better home so her son can come live with her. And when she told that from her earnings she was able to build a home for her mother I stopped in my tracks on Kimathi Street. We were coming back from visiting the mayor’s office to ask him if he could write a forward to our book and again I realized the immediate massive power of what happens when Africans are able to accumulate wealth.

In Mary’s case it’s not much right now but it’s more than she’s ever had and it’s enough. She is changing and she is starting to inspire others. Last Sunday I went to visit her in her neighbourhood called Kariobangi about 20 minutes by hot noisy matatu to the South East of the city along the road full of houses built for the railways. I alight in front of Kariobangi South Primary School and there is Mary waiting for me in all her slightness. She is such a slim pretty gal. She is becoming my friend and in a strangely familiar way she reminds me of my mother. She knows how to do everything and wants to learn it all. She will fill my place when I am not here.

After we have tea in her modest room of corrugated metal, a bed she shares with her cousin, all of their clothes and their cooking tools, I ask her if we can go for a walk. And like so many residential neighbourhoods in places like Nairobi in it’s own way it is really beautiful. A westerner would not see this right away, I believe I can only see it because I have come here a few times now and deep my heart I have great respect for these people.

At first glance you would see what you see on the tv commercials about how Africa is so poor and this is so sad. You would see the broken roads full mostly of big rocks that nobody removes and how awkward this makes for walking. And then you would see the garbage that is everywhere – plastic bags, food things, a shoe, a broken bit of something metal. Beyond that you would see a gaggle of kids who are missing items of clothing, shoes, whose clothes are soiled because everything is dirty and dusty and kids after all, are kids. And likely you would feel sorry for all of this because it’s not what you know, what you think is the right way to live and you would stay there on the outside of everything that is happening around you.

I never take my camera to these places and then I always regret I didn’t. I don’t like strangers thinking that I am one of those photographers who will take a picture that is sad or will show yet again something tragic of Africa. Those aren’t the kinds of pictures I take but the Africans don’t know this because why would they? So many of us have just come and gone with open mouths and or sat in meetings debating solutions without ever really stopping to see what is really there. To look but not to truly see.

When you do that what you notice is quite different. You see strong little bare feet capable of running quickly and fearless across very harsh terrain with no complaints, with nothing but a smile. And then you see a network of women caring for children, selling simple fruits in the street, trying on used clothing – maybe something pink and quite lovely that brings a smile or a blush. Of course you would hear the church in it’s thumping, it’s grand belief that what really matters today is a baby that has been born, that life has come yet again to this beautiful and complicated place. And if you had stayed that long and touched the hands of people as they do so often you would feel like you do everywhere in Africa, that you are welcome here.

I no longer get a discount on our t-shirts. I have to pay full price which is startling but wonderful. I am buying as many t-shirts as I can before I leave again so I will have reminders of how simple and precious this beginning time has been for all of us but I think especially me because I am a guest here.

As soon as our book is printed and our sales coordinator is sitting at her computer I will go back to North America. Probably I’ll go to Vancouver to see my accountant and my friends, get some rest, check in. And then I will find somewhere where I can earn some money for myself while shamelessly selling our shirts. I may go to Atlanta. I’d like to visit Georgetown or anywhere in California would work. I need to be in a place where people not only respect what our t-shirts stand for but they see the power of trading with us. Usually this is women. And when an American can pay $40 USD + shipping from Nairobi for one of our beautiful handmade shirts everyone can pay their rent.

The best thing I can offer my business in Kenya ironically is to leave here and go back to where I come from to spread the news. The Kenyans don’t need me anymore here, they just need me to hold the door open for them which thankfully – is one of my best qualities. For all the things I feel I have failed to do or understand in business, sales is not one of them. Nobody sells our t-shirts like me. Nobody says no when I tell them what I have learned about trading fairly with Africa. Nobody can show me in any kind of pricing structure that higher margins for Africa isn't a pledge of dignity, of kindnessness, of repect. Na Heshima.

The Ethiopians are trademarking their coffee brands in order to secure higher trading margins on global commodities markets and Starbucks is trying to stop them. Shame on them. Shame on us all for not acknowledging that paying 3cents more per cup is not an act of losing power in our own personal economies but of creating solidarity with the much greater community we live within that spans the circle of the globe. So we have less. So we go without for a change. So we consider to be far more grateful than we ever have so that others can sustain, so they can have what we have had in abundance for so so long.

Urban Renewal

The future of Africa is urban. And if anyone doesn't like that they should get over here and participate. Dense urbanization is far better than a nightmare of sprawling SUB-URBAN unplanned growth like Johannesburg, Sandton, Randburg. The trick is to think like Manhattan and go up - not like L.A. and go wide.

The city is greening - the purple Jacarandas that line Kenyatta up to Ngong Road are so pretty in the uniformity, so elegant in their history. In 20 years Nairobi will have 10 million people living in it and if these little trees have a chance it will be rather green.

A modern highly technological urban village en masse.

Bella, The Bomb Blast & Canada Post

Everything is connected. Sitting in the studio this morning on a holiday Tuesday waiting for Mary to come in to discuss the book, I am surprised and delighted when in walks Bella. 15 years old living only with her siblings because mum and dad both moved out on their own, she cannot afford to go to school. And she is so sweet and so quiet I jump up to shake her hand and say welcome.

She has drawn CITY HALL which I love – THE most important building in Nairobi and there she must have sat, sketching so carefully and shyly because nobody seems to like it when we draw the buildings. I asked Mary to find more girls because so far our first seven sketches have been done by boys. Except Lillian – 18 years old with 2 kids already we sat together and sketched one of my favourite little buildings in the city – the REHABILITATED PUBLIC WASHROOM. Public washrooms are a big deal for folks on the resource-poor scale of the spectrum. Someone with a big heart made sure this building came to life. Someone who cares about the average Kenyan.

Again told to move away from the security cameras so we weren’t to be seen. What chances do these kids have with policies against public sketching? Perhaps our book will help change that.

Our first little booklet KAMBUKA NAIROBI – Volume 1, The Central Business District, will feature 18 youth sketches of some of the city’s most interesting buildings. It will be sold for KSh 700 or $10 USD or 5 GBP to hopefully net us about 7 months of rent, salaries and internet all the way to next summer. We only need to sell 10,000 of them with the 10% youth license fee being dedicated to school fees. If they can sketch. If they can help us spread the word.

Waking up in the middle of the night I had a dream I was thrown in jail for earning kids more money than their parents. But who else is going to care as much as the youth than themselves about their future? Many of the parents are abandoning them or even beating them up – all they want is to go to school and be happy. Our business can do that for them and they are the very key to the success of the whole thing.

In every problem its own solution is sitting right behind it in the shadows. Thousands and thousands of youth with no access to opportunity in the current African economies. Is this a problem or is it its own brilliant masterful solution? Problems of this magnitude require a completely different set of ideas – an upside and backwards approach to empowerment with no barriers. If we can get out of the way and harness their energy the kids will do the rest themselves.

In the shadow of the Co-operative Bank Building walking through the Bomb Blast site of the old American Embassy that is no more, I think of Bella and her siblings living alone in a house in a slum. Everyone around me thinks I am an American, I can feel it. Like I am responsible for all the names on the slick dark wall behind the fountain. In my jeans, t-shirt and ponytail of course I look American and as a North American am I anything very different? The Kenyans don’t have much time for the Americans especially the ones appearing in the newspapers fundraising for Africa. When I suggest that there are Americans and British and Canadians who care about Africa the conversation runs dry. It’s like we’re not even on the radar here. Whatever, knock yourself out, their blank looks seem to say. The Africans want success stories about themselves. They know our best intentions many times never even arrive. They are tired of saying thank you. They are tired of things that do not work.

Hundreds of Kenyans died right there in that NW corner of Moi and Selassie – so what chance does Bella have living in these conditions? These were folks with jobs. But Bella can win – she’s smart and careful and she arrived today with a beautiful precise little vision for our book. She is why I am here and why I refuse to give up. I love these kids. When they smile at me in hopes of me sharing the secrets of obtaining a better life I want to share every advantage I have ever been so lucky to experience. So I buy them French fries to fill their empty stomachs and felt pens and pads of paper – the only things I can offer right now and some Shillings for artwork.

I am watching a BBC newscast about whether or not we are actually making poverty history yet while I do my accounting for my shareholder’s loan. I am going to get a return on my investment if it kills me. It seems like in some ways we have started and in others like the still enforced subsidies on agriculture, we are far far from trading fairly. Tomatoes. Sugar. Coffee. Bananas. Such simple tools to feed a nation. What are we so afraid of? We have been so rich for so long, isn’t it perhaps time to offer this up like a turn at the wheel, a run down the slide on the playground. My mother used to reprimand me for not sharing. Being selfish in our home was sternly frowned upon. But as nations we do it without a second thought. And that's why we give aid.

Looking at my receipts from the Post Office I get confused thinking I have grabbed my Canadian expense file but I am wrong, it’s from Posta – Kenya’s Post Office. And then I remember that Canada Post came and went from this place of cold water in an effort to transfer knowledge and share our ability to turn a profit from stamps, envelopes and things flying through the air. As I listen to the experts from the UN talk about aid I wonder why Canada Post left? Was it the bomb blast? Was it the overwhelming prospect of millions and millions of Bella’s who at 15 years of age are still finishing primary school? Was it the Kenyan’s stubbornness to do things their own way? Was it the exhaustion and bitterness that ensues with corruption? Perhaps they will come back.

God I hope they come back. I would give anything for self-adhesive stamps as I prepare to ship 25 shirts to Vancouver tomorrow morning. And if they sold me tape instead of giving it to me for free maybe everyone could take a little more home at night for all those little mouths to feed like Bella. Maybe we would finally see the Africans as so much like ourselves in so many many ways.

This story is for Mary Shiro who completely thrown into the massive task has begun to produce her first book and is exceeding all my expectations.

Indian Celebration of Light

Today the Hindus are celebrating light - and the earthern lamps placed around their homes in hopes that they will illuminate individuals and societies burdened by ignorance and darkness. Deepavali or Diwali is today October 21st. I wonder if all of us prayed today along with the Hindus for all ignorance to illuminate, for all darkness to brighten - what a powerful force this would be in the world.

This is the long weekend bookended in between Jomo Kenyatta Day yesterday and something Mubarak on Tuesday so the city as I so love it, is empty. Looking down from my patio I happen to witness what looks like an African swimming lesson. And I know how cool and wonderful the water feels because I was doing just that yesterday in the heat of the day falling asleep after so many sleepless nights. I can feel my work schedule changing slightly so I am most productive from 8am-noon and then again from 5pm-10pm. For a few different reasons in the middle of the day I get tired and hot and grumpy.

And I am weaning myself away from the studio seeing if the team can make their salaries without me, with only the legacy of all the ideas that I hope are good and respectful so they can trade their own way. I think I actually get in the way really, in my fury and North American-ness mostly I think I make everyone nervous so I am starting to ask them, what can I offer? What do they need from me? Such is my fate being most motivated to help the people in the world who can least afford to pay me. How ridiculous. And I will likely always feel this way. If only I had whatever it is that Mother Theresa had. My commitment is deep enough but I remain conflicted thinking I should be buying things and flying places and being current with all the things that are.

If I don't find a partner by Xmas I have to leave and go back to work leaving the Kenyans on their own for a while. What the hell am I going to do? Who is going to say to me - yes we would love you to come here and share everything you know with us? The idea is so exhausting I can't bear it. And where? It's too bloody cold anywhere in Canada until May or July even for my liking. Southern California would work, or Atlanta which I like. I have a friend there and I do like America. Things work there. Everything is clean. Not forever but maybe for a while. Enshallah.

I love this photo - it makes me laugh.

Kumbuka Nairobi

I remember very vividly the day I felt for the first time a sense of letting go of everything I have worked so hard to build. I was sitting on my mother's old couch drinking a cup of coffee with my feet curled up underneath me, how my brother and my father also both sit on couches when they feel relaxed.

It was after my first trip to Kenya but before my second and even though I had only made 50 or sixty shirts I began to feel a sense that one day I would let go of my idea so that others could hold onto it. I didn't start this so I could have a job - I'm not a manager of people or a person who sits and reads spreadsheets so in the end I always knew my role was to be the inspiration so that others could gain from whatever I was able to set on fire, to ignite. And even though I probably only had a couple thousand dollars on hand, it made me a little sad to think into the future and know that one day I might not be the one who sews the letters, who answers the emails, who tells the story.

So today in the studio surrounded by 12 or so Kenyans all madly jockeying for table space as we quickly designed shirts, opened photoshop, cut fabric, drew pictures and paid out cash in Shillings for beautiful work again I stopped a moment to see this frenzy going on without me and there it was, that lovely yet lonely sadness. My business doesn't actually need me anymore to function - it really just needs me to ensure financing and sales will unfold long enough so everyone who is training can continue. And everyone is getting so good - so efficient in their execution be it Steph who makes screens out of photos or Mary who researches and tidies and just loves it all so much - and of course Judges who now has the task to do what I used to do - grab the reins, hold on and hope there's money in the cash box for the next day and the day after that.

And it is only later tonight while I am alone and I think about what happened today do I wonder, did I sound appreciative enough? Was I kind? Did I listen carefully? But even if I didn't it's okay because as I've told everyone I have worked for the last three years now to build something for them so it's really not about me anymore and it actually never was which in it's own way is such a massive bloody relief. I like it when the youth come into the studio and they don't really know who I am or they just get their stuff done and leave again. I can be invisible. I can smile and watch how all our little handmade systems work themselves out in the most African of ways. There will be a day when I am no longer here and this is why each day I try and step further and further away.

I had to tell everyone that if anything happened to me that I have a will and in it is the instructions that will bequeath all of this to them to take on and own themselves. That in such a case if they so wish they can take it over and fortify it for the future so all the ideas and promises I have tried to express can really come true - it's up to them. Of course everyone was silent. What a confusing thing to say I suppose but how can I not? If something did happen to me they might not know what to do. They all have keys. They know who the rent is paid to. They have inventory and a sales book - they bloody well better keep the lights on without me.

And of course the only reason I have ever had to think this is now after finally building something in life that is worth anything so important to save. I know even though we are still so tiny in our operations that we do have the chance to grow very very large and this is the opportunity they will be afforded. And I would not likely have to think this if this place of cold water wasn't so dangerous and didn't have daily reminders of how precious and momentary it all is. I would hope they could make it live. I would hope they would do all the things I never knew how to do myself.

This story is for Rose and Dennis, Barbra and Joseph, Jared, Lamex, Mary, Levitty, Steven, Rosette, Nancy, Lois, Penny, Steph, Judges, Moses, Benson, Nicolas, Derek, Beatrice, Shiro and the quiet boy from Uganda who ran away from a life that was too painful to live within. It is a 150 square foot room on the 15th floor of an office tower in downtown Nairobi. It is the biggest dream I ever had the strength to believe in.

Kumbuka Nairobi.

Bangladesh

Hallelujah - a journalist has finally decided to blatantly explain the story of how we in the rich countries are exploiting those in the poor countries. Thank god, I feel like perhaps a change may be coming.

When I tell people our shirts sell for KSh 750 ($11 USD) all the way up to KSh 3,000 ($42 USD) it's like I've just said I was a transexual trapped in the body of a lizard. They stare at me like paying a fair price for something is a sin, or a problem or that something is wrong with my business model. So I start to explain that to pay fair wages and make a profit in business products cannot come to market for cheap prices. Why would you even try?

On the news today I see that a UK chain is selling 3 shirts for $10 and as a businessperson I immediately think - which country is being exploited for that contract? That's $10 to grow, gin, mill, bleach, wash, sew, fold, pack and ship the cotton a 1/4 of the way around the world. For over five years I have been studying how this possibly makes sense, how I must be missing something vital or complicated in this formula but now that I am deeply embedded amidst the people who live in the underpaid world of work here in Africa my suspicions are absolutely coming true. It doesn't make sense unless someone along the way is being taken advantage of.

When I tell people here my mission is to increase the wages, to pay people fair money to create and make - to imagine and work hard so that my business will earn a profit - many of them look at me like I am tredding on dangerous waters. Because the system isn't fair and most of us know this deep down in our hearts but it's been going on for so long we are used to it.

Why should any one country or culture or group of people be paid such abysimally lower wages than us in other countries? In the big picture scheme of things I mean - forget the economics - why shouldn't wages start at the point that makes a life possible to live in dignity? How can so many of us stand seeing people go hungry because they just can't earn enough? Why aren't we sharing more?

The very first time I went to Las Vegas I saw first hand what the root of this problem is. The deeply embedded concept that to compete on price is a business advantage. Miles of buffet food laid out in all the cheap hotels in the desert showed me how accustomed we have become of getting the things we need at the prices that suit us the consumers and not the providers. And the theory I am told when I challenge this is 'that someone has to work for less or it doesn't work' or my favourite, 'that's just the way it is here in a developing country' and I am stunned because that's not an explanation of a system, that's an excuse. Kenya should be far farther along the development curve than it is and everybody knows this.

So the t-shirt sewers in Bangladesh are protesting - enough they say - they're not going to make this cheap cotton stuff for such an awful rate anymore and we as the consumers of 3 for $10 ought to think very deeply about this shift. We don't need to consume so much. We waste the profit margin that truly belongs to other people halfway around the world. We toss things in the garbage without thinking because they're cheap and meaningless but if they were priced fairly and we were made to work a little harder for what we have maybe just maybe we could begin to correct what is so deeply wrong.

I sat in the office of a very interesting Indian woman this morning who administers an educational trust here in Nairobi and she said something that I think about so often everyday here in Africa. People here have dignity and they feel shame because they are treated poorly. To come here as a foreigner and distrupt what is already a beautiful system of trade and culture is what she called uncivilized. India worked before the British arrived and now finally it is starting to work again.

I wonder if the fact that Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize this week has anything to do with the workers protesting in Bangladesh. I think it must. They feel proud. They will survive without us and they know it because the world has told them that their own homemade system of banking on the poorest of the poor is the most successful investment on the planet.

One day I will go there and see the Parliament Building that was built for them by an architect who died penniless in a public washroom.

This story is for Joseph Kahn.

A redrawing of lines

Dusting off the cobwebs this morning in my usual booth at the Java House on Koinange I was thrilled to see this story. Finally a proper step towards opening the trade doors to free the Africans. A free flow of capital and labour. 105 million people encouraged to inter-trade and share without anything having to be brokered by foreigners or import taxed to death. Museveni, Kikwete and Kibaki - could you maybe have thought of this sooner?

Cash Box Sales

Nothing a pile of cash spilling out of a dirty brown envelope. Showing up for this week's team meeting I couldn't believe how fast sales have begun - everyone loves our shirts! We are nearly halfway to making our monthly goal of 50,000 KSh ($800 Cdn) and we've only been at it 3 days. If only our lawyer would get back from holidays on the coast and incorporate us so we can open the bloody bank account.

They love the fair trade. They love the recycling. They love the hand-stiching. They love the kids' art - we are finally coming into vogue - trade not aid for Africa.

KUSAIDIANA

Syl Rogers is a teenager I have been communicating with for over six months now by email - we've never met. This is him wearing a shirt he made in Freetown in an attempt to see if we do can do what we are doing in Nairobi on the other side of Africa too. The reason is twofold - growth and KUSAIDIANA.

One of the most important lessons I have learned during this was taught to me by a financier in Vancouver when he told me "We don't look for stars, we look for constellations" - a sentiment I have never forgotten and why Syl is making shirts in Freetown on his own. In order to get people to buy into my idea of using the private sector to build kids lives in Africa I knew I had to prove the business model had growth potential. And even though I have yet to actually get anyone else's money at work in our business I know one day we will and this is where KUSAIDIANA comes in.

It is a swahili expression that means 'to support one another'. Ku meaning, we or us; Saidia meaning to support; and ana meaning the act of - the verbalization of the whole thing I suppose. We know we have a product that sells and Syl and his team can figure out how to do exactly what we know in Nairobi only in the edges of the Atlantic beneath what is known as "the Lion Mountains", Sierra Leone.

So it is too early to consider doing this quite yet but then again I think, if I have known how painful and confusing and difficult all of this was going to be perhaps I would never had started in the first place three years ago. So it must be that drive, the passion I have burning inside me to invest in these kids that is saying, go now and meet Syl. Lay the first bricks and build slowly just as I have done in Nairobi.

One email - an order for four shirts. Direct seamail from Freetown to the Hudson River - hand made shirts from Africa on the streets of the Big Apple.

At a cocktail party last night two young journalists asked me what I was doing in Kenya and when I told them our story they said, 'How refreshing from the usual UN/Aid story' and I thought, yes, we are what's coming next. We are what really alleviates poverty in Africa, the small scale entrepreneurs who in our quest to better our own lives are making others better as a result. An increase of 1% in trade for Africa is about $70 billion USDollars. The most powerful and stable economies in the world do not have aid coming in - they are driven by small business activity like we now see flourishing in India, China and even Canada.

A nation of shopkeepers, counting the pennies, sweeping the floors, innovating for tommorrow and what could be. A new friend is frustrating by her old aid job and is tortured over going back again because she needs the dough. So I suggested it could be an opportunity to change this, to make aid better and more robust - or even change it or end it - but for god's sake do something.

We all have to be the change, that's what is really comes down to. There's no more room on the planet for those of us not willing to roll up our sleeves and figure out how we are all going to survive. I think it was Ghandhi who said this, 'to be the change you want to see in the world' and it's so so simple.

NBO-FNA - Passport to Africa discount on Kenya Airways.

Sierra Leone

Webcam photos from Freetown to Nairobi via a Vancouver-based server: a handmade value-added Africa. When I stop to think of what I am actually trying to do my brain melts and I have to find a window to look out of.

So Syl Rogers and the team are sewing shirts in Freetown and have already decided that using machines is faster and more profitable. I love it. And as I step aside and train Judges to become our Managing Director for us here he tells me that a smaller space is more feasible for us now, that we should only move to a larger one when we can afford it. Now that's worth finding a salary to invest in.

Someone said to me last week when I told them what I do - "Now that takes courage" and I responded "YES it does." This stuff is really hard and lonely too sometimes believing in the importance of something that I may never actually see in my lifetime. The things I work for will bring results far in the future - this is not a now endeavour and so I have learned that some things in life are far more important than this immediate gratification thing.

I think that's what has gone wrong in my own culture of North America - that we have become so used to immediate results that we fail to appreciate that good things take a long time to build. Like the increasing divorce rate of 50% - we are giving up too easily on some of the best things in life. The other day over coffee my new Kenyan friends asked me what it was I was most seeking in a partner and without hesitation I answered "Someone who wants to love me" and if I can't find that then brilliant, gorgeous and rich will have to suffice.

This photo of me bending over is probably the most poignant image of what my life has become. There I am standing on African soil teaching a kid how to use a camera. I have many photos of me like this - head chopped off - mouth open speaking - fingers illustrating how simple technological buttons can transform us. It's a bit revealing for my taste but it makes the people who love me and support me smile in it's truth.

Pendo means love and this shirt, a little pink pendo for a girl is designed to share how I feel about this beautiful place. I actually designed and sewed it myself so when our new managing director sees it I suppose he will have no choice but to pay me for fair market rate. A little extra cash to fill the fridge here.

Today is Sunday which is the hardest day for me in Nairobi. All my friends are either in church or with their families and I end up walking around rather alone. Although today should be fun going to an afternoon party up in Muthaiga with a bunch of local business and political types. I always like to wear high heels to these sorts of things as a much welcome break from my usual workday wear but parties are usually on grass here and I end up either in bare feet or getting stuck in the soil. I am looking for a financial partner on the little book I have designed - KUMBUKA NAIROBI (I remember Nairoibi) about the old architectural stories here.

I have been photographing and sketching the old buildings in the CBD in hopes of creating a new product the studio will sell. And each time I sat to sketch on the sidewalk the Kenyans came over curiously to see what this Mzungu was doing. So I found 2 teenagers who want to contribute to the book and if their sketches are good they will be paid royalities and offered a chance to sell the book for income. Everywhere I turn to look in this place of cold water there is someone keen, talented and hungry for opportunity. It's like liquid gold running through the streets of the city - and all we have to do as responsible well-intentioned adults is build the pipes and harness the energy. "I've been drawing since I was a little boy" Benson says to me sitting a few feet from the beautiful 'peace pole' built on the other side of City Hall Way from City Hall. In remberance or perhaps apology of the 2 bombings seen here in 1998. Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi - Americans attacked out of hate and mistrust.

And good for the Americans - still amidst this anger they are coming here with their cameras and Tilly hats because at the end of the day the most average couple from a small town has saved money for the last few years so they could finally come to see Africa. We are guests here and everyday this is important to remember.

When I first saw Benson coming towards me on Saturday afternoon as I sat sketching in the sun, I figured he was one of the rough street kids who was likely to be looking at my purse. His shoes were dirty, his hands idle, a kid with ambition but nowhere to put it. So he stopped out of curiosity and looked over my shoulder. Even if I do get mugged again it will be okay because anything valuable cannot actually be stolen and I have duplicates of all my plastic conveniences.

So I asked him if he wanted to draw and immediately he sat down beside me. A beautiful little kid with nothing to do on a Saturday and sketch he could. He'll come visit the studion on Monday and meet Judges. If my budget for the book is correct he will be paid 1,000 KSh for his sketch that I insist he must do at least 5 times to make it the best he can. And then he can help us sell the book and gain pride that his skill has currency in this world. That everything is not so sad and discouraging - that when we allow ourselves to believe it is possible that is when it begins to be so.

God I hope these photos upload today. I know my friends need to see what's going on.

Cash Flow

If there was one moment in the entire last four years of my life that I wish my father had been present for it was today at 2:30 pm Nairobi time when our first Kenyan sales occured. I can't count how many times he has said to me 'Remember Sue - CASH FLOW' which of course I know and am aware of the importance in business but considering the magnitude of the undertaking I have been slow to focus on. I needed to walk down the streets safely. I needed to find my place to have coffee in the morning. I needed to be able to blow dry my hair.

And after all this time, now we have beautiful shirts. Now we have trained sewers and designers. Now we have a young completely motivated Managing Director who has already figured out how the business can save $450 USD. That's what a 40% employee ownership fund does - it mobilizes and energizes and keeps people awake at night just like I have been hoping and dreaming that one day this business will sustain.

$2,600 KSh is roughly equal to $38 USD which is why as well we will co-price the shirts in both currencies. Psychologically the inflated Shilling disturbs Westerners and I believe even discourages them from spending more than they do when they come to Africa. So that was how much income the business generated today on October 2nd, 2006 after nearly $120,000 Cdn invested to get this far. I nearly cried. And this was with a discount for the family rate - the real figure was $3,500 KSh which is why of course I should not be in charge of sales because I would give everyone a discount who came to trade.

So we in the West just have it all so wrong - Kenyans like most Africans, have cash and when they see an opportunity to trade fairly and invest their money into products or services that better their own economies they are loyal. When I designed the hand-made component of the shirts it was my personal subsersive way of showing people how beautiful this place is, how beautiful humanity itself is - and that when we invest in this we get something back that is healthy. It is our human capital that we need to unleash, more powerful than the FTSE or DOW or the price of gold, the more than 6 billion of us is the energy we have yet to truly tap into.

I have been told many times by white people or mzungus, as we are called in Kenya, that I need to be careful here because "the wages aren't cheap", or "the people I least expect if from will steal from me" and every time I hear this my heart gets sad and I get a lump in my throat. What do I say in return? I believe in something different that when you put in place systems of trust and empowerment this kind of thing doesn't occur. But maybe I am naive still here and I did get badly mugged here by a group of people who showed me anything but courtesy.

So I live in the optimism of what could be in this place not because I want to be right but because it keeps me happy and getting up in the morning to do all of this all over again tomorrow. It gives me the strength to want to share everything I am with the world because I can and after all this time I don't think I could ever live any other way. How do you champion a cause if you don't believe deep down in your soul?

I saw Kirk Kervorkian on TV this morning - the man said to be worth billions more than all the others billions of us walking around on planet earth. And when I see someone like this I look at them closely and wonder how they can hold onto so much for themselves when there are so many people living in the poorest most abject lives possible? Why does he believe that accumulating so so much more than what he needs to live even the most brilliant of lives is more important than sharing it? Why do we still accept things like poverty and children dying of hunger? When will we decide that there can be another way and that we have everything we need right now to changes these things?

There are 16 of us now in the studio sharing the space in shift rotations for design, production, management, shipping and whatever I do - 15 times the likelihood of coming up with amazing ideas and ways to succeed. All I have to do is step aside and tweak. The Kenyans are starting to do the rest.

Boda Boda - a new green bike for Africa. Less cars, more space for the humans in this place of cold water.

The Mara

I have heard about the Masaii Mara like most people for over ten years probably and so finally arriving there it was no surprise to discover like in so many other places there is lots of change and a lot of it not good. It was a great idea that so many people decided to get over to Africa and discover the animals but the footprint has been deep and the locals don't like it. Like so many issues in Africa I believe this negative, this challenge, this natural disturbance does have a silver lining. They say we only truly appreciate after we have lost what we held most dear.

So it is ironic to be writing tonight after watching Darryl Hannah on CNN who will finally hopefully will get her fella americans guzzling biodiesel and organic food and HAND MADE RECYCLED T-SHIRTS! I believe the next 2 years will see the biggest environmental tidal wave for the better the planet has ever seen and the Americans will lead this charge. Nobody consumes like they do - it could just be for the good.

Walking along the Mara River in Southern Kenya I can hear the bottom of the inside of the belly of a hippo whaling out from the river as I pass by a 'regenerative fruit buffet' - a snack shop for birds featuring wonderfully decaying passion fruit. How elegant. How colourful. How thoughtful. If the birds eat the rotting fruit and drop their waste on the ground then maybe somehow this aerial excrement will refuel some grass that an elephant will eat who will then crap on the ground where bugs live who will creep and crawl back to the shamba and regenerate the papaya tree. Now if we humans can just stay out of the way. What a wonderfully humble agreement.

Waiting at the Mara airstrip I search the local crowd for kids and sure enough there is a 6-year old boy looking over curious at us. I signal him to come and see my camera, which he does hesitantly but reassured by the grandpas after I give him a grown up felt pen. Instantly he loves it and ferociously he is not interested in giving it back to me. We play around for about half an hour shooting silly self-portraits when finally we hear the plane coming. It has been hired by Kenya Airways to Boscovic Air Charters to come get us. How casual. How African. Can you help us out? We messed up today - a crowd waiting in the middle of nowhere for something to fall out of the sky.

As I say goodbye to my little friend I have to turn away in my inability to tell him in our different languages that I will be back one day. I will post him some shots he took so he can see an ability he may never have known before. My business could educate him. He could become a resident naturalist who takes pictures to teach us who come so far to see to rather appreciate and love what has always been, what needs to remain. And he could recharge the batteries with the solar panel down the road - send me photos from the wifi in the lodge. It's not too late for him, in fact, all this technology is just in time.

"It is in the shelter of each other in which the people live." - Irish proverb.

Change

One of the most common ways for me to wake up is in a cold sweat in the middle of night with 2 thoughts as fast as freight trains running through my head - what country am I in and how much money is in the business bank account? I used to think this was abnormal.

In these moments I comfort myself with stories or thoughts of others who must also have had some sleepless nights and tonight it's Craig McCaw - the genius behind the massive capitalization of the American cellular industry. A few months ago I came across a quote of his that I sent to my girlfriend Sam in LA who has struggled courageously for years to build a stable of tv shows to call her own. She, like me, broke out of a secure to life to bring her dreams to reality and live in the uncertain life that begins immediately thereafter.

McCaw said, "Your greatest ideas will never be understand by anybody" how empowering and frightening at the same time. But when I told people years ago starting this that I was going into business with millions of African orphans I wish I had the fortune of coming across Mr. McCaw who might have said - now that's an idea worth investing in Susan. I have always been the kind of person who learns by racing right to the very end of the idea and then thinking slowly backwards from it. So it's hard sometimes for me to learn with others because often I don't understand what they are thinking and at times my own thought patterns go unnoticed. I can't explain how I get to where I do - only that I see things mostly visually is how I learn and often I am on the sidelines trying to get back in the game.

So tonight, finally at last, sleepless in Nairobi as I can hear the little African birds waking up outside the window, I came across Mr. McCaw again and another one of his amazing ideas that comforts me in this hyper-extended space I have been occupying while I struggle to become patient for how long all this stuff actually takes. Watching Bill Clinton on the television tonight made me think of change and how slow it takes when he reminded us that all of our wars are over resources and not religion. We fight because scarcity terrifies us and we have yet to evolve past this idea.

So McCaw said "Change occurs when there is a gap between what is and what should be" which of course made me think of Africa. What is is poverty and corruption and a broken-ness. What should be is what has always grown here - regeneration, family, trade.

Being back only 12 hours and already I have felt the secret handshake at least 30 times. Besides Kenyan tea with milk this is my favourite custom here, to join hands immediately with the person you are in front of. To extend of yourself without question the respect of what you are to the other. Salaama.

People say there will never be and end to the war between Israel and Palestine but I don't believe this. The war would end tomorrow if everyone fighting in this levant would consider seriously that peace comes from the moment to truly want it. That to win is to overcome and not defeat, to evolve and not conquer.

Sitting in the Norfolk drinking birthday champagne I see a little kid hiding himself behind a chair looking at me. He is maybe 3 years old and bored with his grandparents who are not talking to him. But he is an African kid so he shows those signs of being so loved and so adored it comes across as confidence. I can't stop looking over and smiling at him but he is so shy he just keeps disappearing behind the upholstery. As he walks away in tow behind mama he keeps looking back at me with that chubby cheek African smile. He is why I have come back. These kids are my greatest happiness.

38 years old - Vancouver to London to Nairobi. I've got just over 3 months to find us a financial backer. And thanks to Bono and Angelina and Clinton and Brad and George and all those incredibly powerful influencial voices I just know in my heart we will find someone. Things are changing, the gap is starting to be filled by what should be. Bono's t-shirts went on sale for $40 USD - 25% earmarked for people in Lesotho.

Besides tenacity, humility and generosity I think one of the most powerful tools to have in business must be patience.

Moja Moja.

Regenerative Economics

London. Money. Brands. Luxury. This is one of the biggest tax havens in the world - you can small the green-ness of the money in this town. Such a small island too, home to those who make the deals.

Finally I have found a book that explains everything I have been building and learning over the past 2 years - a book that explains the concept of regenerative economics, the future economy. So when I walk thru the streets of London it seems one day all this luxury will disappear because it can't regenerate and is based on the concept of scarcity. The very act of creating abundance is such a wholly massive threat to so much else because it presupposes there is enough for everybody and our desires will actually finally be met.

I think this must be the biggest revolution our modern economies will face - how to reclassify all our systems of manufacturing and delivery - consumption and exchange when we start living in the new economy that does not waste. An economy based in ideas and not things.

When I stepped out of the material economy two years ago it took me a long while to lose the feelings I had of being almost like a leper who desired very little except healthiness and equality. And still it's hard in the face of all this so-muchness to stand apart from it and be happy in the lack of desire for it. But to believe in the regeneration of the planet, the growth and health and feeding of it is such a more beautiful store window to look into. It is like escaping to the top of a beautiful mountain on a warm spring day looking over a river crashing endlessly into the sea.

In the movie 'The Queen' I saw a few nights ago here in London there is such a lovely scene when Helen Mirren is sitting quietly crying from all the confusion and stress of what is going on with Diana's death. She turns suddenly when she hears a buck behind her - the one the young princes want to shoot and clain trophy over - that she too is hoping to own in some way. But in it's beauty and it's example of regenerativeness she privately and intimately changes her mind. She chooses life over waste and keeps this secret to herself.

Namaste.

Trade Not Aid

When people ask me why I think aid is such a problem I tell them that it's basically the crack/cocaine of the global economy and then they get it. They don't understand all the massive complexities because unless you were heavily involved in aid you wouldn't see these. But everyone understands addictions and what perpetuating them can do especially in Vancouver where we have such a huge drug problem right in the city.

When you see a drug addict your first thought is that the drug is the problem and if that could be taken away or weaned off of then everything would be okay. But drug users are much more complicated and interesting than that. Many of them have lived multi-generational lives in addict families where physical and sexual violence, systemic poverty and racism also is prevalent.

The real story that will come out of Africa is 50 years from now when the healing is occurring. Now it's about survival but if we look at our first nations people who have healed mostly in the past 20 years, they're starting to get their fair share of the ecomomy and only now are we hearing the stories of how bad the oppression and abuse really was during the past 100 years. The psychic or emotional healing is still to come.

So I believe the sooner all this crack aid stops the better off Africa will be. It's maddening for me to have the little kids come up to me on the streets begging with these fake voices of sympathy pleading with me when I have just seen them moments ago laughing and playing soccer. I know they're homeless and I know they're hungry but I also know they have more dignity than they let me see because I am mzungu they see me as a charity hit. So I tell them not to beg and they get angry with me because this is all they know. It's an addiction with no solution unless a whole new approach comes along.

This is what aid does and the kids in Africa are far better than the circumstances it breeds for them to live under. The most stable and properous economies in the world do not have aid. My dream for the future is to see the emptying of all the offices in all the United Nations buildings around the world. And all the charities and all the NGO's lose their workers because there is nothing left for them to do. This is supposed to be the goal. Aid is supposed to end so why aren't we starting with this?

So many African economies are completely hijacked by aid and if you told the aid agencies to pack their bags and get lost what do you think they'd say? They tell us they are there 'to help' but when you look at how many employees and vehicles and meal vouchers this adds up to - you have to wonder. It's a complete economy really - with it's own CEO's, accountants and job seekers.

I tell my African friends if there is one criticism I have of them it's that they are far too polite. But there is a growing movement to get rid of aid and all it's addictions in Africa which is so great and something I can't wait to be around again because over here in North America we just don't get it. We want the tax relief, we want the valour of our names being on an Endownment Fund, we want to say - we helped to save Africans so in part we can feel better about our wealth. It seems we're doing the right thing by donating or volunteering but when it comes down to the more difficult and threatening concept of actually sharing our trading strengths this is where it gets a little mirky for people.

Do we need the poor countries to stay poor so the rest of us can afford our lattes and t-shirts and dollar stores? Does the global economy depend on some of us serving others? Will the world allow a value-added Africa?

Our first shirts start going in the mail next week. We'll see what consumers say about all this.

Uhuru for Africa

The Economic Freedom of the World

Rather than lying in bed overwhelmed by feelings that I will never succeed at this I got up and checked my email. Often there is a note from either Nairobi or Freetown that always makes me smile. There was but also an email from a friend and supporter about a seminar at the Fraser Institute re: the concept that aid hinders trade. I can't believe I was notified to be a speaker - Would I have something to say.

This story is a rather unpleasant story and I don't like to tell it because it upsets people and I get critcized and told I am greedy. It's a story about how my business was taken advantage of by aid and probably the most painful lesson I have learned so far. It still hurts when I think about it because it may have cost me the friendship of the Kenyan woman I started this with. She never responds to my emails anymore and I worry this is the reason why. When I see her in person again I will ask her and I hope I am wrong but until that day it still haunts me somewhat. I am probably wrong because she is African and therefore far more experienced in the complexities of aid than even I am.

During September of 2005 when I was producing an exhibit to earn income for the business and the SHERP Orphanage I had been working with I had the idea to try and bring two of the orphans and Grace to Vancouver for the show. I knew it would help our sales and everyone loved the idea. The Kenyans would get the chance to see Canada and it would give them a powerful sense of belonging as partners to have them as guests here.

I sold the idea to Canadian Immigration as a 'Trade Mission' between our respective nations - a gutsy move to show Vancouver that trade was more powerful than aid. In a series of late night phone calls, faxes and emails to Nairobi I somehow managed to convince a famously restrictive Visa desk to let the kids and Grace come which almost NEVER happens. As the news shows frequently now boatloads of Africans floating their way to some dream of economic freedom in Spain or later France, the world has no idea what to do with all these Africans who are seeking something better than most of what is going on in their countries. And it's so bitter and painful if you know the colonial history of Africa - how welcoming the average African was when the Europeans first arrived looking for tea, diamonds and gold.

The only catch in my plan was that I didn't have enough cash for the plane tickets. I had to ask 3 friends to guarantee they would lend me $15,000 to add to my meager $5,000 in case something happened to the Kenyans in Canada - a bond requested as well as a notarized letter stating that yes, I could get my hands on all this money. We don't know what that's like in Canada - when we go to Africa if anything happens to us we'll be okay, we have credit cards and insurance and bank cards that work everywhere but it's not the same thing coming North.

So I was maxxed out but then I got a surprise phone call from a person who told me if there was anything they could help me with me to ask. So I did in a letter to a movie set requesting if all 300 crew members might be interested in each paying $20 to attend an art exhibit - advanced sales so I would have the $6K to cover the flights. But the person offered to pay the whole shot themselves and in my naivety I said yes. I knew in my heart this wasn't great to put all my eggs in one basket and not spread the risk and joy around more - something I learned in political fundraising. You are far more powerful to have 10,000 supporters each give you $1 then to have 2 supporters give you $5. In the latter scenario if 50% of your supporters go away you are left with one person. In the first example if 50% of the people end up hating you even - you still have 5,000 supporters. This is why grass roots movements have been so successful and ultimately why I believe African will be okay if aid diminishes. But I was under the gun and I only had 2 weeks to get them here so I said yes. I had never taken anything for free until then - I had always paid people for their help because I am a business and I am trying to prove that trade is better than aid so I don't take handouts.

After the exhibit I was asked by someone involved with my donor to allow a new charity, society and endownment fund, that had all 3 been established within 4 days of our exhibit, the rights to use our documentary film to fundraise for them. Great right? Just what I wanted - to have even more people love the kids I love and help them. And after investing $10,000 of my own money so the exhibit could earn us as a group $30,000 it felt a little strange but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. So I suggested that they could use 3 minutes of the movie (and they chose the best 3 minutes) if they paid Sam the film maker $2,000 and $10 for every dub they wanted to mail out. A rather innovative distribution tactic I thought. They were likely to get at least a $100 cheque for each copy they mailed out - a basic 10% marketing cost.

So I was stunned and offended when I got a call saying that not only was $2,000 'unacceptable' by the millionaire on the other end of the phone, but that my request was selfish when their intention was to help the kids even though I was very effectively doing that. He said our film was 'a very powerful tool' for them to fundraise with for his endowment fund which made me laugh of course - having hurled myself over to Africa six months earlier to achieve the same thing. But when I explained to him that no portion of the actual endownment fund was ever going to leave Canada, only any accrued interest that might come in time - @ at very high 10% interest rate the kids would get $10,000 after one year of $100,000 in donations sitting in a Canadian bank account paying a Canadian financial institution interest as well. Aid money for Africa. Aid money used to buy plane tickets and holidays for people who want to help.

To make a long story short I did not let them use our film to fundraise because I felt that the beautiful little business I had worked so painstakingly hard to build from nothing so it could be a signpost of dignity for these kids was ultimately being taken advantage by aid. And I made a very unpopular decision in that moment that cost me relationships, confidence and maybe even the friendship of the woman who had flown across the world to come see Canada. And their side of the story is important too. I don't agree with what they are doing, fundamentally I believe they are hurting Africa in the long run, but they feel it's the right approach and they may succeed in getting huge amounts of capital over to Kenya in the years to come. But it won't sustain, it will continue to reinforce the concept that Africa needs help instead of an equal opportunity to the economic freedoms that we all have the right to.

In the first twelve months of trading my business generated nearly $60,000 CDN in income, $12,000 of which was direct wire transferred into the kids income account we helped setup when we sold our first t-shirts in Maralal. If that group had chosen to continue supporting the vehicle of trade I had built to work in the kids best interest god only knows how much income they would have by now. But they have their aid and hopefully the well that was promised to them.

When our exhibit came down there was $20,000 of unsold art - $3,500 which belongs to the kids as their income and $7,000 which is apportioned to the 6 artists who created work to be sold. I will always wonder what would happened if this story had ended differently. If a charity had never been created offering tax breaks to Canadians, if an endownment fund for Africa had not been announced in the Globe and Mail and if those very people who called me and said they wanted to help me ever received or read the letter I sent explaining how trade is better than aid. Should Africa gain an increase of 1% in the global pie of trade - this $70 billion dollars would be triple the amount of it's current aid agreements.

Poverty doesn't just happen, it's borne within the womb of the deeply rooted complicated macro-economics we all live by. At the end of the day my business could not compete with a 47.3% tax relief for Canadians - money our government somehow relieves from tax income so it can leave our country to create dependancy somewhere else. But all this isn't explained to you in those sad black and white sponsorship ads that make us all pull out our cheque books. We don't see how most of our money doesn't actually end up in the hands of the kids you see hungry and crying on television. It pays for salaries and studies and expensive hotels rooms owned by private equity firms registered in small offshore countries. Some of it gets there sure - but most of it doesn't. That's what I always say to people - go to Africa and try and find the aid money. The things that are truly working there are the small local ideas that have a chance to grow, things Africans are building for themselves and all their children's tomorrows.

I think about Grace everyday and pray that she understands the decision I made even if she doesn't agree. I know her dream is to have the orphanage self-sustain one day, the same dream I have for the other 450,000,000 kids who are her neighbours.

Salaam.

EBITDA or CASH

If someone has said to me three years ago when I told everyone I knew that I wanted to alleviate poverty in Africa, "EBITDA" I might have gotten to this place of feeling completely ignorant much much faster. Supposing most people are like me and have no formal financial bankground things like EBITDA and cash on cash yield are incredibly daunting. But to use the private sector to finance whatever dream you have these are two terms to most definately master.

If I was happy just having a small little operation making a difference in a small number of peoples lives then I could go on forever never having to learn these things however, such is not the case - my dream includes 450 million children. When I ask them what they want to be in life they say the professions - a doctor, a lawyer, a pilot - but what they really need to also focus on is economics, banking and trade so they won't have to leave their continent to get a job. But economics isn't sexy - or at least not yet.

I am trying to get a financial mentor to come to the studio and explain EBITDA to everyone - to show the Africans who are wondering why the hell are they so poor when they're living in such a rich place - the very things they need to know. And it's all about cash which Africans understand better than most of us I imagine because most of their economies are still very much cash based. I know a Masaii guy who owns over 1,000 cows and each one is worth $300 CDN which means he has over a quarter of a million cash on hand - all he needs is to call a butcher. But he would never do that because his herd is his cash on cash yield, month after month, year after year.

EBITDA - used to approximate the fundamental earning power of a businesses operations while forecasting capital expenditures coming down the pipe.

Cash flow into Africa.

Faith, Surrender & Hope

Last night was the darkest of the darkest - going to bed wanting to throw in the towel and move on feeling like I have failed and that I will never be able to actualize my vision into something lucrative. And why I don't know after actualizing this summer's sales orders and seeing we made a 37% gross profit margin you'd think I'd be happy. But I think it actually scared me because I know my idea has the ability to be incredibly successful but I don't know how to get it to this point. I don't even really know how to calculate a gross profit margin - I had to buy a book that explained it to me written by a guy actually who admires one of my best friend's fathers for his business acumen. That's somewhat encouraging - perhaps someone to eyeball my business plan. And with 5 currencies in 4 time zones my head gets dizzy trying to understand how to possibly forecast this tiny trickle of a stream to hopefully become a river of cash flow.

I am a designer and a champion of kids - I am the one who does the best job looking into their eyes and finding a way to help them understand how powerful they are - asking them "Have you ever done this? I will teach you how." And I am the one who sells this idea better than anyone else in the world because I can translate to people so easily how poverty is a trap and that a business like ours is the key that loosens it so people can spring free. I know this deep in my heart because SHINDA supported 8 employees and 15 family members for two months making a big difference like they have all emailed to say - a big difference to feed their kids, nurture their esteem and sustain. I can't let this fail for them or me.

So it is so baffling for me when I wake up full of dread in the middle of the night over and over again feeling like I am already failing when I just can't be. I am exhausted and discouraged and I need someone to help us - someone who knows how to do all those Excel-things that I never bothered to learn because I was desinging and sketching and learning about Africa. I just have to keep believing or having IMANI that someone will come. I have to remind myself that what is important is this lesson below of the Wise Woman's Stone that was sent to me by the business coach I hired three years ago to help me begin this journey. It is a reminder to me during these painfully lonely days that all this giving and sharing and extending of myself so I can find a way for kids to SHINDA in Africa does have currency in the world and that it isn't all for naught. That my demons are wrong and somehow I will find a way for us all to SHINDA over them because the world needs dreamers and idealists who believe in the "Why not?" that so many of us need and are willing to build.


The Wise Woman's Stone

A wise woman who was travelling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation.
The traveler left rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime.
But, a few days later, he came back to return the stone to the wise woman.
"I've been thinking." he said. "I know how valuable this stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me this stone."

Enshallah.

Calgary Film Festival

So Emily and Sam will be headed to Calgary to Moja Moja at this year's film festival. I wonder what people will think? After watching the film myself at least 20 times all the nuances and africanisms are so subtle and funny - like an old friend farting next to you on the couch. But I remember my first time being in an African home how nervous I was, how overpolite I must have seemed in my attempt to express how much I wanted to understand. Na Heshima.

But for someone who has never been to Africa and only watches CNN...thank god for all the visible publicity and celebrity celebration of Africa because people ARE finally beginning to understand they have never understood before. Matt Damon is going to be opening the Toronto Film Festival with an announcement of his film about Africa so today we fedexed a package with Moja Moja just for him. A shot in the dark - an arrow sent forth towards an imagined goal.

And after all the emails I've sent and phone calls I've made, letters I've mailed and dreams I've had; drinks I've bought, fingers I've crossed it seems as though finally there may be a break in the clouds coming soon. My horoscope the other day said the most amazing things about Virgo - I wish I had kept it. Something about a spilling over of all things tumbling and hot and fast like a waterfall rushing in my favour. I yelled YESSS! out loud in the restaurant with my girlfriend waiting for the soup.

If you build it they will come. Enshallah.

First USA retail order

Well it finally happened! A retail buyer from the San Francisco left me a voicemail saying 'the staff just love the shirts and want me to order them'. It's a very cool museum (The Museum of the African Diaspora) and even though his price point is too low we'll INAWEZEKANA somehow and show him what a value-added Africa is worth.

And Stephanie who brings her laptop to work who studied design and sends me emails about organizations who have grant money available. What a great thing to have the person who assists you tell you they need their own assistant - that's a good sign.

The big order of 100 shirts is done and will likely be shipped moja moja - or one by one to the buyer in Canada. Air cargo prices are even higher than last month so we'll see how well Postal Kenya and Canada Post do for us. I don't entirely know if this falls within the professional guidebook of apparel retail but it certainly will be special for the office to receive 100 brown envelopes over the course of a few weeks. Small business 101 - do whatever it takes no matter what to survive. If the front door's locked go to the back. If the back door's locked - crawl in a window.

Everyone in the studio did such an amazing job I think I'll have to find another office to work in so I don't get in the way of a good thing. And if my Kenya Airways flight crashes into the Sahara Desert next week I will leave this world knowing my dream of building wealth for Africa has come true.

Moja Moja - flying t-shirts over the pole across the globe.

It takes a Village

I think my favourite of our colour lines is village - Corn, Tarmac, Blue Sky, Rusty and Kisses - what you are likely to see on your way to an African village. After cutting and designing and sewing all day when I look at the floor I see a beautiful pile of scraps - still so gorgeous in it's elegant waste. Something else to figure out how to recycle, regenerate, re-think.

The saying that 'it takes a village to raise a child' has kept me going for years now thinking about how to empower Africans in this venture and when I walked into this shop today I thought - now this could be what we look like inside SHINDA. Not anything like you see in Kenya really - maybe in the private homes or embassies but definately not CBD shopping. Joseph has a second potential place in mind for us on Ngong Road so we'll see if they're up for a lease. By January we're going to need more space that's for sure.

Getting all the samples done to photograph and show to retailers in London on my way through this trip - get some orders, flash the brand and hopefully tell everyone we all have jobs for another year or month or whatever it takes.

Moja Moja - colour explosion.

Nelson Mandela

Albert Normandin is a photographer I have known for a very long time who graciously allowed me to use this photo over three years ago when I started building the business. And in a completely circular twist of fate I had the chance to bid on a huge beautifully framed version of it at an auction last night for the Nelson Mandela Foundation. They raised $30K Cdn which is to be matched by CIDA - not bad for a Thursday night in Vancouver.

But as I sat there wondering about the charity model it made me think of what Africa really wants and needs so much is more trade and not more aid. So I thought of Joseph and Anna who came with a suitcase full of beaded jewellery to sell, to trade with us and how they went home with over $1,000 in sales what that must have done for them over a handout of the same value. I know Joseph bought a bicycle.

I don't talk about these things so much because people are generous and they want to help especially in Vancouver where we are so rich by comparison. I saw a lady on tv today who has over 500 pairs of shoes and although you can't help but wonder at the accomplishment of that, for me whose soul is divided so deeply between the haves and the havenots, it did seem rather sad. That's probably half a million dollars worth of shoes given their value - an amount that could better lives of thousands of people who have nothing.

She said she wanted to be a model of inspiration to women. If I could ever inspire a single woman it would be to encourage them to share with others who have nothing.

Duties and Tarriffs 101

One of the biggest most contentious issues discussed in the DOHA round of trade talks is the idea that rich countries lowering their protective duties and tarriffs would help nurture trade in Africa. Kenya is not considered by my government to be MOST VULNERABLE NATION that enjoy lower duties like the USA I suppose and that whole free trade explosion we are supposed to be living under. And this is why China of course has turned into such a fashion superstar in our policy efforts to save the Asian Crisis the world is now flooded with t-shirts and porcelain and running shoes MADE IN CHINA.

It's funny because when I was a kid I remember looking at the underside of things and always seeing MADE IN TAIWAN. I guess in the 70's there was some sort of manufacturing boom there before the curtain was dropped and Shanghai rose again.

This is why Kenya is positioned so well for the future - they like so few African countries who have a port which is second in size to that of Durban in South Africa I believe. So the 300 million people who make up East Africa can get their goods out at least and on their way to a more lucrative albeit costly foreign economy like Canada.

Our products, HANDMADE RECYCLED T-SHIRTS that employs Kenyans and gets kids into school enjoys the highest of all Canadian duties under category 6109 10 00 22 - t-shirts/unisex/cotton - 18% on manufactured value and 6% GST on top of both of those amounts. The main reason I keep strategizing to eventually export in the USA is that I have been told and am trying to find out that textile imports into that land are 0% thanks to the EPZ's Condeleeza helped to build. I also think that the military base in the North Eastern part of the country might have something to do with it - free trade for those who sympathise with our national agendas.

As I budget for these duties and email the paperwork to the studio I wonder what life would be like in a world with no borders. If there were no more nations but collections of communities trading and living and eating completely based on choice and convenience. Wouldn't we be better off really? What is all this nationalism doing for us as a global community anway? It's like a membership to a privileged club - what you really pay for besides clean towels and a great view is the knowlege that other people are kept out.

Global trade really is just another club. And as we build the business model the club we join will be the one that wants to trade with Kenya and South Africa and Sierra Leone. Who are those people and what colour of t-shirts do they like to wear? When I sent those disposable cameras to Kenya in July of 2004 I never imagined I would be calculating textiles duties into the wee hours of the night in order to get my point across. But that's the small task of what making a difference truly is about. It's not the grand sweeping press conferences and promises - it's the small letters at the bottom of confusing legal documents that hold more power over us than we realize. How some of us get rich and why others of us grow poor without ever really understanding the impact of other people's decisions.

I was watching Christiane Amanpour sniff out Bin Laden tonight and it occured to me that muslims and arabs and fundamentalist terrorists might actually speak and use the Swahili language as it was borne off the Saudi Peninsula. What would they think when the saw our declaration to SHINDA with African kids? I think they might actually love it and if there were no import duties into Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Sudan could this be a market for us? I would imagine I would have some explaining to do next time I crossed at Peace Arch on my way to the outlet mall on Exit 202 North of Seattle. Didn't we see Osama wearing one your shirts Miss Standfield? Of course he would look good in our tones of coffee and tea and maybe sky blue to go with his eyes. He gets his Kalashnikov's from somewhere and all those white Toyotas.

Eleanor Roosevelt said 'The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams'. What on earth is the world going to look like in 20 years from now? Who has the most beautiful dreams? Who will want to help us SHINDA?

Lala Salama. I go to sleep dreading the possibility my new t-shirt silkscreener is going out of business with all 25 of our new samples locked behind his doors.

Sam Oliver

It's amazing how many things come together once a strong logo and brand are selected. This is a first rough draft of the book cover - done by Sam Oliver whose film has just been selected to be in the Calgary Film Festival (great place to sell t-shirts).

Right after the Vancouver Canucks rebranded I had the opportunity to speak with the guy in charge of marketing so of course, I asked why did they choose the logo they did - the orca whale arched into a C. What he said is what I always think of when I realize it has taken me 2 years to identify this image as our logo and to use the name SHINDA. And the money it cost is a fraction of what the Canucks paid.

So the guy tells me they hired some fancy PR firm or ad agency to do market research into the most successful hockey franchises in the NHL. Not even who scored the most goals, but at the end of the fiscal year which teams brought the greatest shareholder returns in the league because after all the face-offs and penalties and hot dogs and bad calls that's really what allows us Canadians to enjoy our sport so much - it has to make money at the end of the day.

It turns out that of the top three teams there was a consistent theme to the logo - something that if the Canuck's replicated they might hedge their bets and gain market share. Who knows if the new logo made any of the guys skate or shoot better - likely not - but the logo was designed based on the findings the hired PR firm had told management. Basically at the end of the day, they paid $1 Million bucks to be told that if they wanted to go with the odds of a winning logo the one thing it had to have was 'teeth'. And so it does.

How would you value the Nike swoosh or the Mercedes circle? The peace sign? The hand that says DON'T WALK in the crosswalk. You can't. These things are priceless. When it comes to alleviating poverty these days you most definately have to get in the game and compete with the best.

Corporate Law

Tonight I sat in the back of a plane worth 25 million dollars and it only carries 8 passengers. That's the power of corporations who could never finance their activities without the protection of corporate law.

When I see people like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and Kofie Annan and Angelina Jolie and all the people who so want to help create prosperity in Africa the first thing that always comes to my mind is the power of money and if applied humanly, what it can accomplish.

The Amazonians who realized their land could be taken away from them made one succinct decision that has been a landmark precedent for anti-poverty activists around the globe. I don't know where they got the money from but they financed Ivy League business education for enough of the younger generations so they could come back and fight for their rights of their land with powerful corporate law, and with english and judiciary skills - how truly the world works for those who have the tools to play the game we all are governed by.

And so we are learning the corporate law of Kenya and of Africa - likely the most fractured legal systems in the world but nonetheless working in places like Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa. If there is one thing that post English colonies in Africa might be grateful for is the system of common and civil law that remains. Not because it's better than whatever was there before, in fact I'm sure it's not, but what it can be used to do from this day forward - to level the playing field and to get in the game before it's too late.

Hopefully by January SHINDA will be a corporation - paying taxes, sharing ownership, taking advantage of how the global economy really works on behalf of the kids who need it most. And if there's one thing I know the Kenyans who work with us can do as well or even better than anyone else is to think, to discuss, to anaylyze and debate and determine what is right, what is fair - how to SHINDA for their own good. In the eyes of the law, everyone is supposed to be equal.

I have always thought that the world is made up of 2 economies - like superhighways travelling at the speed of sound - twin Autobahn's shooting across the globe. One highway is the 'good economy' that cleans up rivers and cares for children - the one that makes us all happy and healthy and proves to us that there is enough. The other one is the 'bad economy' that wrecks everything, drains the lakes, starves the indigenous and discourages us to believe that there will be something green and beautiful for our children, our grandchildren. And there are millions of us out there working passionately into the night scheming to hijack capital out of the bad economy so it can get to work in the good one. That's all it is - these intentions are not contrary - they are not two highways going in opposite directions like we sometimes feel. They travel towards the same goal that is the future whatever we determine it shall be.

Can we protect children using the same tools that have made them so very vulnerable? I think so. I'd like to see someone stop us from trying.

FBO YYJ - Victoria

Book Dedication

The following is the opener of the book that tells our story - SHINDA: How 100 Orphans Helped Build Africa's Youngest Brand. It is from 'The Prophet' by Kahlil Gibran -

On Children

Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
- Kahlil Gibran

This book is dedicated to a healthy future for Africa's children.

Retail Prefab

Besides kids, Africa and photography one of my biggest passions is architecture. I will never be an architect or even understand how a structural entity can erectify and endure but I do know when something speaks of an idea that is soulful - why humans feel the need to create beautiful buildings in the first place. My father is a builder so standing in the middle of framing and sawdust and exposed plumbing is the rec room I grew up in as a little girl. My first brownie badge that I sewed on the arm of my brown cotton tunic was a tiny brown square with an embroidered hammer and saw.

I wonder what people would think if this found itself on the streets of Nairobi? The Africans would love it! And the Commercial Bank of Africa? We'll see I guess when they get our loan application - FUNDS USED FOR: to build the most beautiful art gallery in the world. COLLATERAL: 1.5 million kids who need to go to school. That's got to be perceived as an investment for the future. That's got to be some sort of real world asset that no one could take away from us if we stumble and fall, make mistakes as we struggle to SHINDA.

Marmol Radziner, PREFAB desert house

Evolution

Finally ready to go back to Nairobi after a few months of strategy in Vancouver. And whilst away the 8 Kenyans kept it going without me. It didn't fall apart, nobody quit and the rent is still being paid - in fact they have even hired someone new! If I died today my dream would live on - it's finally ready. Looking at our new identity it feels so right now after all these days of wondering what exactly it is I am trying to build to the help the most kids possible in Africa. After all the questions that people have asked me and all the worries or naysayers too - that Africa is not worth investing in - that I'm a fool to use my own money which always surprises me. If I wasn't prepared to risk my own capital how could I ever expect anyone else to? The only people I have ever met who care as much as I do about kids in Africa is the kids themselves and they come at me like a freight train. They will build this. They have the most to gain from our growth.

'To win' - SHINDA - exactly what the kids need to believe is possible. There are 900 million people who live in Africa and half of them are kids. What will they think about this business designed especially for them as a tool to build their own futures on their own terms? What will they do when I hand them our card and ask "Would you like to learn how to take pictures? or design a funky t-shirt that expresses your culture?"

When I first told people in 2002 about my dream of building this business many people stared at me with their mouth open. Some even said things like, "Can you find people there you can trust?" or "Can people speak English?" and even still in the smallest of subtle ways people are still so bombarded by the mess of Africa they literally do not believe that so many things are working and working well. So I am thankful, or SHUKRANI for all the media hype and movie stars and lobbying by those people with influence who have chosen to talk about Africa in this past year - who have raised awareness so at least the rest of us can begin again and learn a more truthful history of what happened to Africa in the first place. So at least we can understand.

This is evolution. There used to be a time when women in our country weren't allowed to vote and I know one day even under the darkest most repressed regime, women will flourish one day as they have in Canada. Because each one of us does have the social power to affect change if we are willing to be as Ghandi said, 'the thing we want to see in the world'. That's what it comes down - you have to be thing yourself - you have to live it, and fight for it, and sacrifice and lobby and believe and love otherwise you are putting this burden on someone else. It's discouraging and enraging but it is possible, it is so very very possible.

Na Heshima watoto. Shukrani rafiki - pole pole, salaam.

YVR-LHR-NBO - Tuesday September 12, the week I become 38. Can't wait to feel the secret handshake once again.

Intellectual Property

If I had known when I had this dream over 4 years ago of building wealth for kids in Africa that at times it would be so excruciatingly hard I wonder if I might have hesitated. One of my best friends says that she always knows I'm happy when my blog is updated with another story. I haven't written for over two weeks because I lost all my strength to do this. It seems like it may be back, it always comes back when I sit with the t-shirts or design books and download all my creativity into what my business will look like so everyone in the world will fall in love with African kids the way I did back in Conakry.

It feels like I am at the very bottom of a massive dark pit with walls so high and so smooth there is no way I can get a grip. After four phone calls and seven phone prompts finally a recorded voice at Canadian Border Services told me they were closed. I was freaking out after the lady at UPS said even a $20 value on a trade barrier item might have duties of $500 applied to it which means my $1,200 value shipment would have duties of $30,000 on it. Of course it won't because that would be ridiculous but on the Customs website red hot words beside TARRIFFS are USED + TEXTILES. Canada does not want in any way anything second hand or anything textile entering this nation.

Two weeks ago I had tried to bring the shipment in through New York but then the Heathrow scare and that was the end of that. No shipments coming in from Nairobi due to terrorism. Terrorism? I thought - they should see what's going on next door in Somalia. Kenya's nothing.

So I found a lawyer in DC who gave me a quote to trademark the brand and while I was talking to him I was looking at the website of another law firm in Nairobi who also specialized in 'intellectual property'. My nemesis - if only I was happy selling real estate or being a teacher - those things are lucrative and good for the planet. But no, I had to decide that my sole purpose in life was to create wealth in one of the most volatile complicated and messed up places on the planet. Anyway this Kenyan law firm states very clearly on their site that "Although official Government policy has been to encourage investment in Kenya, including from abroad, its record in attracting significant foreign investment has been poor. With a liberalized economy (price controls and foreign exchange controls were lifted more than a decade ago), and a vibrant market-driven private sector, Kenya could be further along the development path than it is."

Intellectual property is also a bit weak and requires 'modernization'. My thinking is that the business needs to be based in the US to take advantage of strong corporate law and our product imported into the States as there is almost no duty on incoming Kenyan textiles and of course, the American economy is the most powerful entity on the planet so all this seems a no-brainer. At the same time I am thinking the team in Nairobi can find ways to re-cost the product and start selling it to Kenyans as well as long as we can protect the brand. And it's funny because there is almost no retail brand industry in Kenya - there's a few little things but nothing based on intellectual property - mostly commodities based brands like oil, coffee or sugar.

I have to lie down after the customs experience. It was like a flashback to last fall when I was arranging for the 3 Kenyans to come visit for our art show. It's all so hypocritical for the average person. I get on a plane with no cash and fly halfway around the world knowing full well I don't have the $50 USD to enter Kenya and by the graciousness of trading with Africa I am let in and welcomed. Of course I paid the visa fee but only after I found a Barclay's ATM in the Jomo Kenyatta arrivals lobby. "Don't do that again" the security guard told me so of course I suggested they relocate the ATM so it was beside the visa application desk. And if I was an African boldly exiting into the Great White North with no paperwork or money? They can't even get into our embassy in Nairobi.

I can't rest because I am sleeping in my friend's loft and its so bloody sunny I could get a suntan and I'm boiling. After lying there feeling sorry for myself for three minutes I get up and put on my bathing suit. I've never tanned while working in an office but why not? I can't not succeed at this. As I sit at my desk in my bikini trying to learn more about importing I look at myself and think I am becoming somewhat of a weird person. Other people are rollerblading or sitting on a patio drinking cold beer and here I am living out of suitcases and thinking about kids in Africa. I am so deep into this it has changed me.

But then I sit down with the 20 colour samples I scored at Home Depot thanks to Ralph Lauren and I layout the colour lines of 'village', 'national', 'coastal' and 'exports'. There is probably nothing I don't know about the Kenyan economy and how it works - it's all there in the colours of our shirts; bloodshed, sunshine, coffee, tea, carnation pink, indian ocean, rusty, corn, kiss - everything you see in Kenya is a colour.

I got an email the other day from one of the designers. She asked to use some of her fees to pay for drugs for her mother who is sick. When she was refused to cash a cheque unless she had sex with the officer she realized she only had a few days to make this decision. As I go to bed at the end of what seems a nightmare of a day in the world of small business I think of my own mother who died because there were no drugs to cure her back then. I never reached out and asked anyone to help us halfway across the world. I wonder why not?

One day in June my father told me my mother would be dead by Xmas and sure enough she was. I didn't make a single phone call, or ask for help or even read a book about cancer. It was 1986 and we all had free passes to Expo. That was the year all the sushi bars opened and the farmed salmon industry began. My mother died 12 days before Xmas which has always amused me in some strangely musical way. When I think of her I think of the kids I know in Kenya and tell myself businesses succeed every day and some don't even try to make people's lives better.

I told her we couldn't lend her money but that I would try and get her another order so she would have income instead. I haven't heard from her since. I wonder what decision she made and if this is why she hasn't emailed back. And why didn't I say - yes - do whatever you have to do to save your mother. It's times like this that I crawl into bed and think not only I am failing as a businessperson I can't even seem to get the human stuff right.

A new door opens - www.shinda.org - a gift from someone who not only understands but cares too.

Attention Publishers

This blog is a book in progress and viewable for publishers. Please contact sue@cpgkenya.com for more info.

After three years of trying to build a fair trade business in Africa for Africa, one thing I have learned is that there is massive public support in North America and Europe for examples of success stories. I started writing this book in response to emails, phone calls and letters I regularly receive from friends and strangers who truly want to fair trade with Africa, but don't know where to start. And after all the donations, fundraisers and charitable intentions - a very young Africa is ready to show the world what they have to offer as equal trading partners.

The bulk of the stories are written by me as a journal with creative support from the team who runs our t-shirt studio in downtown Nairobi and others who have partnered with us during the past three years. Our publishing goal is to create a revenue product for the business while offering the market a 'how-to' entertaining read on what it takes to build wealth for Africa. Kenya is primarily used in the examples because of our location but most of the stories are common throughout the continent. Every story has photographs to visualize the context. There are a few entries from kids in Sierra Leone and South Africa where we are researching our expansion as somewhat of a 'franchise' model in order to build wealth in other African nations.

If anyone wants to learn how to partner-trade with Africa - this book will give them a personal account of what's in store for them with the encouragement to believe it is possible. It is a personal journal of my own intimate struggle and passion - despite my North American privilege, opinions and ignorance - to overcome many real or fictional obstacles in order to successfully build a profitable enterprise that works to the advantage of Africa.

Please contact sue@cpgkenya.com for more information or comments. The book will be finished in December 2006.

Cover photo - Pengilas Lepoora, SHERP Orphanage - Samburu Kenya.

The Aral Sea

If you look on a map of Eastern Europe you'll find The Aral Sea just east of the Caspian Sea - in the Central Asian deserts sandwiched between the formerly Soviet states of Uzbekistan and Kazakstan. It is the 4th largest body of inland water in the world and the largest reserve of inland salt. But to really see the Aral Sea, you would have to have a new map that indicates that perhaps the Sea is misnamed because there's no water in it anymore. It's a dried up chemical-infested salt flat not unlike I imagine Death Valley in California only more savory.

In the 1960's when the African slave families of the American South finally got out of bondage and stopped picking those backbreaking cotton crops the agricultural opportunity to do so moved to the Aral Sea. In a massive human rights movement to free oppressed people in The United States the result has been to environmentally destroy another human settlement halfway across the world.

I pick up a copy of this month's Vanity Fair to pass the time on the nautical journey from Tsawassen to Schwartz Bay as I cross the Georgia Straight to the Southern tip of Vancouver Island. I don't normally read Vanity Fair but the stories are so well written and when I do I feel for a brief few hours that I live in New York. Those writers are so smart and so efficient in their collection of ideas - it's like they know all the interesting and juicy things the rest of us would never come across - someone with as my friend Judy says, 'great cocktail party skills'. Personally I love the cocktail party concept - if I can't squeeze any interesting coversations out of the crowd I can leave and nobody cares. Dinner parties are different.

Joan Root was a Kenyan environmentalist who was doing whatever she could to save Lake Naivasha from being drained by the flower growers perched on the edges of the lake and whisk their goods to Europe in their own private fleet of jets. So in this eerie twist of affairs - an elderly formerly English woman who lives on 85 acres of some of the most beautiful land in Kenya gets murdered so she'll shut up in order so friends walking the high streets of London can have their roses and tulips and green beans. That's really what it comes down to - another murder in Kenya only this time by the dark forces of employment and profit and growth that Joan's advocacy was thought to threaten.

Usually Vanity Fair writes about murders in Kenya by folks who are sleeping with people they're not supposed to be sleeping with. I don't mind those stories - a bit harsh really for breaching the monogamy pact but much closer to our own lives and good to know we're not the only ones bringing problems upon ourselves in life. But this story is creepier because it's about flowers, something beautiful we all love that at a dinner party you would never think might be draining a lake or ending the life of a little old lady who lived in a farm and cared for the future.

Will I ever find myself in some sort of similar and terrifying position - because I am using business as my activism to alleviate poverty, generate income and get kids into schools? Will someone whisper about me in the dark night of Nairobi - 'that woman who makes t-shirts from recycled product found in the markets - she is helping children so we need to get rid of her'. Could our artwork and exhibitions and napkins and pillowcases and teams of designers learning photoshop ever represent something other than opportunity for Kenya? Will I live like the Dalai Lama one day - forced to do what I love outside of Kenya because it ceases to be safe for me there? I think my father fears this.

It is well known that big business gains when it operates within nations that are deemed 'unstable' so much so that there is a history of failed states ironically full of oil and diamonds and the lowest wages on the planet. I know this becasue for 3 years I have been discouraged by people who love me - not to invest in Kenya because it is dangerous and volatile and it's children are not worth risking my life over. These forces be them real or imaginary keep competition away and allow for huge monopolies to exist working under very difficult conditions but at the end of the day highly lucrative and worth all the line items like security, weapons and bribes. After all that there is still big big money to be made when no one else is around to bring the price down. And this kind of protectionism occurs in different more socially acceptable ways - be it through import duties or immigration laws like we have in place in Canada.

Next week I will test this theory in Canada when the studio ships the first major load of product to me here so I can look at the invoice and see what our government says about doing business with Kenya. I have been told the duties will be as high as 18% which is why we don't see products from Kenya here. But my secret weapon is that I am from here and I used to work in shipping. I know how the system works and I will trade to our advantage as much as I possibly can. And I am a writer who knows how one word can completely change someone's perception - how an intonation can make someone truly care by stopping to think about their own actions and what kind of impact we all have everyday with every decision we make.

I want my business to be an example of how something beautiful and healthy can show others that if we don't get caught up in all the dialogue maybe over time of just getting dirty doing what we believe in things will get better. When I worked in West Africa for Doctors Without Borders I quickly realized this was a wrong move and I got out of the NGO world. I was never going to succeed pointing fingers and fighting in the same wars that feed off humantiarian activity. It was so easy for me to see how angry I would become over time, how disillusioned or deflated I would end up being after engaging in things I didn't believe in.

So I think of the Aral Sea and wonder if this flower production keeps up at the pace it's going after 20 or 30 more years there will be no Lake Naivasha. When I visited the lake in June I saw a hippo up on the land much higher than usual, when I was there last year, and I wondered if he was simply standing where he normally floated and hadn't noticed the water level had gone down. Hippos don't look very smart - they can chase after you and kill you in an instant but not an animal I would think to be perky or alert to change. Before I left Lake Naivasha I bought a box of crayfish on the dock and took them back to the Parklands where I was living and gave them to the kitchen staff in exchange for a plate of my own. Lots of garlic and onions with tomato on the side.

Crossing the Georgia Straight last night - a massive body of water connected to the Pacific Ocean and filled with the tips of drowned mountains we now call the Southern Gulf - I think of Joan Root and this idea that we are using up the fresh water supplies of the world so we can have t-shirts and flowers. This is the primary reason why I have chosen to use recycled or 'dumped' textiles for the business - after learning about the textiles industry for the last 2 years and basically having to lie down and rest from all the awful depressing news within it - how it uses up precious water and pays people awful wages - how we in the rich countries devour all these clothes week after week in all the supermalls you can imagine - it's awful and terrifying the toll it takes on the planet so 6 billion of us can be 'in style'. But we have more than enough - so much so that we send it all off to other places like Kenya because we don't want to see it in our lives anymore and we believe our castoffs can help others.

A friend of mine said to me 'people might not want to buy a recycled t-shirt Sue - they might want a new one' and even though I am so far past this thought myself I stopped in my tracks and privately grieved. If they knew about the Aral Sea and they had ever seen a photo of beautiful Joan Root caring for hippos and birds and god knows what else wandered past her - if they connected all the dots along the industrial agriculture trail I know in my heart they would say - give me the one that saves the planet. I will buy the one that Joan Root suggests will save her lake.

So I will go to my meeting this morning to attempt to finalize my business plan and I will tell yet again another person with their mouth open that yes - all the products are made from recycled things we find on the streets of Nairobi and turn them into beautiful usable wearable art. That there are creatively feasible ways to lessen the impact, decrease the traffic and get kids into school if we choose to believe it is possible.

This story is for Joan Root who with her father gave photographic safaris to guests who came from all over the world to see the Lake Naivasha.

Cultural Benevolence

Sitting here watching Israel destroy Lebanon I see a man on the news say that what Israel should really do is talk to their enemies. And I hope that this war, so brutal in it's honesty, will teach us just how far off the track we have become.

The downtown eastside is one of the poorest most painful communities in Canada. It is full of drug addicts, sex trade workers, homeless people and blocks of empty storefronts. It is also the oldest neighbourhood of the city - the first one built to service the Port of Vancouver. It is also the strongest community we have despite the broken windows - connected, interpendant, trading within itself.

When I decided to build a business in Kenya I realized I needed some experience first to prove that trading with those in poverty is better than charity so I spearheaded a for-profit calendar project using disposable cameras in this neighbourhood ten minutes drive from the house I grew up in. In 2007 the calendar will go into it's fourth year of production, still proud, still earning income for those who need it most. The calendar seeks to pay for itself bringing with it opportunity for the marginalized, forgotten and needy.

And now I am back down there taking more photos for another project looking for a dumpster behind the Sunrise Market where produce is left for local residents. And so I think of 'benevolence' and how the Chinese community in Vancouver was built. In the 1920's the only way Chinese people who had come to Vancouver to build the railways could bring their families to join them was through what was known as 'Benevolent Societies' or in essence, pay to enter with care.

Having lived in Vancouver most of my life I have always wondered how the hell the Chinese residents put up with all the violence and drugs and crime within their shared community of the downtown eastside. Of all the kinds of people to co-habitate with crystal meth addicts, shuffling elderly Chinese ladies has always seemed so strange to me. But then I think of the Benevolent Societies and wonder if there must be a connection.

Maybe somehow the Chinese who struggled to come here so long ago and then to establish themselves and raise their families in a completely foreign culture can empathize with this marginalized population. Perhaps they are less judgemental or afraid - more accepting or enlightened somehow about what they see.

When I photograph the dumpster I see fresh tomatoes that I could easily use to make some kick ass tomato sauce and I ask myself - should I take some? They have just been placed minutes ago by one of the marketers and they're not rotting - they're just kinda soft or torn - and since my tomato sauce would beat them to a pulp anyway, what's the difference? But I don't take any. Maybe if no one was looking I might. How often do you get something you need for free?

The dumpster reminds me of the kids I meet on the streets of Nairobi, when they approach me and ask for money or food by the studio. I always go get them something to eat in what I feel is all I really can do. And when I do this the Kenyans always talk to me, tell me they don't need money they need a place to live and someone to care for them. I don't believe it's right to take kids out of their culture through adoption - I think it's better to help build a world around them so they at least they have this thing they know that is them. Their culture will always give them a ladder to climb, an advantage or hug from home.

And this is the same thing in the downtown eastside - not to take the residents out or displace them but to rebuild what is around them so they can care for themselves. This is like what is happening in Aceh Indonesia after the tsunami. Many of the aid organizations who went there with suitcases of cash have left now, their project abandoned and leaking, reminders of the temporariness of an outsider's care. It is the few housing projects being run by and for the people of Aceh that are working. When we take ourselves out of the end result of helping others, when we do it truly for purposes of benevolence maybe somehow what our intentions are supposed to be can shine more clearly through those we seek to support.

Hero of the Day - John Adams, founder of Room to Read.

Pendo

So what do you say when someone you have always hoped to find in life walks through the doors of the international departures terminal - taking you completely by surprise - and asks "Do you have to leave today?"

When I started this business three years ago it was to step out of a work life that forced me to do incredible amounts of things that I 'had to' do or I literally would be out of a job. Forget going to the dentist or lunch with a friend - sometimes I didn't even have time to go to the bathroom which is a bit much but it happens. Work can be like this for so many of us. Yes we have to work. Yes we have to earn income. Yes life brings sacrifice and compromise and consequences which is fine. But I will never believe that work has to control us - we created it so we should be able to mold it around the other things we need so it works for us and not against us. Sure things will go wrong or someone will get mad but some things in life are rare and mostly these things involve people.

Yesterday I sat on my girlfriends deck drinking raspberry wine from a vineyard she had picked berries at on Westham Island in the North Arm of the Fraser River. I know this island well because it is beside other smaller islands in the river where my uncle and grandfather used to go duck hunting. When I was a kid I remember standing on the back deck of our house reaching my hands up in the air to touch the plastic bag that held the felled ducks out of reach of our dog - and feeling their soft warm bodies lying in a bundle while our family ate dinner. The Fraser River boasts one of the largest estuaries in the world holding up to a million salmon every day in a region that is the size of Britain. The river is one of Vancouver's major sources of income facilitating trade all the way from the interior of the province right down to the Pacific where it runs free.

As we sat on the deck we talked about work and another friend said she didn't know if she was ever going to work again. Having sold her business I guess this was an option but at 52 years of age I couldn't imagine how she was going to do this. I believe that life needs the nourishment of work, some form of effort to put forth that does something beyond ourselves. And it made me think of the word 'work' itself. To work, overworked, lack of work - it's a massive system of human trade that seems to have been derailed and needs to be rethunk.

How can someone in Vancouver decide they will never work again while so many people in Nairobi would do anything to have even a small portion of work. There is such a massive imbalance in work and wealth across the globe that there must be a way to look at this and turn it into something more beneficial to more people.

I created my work so I suppose I see it all as a different thing. I decided my life's work was going to be all about alleviating poverty - I actually think of that as my job. I happen to own a struggling small business that I hope to grow but at the end of the day what I do is simple - the small tasks of figuring out how to move capital out of the hands of those who have enough, or too much, and get it into the hands who are literally starving for lack of it.

Joseph called me this morning from Nairobi. He has had malaria so I asked him if he had lost weight and he said, 'not so much'. Likely he doesn't have money for the drugs and he probably got the malaria after going home West to his village. He too is Otieno - a boy, born at night. I was so happy to be able to say I would be there in a few days - after my second attempt to safari - the next chapter in my doing business with Kenya.

Pendo = love. Nakupenda = I love you. Penda = to love.

Fear of Flying

I always know when it's time to go back to Africa - it finds a way somehow to tell me. A dried maple leaf lying on Balaclava as I walk home in my cocktail dress and a borrowed pair of shoes after a long night with friends. One friend has just come back from a Bolivian village - another from Croatia, Osoyoos and Port Simpson filming with First Nations children. We are all searching to make sense of everything, all trying to be the best we can be and laughing at our failures along the way.

Of all the fears I have - flying is not one of them. Thank god really because getting to Nairobi from Vancouver is a long haul to say the least. This time I go through Amsterdam in hopes of checking out how Holland does business with Kenya. Dutch tourism is big business and the Holland flower markets are full of flower buds that began their beautiful albeit brief life in Kenya.

Homegrown is a Kenya based business that I research often in hopes of figuring out to build something big and lucrative - enough cash flow to seriously educate some kids and spread the word on how to do business with Kenya. So this is where one of my biggest fears actually resides, in this dark unknown place I am headed towards called success, or failure I suppose if I take the wrong turn. Am I going to be able to do this in Nairobi? Can I actually harness all my passion and ideas and love for this country into a positive cash flow statement that takes care of people's lives? Something that Kenya sees walking by and smiles thinking - we make those t-shirts right here in the place of cold water.

Sometimes, on a good day I am so full of positivity that I think yes of course I will find a way to succeed - lots of other people do it and some of them aren't even that smart or interesting. But what they do works and that's what counts. There's no point at the end of the day going through all the motions in business if you can't get it working in a healthy way. And so I think of Enron and how Kenneth Lay just kinda died suddenly last week and I wonder - okay here is this amazingly successful company where everyone is happy and their work in breakthrough and then before you know it the entire company represents the height of failure and corporate greed.

On a bad day I dwell on all the things I don't know how to do - how all the details and ideas and plans confuse me in an attempt to imagine how thousands of people could interact with us and help grow what I see as the future of Kenya. And it's like standing at the bottom of a mountain looking at the bright sunny mountaintop and then you see the miles and miles of hill that separates you from getting there and it seems easier to go back to the coffee shop and wait until tomorrow. That is fear of flying.

I can get on a plane and hurl myself halfway across the world to connect with strangers in Africa and say "Let's start a business" and I can put everything ounce of everything I have into it for over two years knowing that what I am doing is important, knowing that creating more equitable systems of fair trade is a major answer to these disparaging rifts of those of us who are very very poor and the we that are choking and sick from having too much. That's really what it's about I think.

So what am I afraid of? I have always told myself since I started this in 2003 that as long as nobody killed me I was going to accomplish something. If I could just help 2 or 3 kids then I would be able to sit down and think, I did something beyond my own self and this is good. But now after 3 years my ambition has grown much bigger and my understanding of the issues that are making Africa poor is so much deeper that I believe unquestionably that what I have managed to create, if enlarged and shared with the world could not only help some kids but could seriously encourage others to get in the fair trade game.

Nobody ever says no to buying our t-shirts. I go to sleep each night wearing one that says SHINDA to remind myself whilst dreaming that African can win, it can conquer the wounds that bleed it, it can heal. This is the most important and fulfilling and human thing I have ever done with my life so much so that I can't imagine my life without it. What could I possibly do if I wasn't working to make the world better? This isn't a road on my journey anymore.

Last night I had the most amazingly fun and beautiful dinner in the sunset with my friend Richard who without fail always brings Africa to me. When he owned an airplane it crashed while he was flying and he lay in bed for a year I think while specialists put him back together again after all the burns. And he told me that he had more visitors than anyone ever had in the hospital because at the end of the day the most important thing to him is his friends. As we were leaving this great lady came by who is a big advocate for fair fish trading and we talked briefly about the cost benefit of financing a better world by using our consumption to do so. I told her the thing about fair trade I didn't expect was that once you learn it or understand how it can transform problems you really can't go back. Other ways of shopping cease to have the same meaning.

So can we transform the global economy into something that meets our needs through consumption at the just the right amount while lessening all the pressure we put on the world's resources to do so? If we wanted to make the entire economy about poetry - we could trade our way out of debt and poverty and drought and war. We could trade other things, better things that keep the cycle growing so it doesn't all come to a grinding halt.

In the USA now there is a reality show about youth obesity. This must be the climax. It can't get any worse than this.

Safari of the month - Air Transat 380 - one way ticket to Amsterdam.

Growing Up on the Coast

When I lived in Australia for a year after university I learned to juggle on a boat - standing in the middle of the wheelhouse of a 48' yacht being driven by my boyfriend Martin Butler - I taught myself how to juggle 3 lemons during a trip from the Whitsunday Islands to the Great Barrier Reef off the Eastern Coast of the continent. Surprisingly really, all my boating experience has been on ruggedly gorgeous coasts within reach of where I was born and have mostly lived, in Vancouver. And this makes me giggle really, out of humour mostly that I can actually juggle because this is very untypical of me - but that I was to learn at all it would naturally have been on a boat.

My father was and is a yachtman, I guess you'd say. He's the kinda guy who mostly wears clothing that are various shades of blue you see if you sit watching the sunset during the summer in Howe Sound a little bit North West of Vancouver. It's true and odd actually that as the receding mountains of islands and coastline going back into the depths of far awayness, instead of layers of fading greens what you actually see is layers of fading blues. Tony Onley paintings are like this. A coastline full of gorgeously green fir trees that crash into the great Pacific Ocean that to the naked eye appear blue. Emily Carr painted them green, but then again, she was a woman so maybe this had something to do with it.

I came to spend the weekend at my father's house on the Sunshine Coast and for the entire 48 hours I was filled with a sense of - 'this is who I am and what I have always been - what I am made of and what I know how to do'. I know how to run down a steep ramp on a dock, I know how much sockeye salmon is worth and I know that when a stranger knocks on the hull of your boat, you invite them aboard for whatever kind of cold drink you have to offer.

Walking down the marina dock I was still 10 yards away when my old friend Bruce came out of the wheelhouse and started yelling at me. There is nothing anywhere in the world that feels as welcoming as an old friend who is happy to see you on a boat and puts down whatever is in their hands to make you feel at home. Climbing aboard the Kona Winds like I have done time and time again for the last 18 years felt like pulling on that old pair of jeans you still love, falling into the arms of someone who never fails to say 'give me a hug'. Something to count on.

This is why I love Africa so much. And why I love my life in Vancouver too because I am lucky to have such history and so many friends who still play the part of the characters in my memories - experiences that anchor us in what we are, what we have always been. In Africa it seems, and maybe I feel this more as an outsider, but it seems that almost always the act of welcoming takes precedence over the act of whatever it is we are busy doing. That to have someone make the effort to come to us and want to be with us becomes far more of a priority than whatever it is we are doing alone. To me that is graciousness, a form of extending ourselves into that realm of what is human and momentary. It is what I remember from growing up on the coast and what I search for most in life.

And I can't be unusual or unique in this - not many people grew up on boats like I did but most of us probably do remember the days when we didn't even question that a visit was taking up more precious time than the visit itself. This is why we work so hard, this is how our children learn new things, this must be something more fresh and fun than all the dates and times we scribble down in our daytimers. I was raised to believe that to extend the gift of yourself with courtesy and giving was a good thing and not an inconvenience - that to show up with a story and some humour or a welcoming gift was a treat and meant something, albeit brief. I think this is one of the things I feel the greatest sadness for, or loss of, before all the phones and voicemails and apologies - that to just be what you are when you can be was enough.

So I grew up on the Coast and when I look at a map of Howe Sound, Burrard Inlet and the Georgia Straight I know all the corners and crags of these places. And spending the weekend at my father's house makes me think of Kenya in that it too is a place that used to be another place before all the other people from all the other places came to visit. I don't want to turn back the clock, I'm not upset, but I do take certain liberties because I am from here, I am a local, I'm from the Coast.

And it reminds me so much of when I see the Kikuyu in Nairobi and the way they look at all the other Kenyans, the way they look at me, as if to say, "You are a visitor, take good care of this place, it used to be ours". And how I see them walk away in their groups indignant of the traffic or cars or new found establishment - it didn't used to be that way and somehow that still means something. I am like a Kikuyu in Vancouver, it is my place, my legacy, that somehow paints the frame around the picture that is me.

A week from today I get on a plane and fly again halfway across the world in hopes of feeling at home enough to build my business that is a gift for Kenya. Na Heshima. Respectfully. A flag that symbolizes freedom from the past, a country that longs to hold onto what is good and move beyond what was a shackle.

Israel has invaded Lebanon. I remember this from the seventies, only Arafat. My friend Georges who is working in Nairobi is in Beirut right now with his 3 young children, triplets he and his wife finally mangaged to conceive after years of believing it could be possible.

dbwa, Sue

Family Trading

Underneath all the crucial and justifiable layers of reasons for why I am building this business is a deeply personal and tender reason why, at the end of the day, I am able to. When I was 18 years old my mother died taking with her the answers to all the questions I have had since about how to do things like how to be a really good friend or what to do in a tricky social situation. It baffles me on a pretty regular basis what this kind of relationship would be like in my life - like if I could have it back right now what would it possibly feel like not to have to figure out all these things mostly on my own, mostly without guidance from the one person who knows and loves you more than anyone else in the world. I do what I do in Kenya because when I look down into the eyes of all the great orphans I meet I know exactly how they feel inside and I know what they need so they can feel strong. They're exactly like me, I am a bigger them.

But I got lucky when my dad found a really groovy lady who agreed to the job of spending the rest of her life with him and with it a step-mother who is always supportive of what I do - like buy my t-shirts! The step-parent role is so strange really when a parent dies - this absolute complete virtual stranger walks into your life and immediately fills the shoes of being the most important person in your life and you don't even get to be a part of the interview process. It's different when families divorce - with death it's closer and more tender.

So my step-mum is this great champion of all of us in the family - eagerly throwing her support in whatever way she feels best to help us all in our disparate ways of making our own lives work. After having spent over 15 years jumping over all these hurdles she would be an excellent candidate for the UN - a peace negotiator at the table with all the mothers of all the leaders of the world. If there is one thing I would like to see more of in politics - it's high heels, lipstick and jewellery. We really have yet to see at all what we are capable of as a planet when less than 5% of our leaders are women. It's not representative, it's not good enough.

Over the past few months I have been sharing ideas and messages with a young teenager who lives in Freetown Sierra Leone in hopes of him being interested in starting a business. I have offered to mentor and help find seed capital if he and some buddies can put together a team who want to learn how to make money. In one of his last emails he told me he wanted to call me Mon, which I think means Mom, and he signed the email 'your son'. I was touched and scared a bit thinking - what does this mean? He has a mom. I'm a virtual at friend at best but then I think of all the kids I meet in Nairobi who also have called me 'mama' or 'auntie' and I realize that it is only a sign of the extended family / child adult bond that exists in Africa more firmly than in my own culture of North America. That in some way all adults are responsible to nurture and raise the community of children, that one is not enough and that why not share? Why not open the net and cast the influence wider?

Most of my really close girlfriends are about ten years older than me and I think sometimes this is because besides being buddies, they look out for me, they advise me and help me in deeper ways because they have already raised children and with their friendship comes a sense of mothering. And when I think of the many boyfriends I have had whom I am in touch with still, affectionately, I realize that in some way they are like brothers to me who taught me something, looked out for me and made me laugh. People who have loved me through the journey of my life so far.

I don't know if there is anything as important as this really. To be loved, to love and to nurture others. The guy at the Western Union last night when I was wiring this week's salaries to the studio said he thought people in Vancouver were to busy with their cell phones and blackberries and volvos to even talk to each other. That he and his wife from Nova Scotia don't understand people here and why they are too busy doing things to share their lives with others.

And I understood what he meant because the life I am building in Kenya is slower and more full of moments when I am with people, not rushing, just being. After all what is all this productivity for if we don't take the time to enjoy it?

Transfer of the Week - Peter Ogego heading from Ottawa to Washington DC to teach Americans how to do business with Kenya.

Pole Pole

Pole Pole is a swahili expression that means 'slowly slowly'. My Dutch friend and I sat drinking wine the other night until quite late and she said the same thing only in English.

So slowly slowly the t-shirts are becoming a rather very finished product. This one will be used as a sales presentation I am doing tomorrow for a buyer who wants 100 of our shirts - an order to keep us all going for a few months so I have been getting all sorts of things in place to be ready.

UMOJA means 'together' or 'of one' - MOJA meaning one. These colours are Indian Ocean Blue, Independance White, Mombassa Sand (stiching) and coffee (inside neck). The silkscreen design is HULA from the SHERP Orphanage in Maralal - licence fees wired into their kids revenue account.

MOJA MOJA! One by one.

Our Logo

What does life have in store for you if you are a blind girl living a remote part of Northern Kenya? An opportunity to be the inspiration for a logo representing African's youngest brand - a fair-trade t-shirt company that helps orphans earn income so they can go to school. Inawezekana.

Atieno Okeyo

My favourite Kenyan name is 'Atieno' which means born at night in the Luo language of Western Kenya. I first heard this beautiful name from my friend Grace Wattanga whom I met in Vancouver through her daughter Barbra whom I met in a gas station. In my search to meet Kenyans in Vancouver over the past three years every time I met an African I asked them what country they were from and once in a while they said Kenya. Throught this I have met a Patience from Nigeria, a Benjamin from Ghana, a Tina from the States (unfortunately the African Americans rarely can trace their heritage country) and a Ken from Kenya.

Barbra Okeyo is our Nairobi Design Co-ordinator. Her secret African name is Atieno and she was the first person in Nairobi to do work with the cpgkenya. Over the past few months she has blossomed into a designer, a manager, a human resources specialist, a salesperson and most of all which you can only hope and wish for as a business owner - she has come to find her own way to nurture the cpgkenya and thrive within it.

The reason Barbra is working with us (not that she needs one) is to save her earnings to finance an education to become a human rights lawyer. If there is one job that Africa needs it's young people to excel at it is in this tender but vital area of human rights. Barbra earns a 10% licence fee every time one of her "Trade Not Aid" shirts sell + as she works full time she has a salary. Just like the orphans whose photos become art that is licenced, Barbra imagined our first made in Kenya design - our main message to the world that what Africa needs is more opportunity to trade fairly and not more aid.

I was at my high school reunion last night with 100 old friends and every single one of them came up to me and congratulated me on the cpgkenya. Everyone made a point to say "Good for you" or "I'd like to come visit with my kids" (because of course they all have children - have to get on that one) and it made me so happy to be able to talk about Barbra who they would never even know about because all they see on the news from Africa is hunger or corruption or AIDS or war. And because I am one of them and we have shared a 20-year history I can tell them "It's not like that. It's different and it needs econcomic trade so it can pull itself out of the shackles of all the historical traps that has kept it down."

Partly all my friends are proud because it's me and it's a very funky business. But mostly, like I experience everyday going about my work, my friends congratulated me because they know, like I know, that Africa deserves something better. There is such a powerful growing solidarity to reach out to Africa and do something - people just want to know what is best. They're busy, their lives are full of work and children and sitting in traffic and the idea of then on top of this - solving poverty on another continent is a bit overwhelming. That's why I built the cpgkenya. To give people an easy fun way to invest in Kenya. Buy a t-shirt, come meet Barbra, get on a plane, read a book or watch a movie - just find a way to trade with Africa.

Canada Day - July 1st - 139 years on the shield.

YVR - NBO

In the past five years I have learned there are two ways to build a business - to make everything about you and your ideas, your way, your name, your micro-managing behaviour so everything goes exactly as you want OR, to empower others to build and create a business that works for many people in many ways and you just get to go along for the ride. The point is for it to work - it doesn't matter how - just that it works so who cares what it looks like?

During a rather restless night of sleep I happened to catch the guy on tv who wrote the book RICH DAD POOR DAD and he said something that I started to realize a few years ago. As I watched myself not succeed very well in a business and culture that values the individual over the group I woke up one day and realized I would never succeed at the level I wanted to if my work was about me. I'm not like that, I work best working on behalf of others. But I wanted to build wealth for myself and so it seemed confusing - like I should try and become a CEO and earn a big salary and master all these business things so I could win, when I'm not built like that in fact that kind of stuff embarrases me.

I work in teams, I love interdependancy, I'm always asking people what they're good at so we can find ways for them to thrive and I think this is the most powerful tool to have in business. The RICH DAD guy says you have to get yourself into the environment where you will thrive, where your own personal genius will blossom because we are all geniuses in some way but certain conditions have to be in place for this to take hold.

So I started going to Africa and now I am back here in Canada working on behalf of the 12 people who work as a group with the business back in Nairobi. They know, like I know that for now in some ways I am better used outside of Kenya - to promote the business and meet people and get orders which is what I do best and what pays the bills. And when I go online to shoot over digital photos of new designs or ideas it makes me giggle really with how beautiful the whole thing is. I built a business for Africans and there they are running the show with little need from me! If I died today (surrounded by fabric and threads and scissors) I will rest peacefully knowing I succeeded somehow in someway to create opportunity for my Kenyan friends.

SHINDA is a Swahili word that means 'to win' or 'to conquer' and it is a special word in our design history because it was the first word ever chosen for a t-shirt by a very talented designer named Sophie Rimmel. I still have the shirt she designed for us two years ago when we had nothing besides some photos and a dream. She chose that word to represent what she saw in these kids, what she believed was possible for orphans in Kenya. Maybe even what she felt was possible for herself.

Am trying to help a small group of Vancouverites from the Sauder School of Business find a place to stay in Nairobi while they launch micro-finance projects in Kenya. What a treat that will be to have 6 people show up and share in the doing of what my own goals are. If only we had a guesthouse ready to go now. I have always imagined that somehow the gallery will provide accomodation for small groups of visitors who come to Kenya to invest in children. Living as a group, together.

I saw on some news report that the future of living means we will all be co-habitating together intergenerationally sharing energy and space in a harmonious Noah's ark kind a way. And I think we are already there, this is how I live amidst and amongst the people I love. If there is food in the fridge why not share it? If you have a need why not ask for help? Living in Shaughnessy it baffles me really how so many people would want to live in such big houses with so few people in them. It's beautiful but it's lonely and it's only for a few.

When I was kid we used to have sleepovers all the time and it was always my favourite thing to fall asleep in a room full of people laughing and squished on top of each other, accepting and bickering their way to sleep.

Book on the Shelf - 'The Road Less Travelled' by Scott M Peck, and it has made all the difference.

Khatsalhano

Kitsilano was named in honour of Chief Khatsahlanough, a leader of one of the Squamish First Nations Bands that originally inhabited the land around Kits Point in Vancouver. It is one of the most stunning locations in the entire city and apparently was inhabited only during the warm summer months - much like it is today packed with bodies lying in the warm sun. The Vancouver summers are so brief that literally every sunny day counts before fall comes and with it the dark rainy months of winter when the earth tilts backwards again and the nights get longer.

One of the main reasons I love Africa so much is that it straddles the equator and thus is mostly sunny and warm and dry all year round. Unlike Canada which is mostly dark and cold and wet all year round. But it is almost July in Vancouver and the beginning of the two most beautiful months of the year.

When I look at all the people lying in the sand at the beach I wonder how many of them have been to Africa or are contemplating a trip. And if they had a chance to purchase one of our hand made t-shirts would this mean anything to them? Or if they had a chance to learn about Chief Khatsahlanough and the summer fishing camps that were here, would this mean something amidst all the bikinis and sunglasses and footballs. There used to be a fish and chips shop here run by the Parks Board which makes me wonder if this evolved somehow someway through the strands of history of buying fish from the Squamish people. And still in this beautiful new restaurant in front of me called Watermark - fish is still being eaten here off big white plates swallowed down with cold white wine from the Okanagan.

So where did these people who eat fish, just like the people who eat fish in Kenya, where did they go, where are they now? Apparently Chief Khatsahlanough wasn't his real name, he just made it up one day because he was going to meet the Queen. And it reminds me of all the Kenyans I meet who tell me their names are Barbra or Joseph or Alice when I know their real names, their African names are something else like Atieno which is Luo for 'born at night'.

The Canadian flag we fly today replaced our first flag in September 1964 which was called the Red Ensign and had a small Union Jack in the corner. Unlike Kenya we are not independent from Britain, we are still a Dominion with representatives of the Queen here on soil. Kenya did shake off the last shackles of being a British colony -it succeeded thanks to the Mau Maus - of rebecoming itself again born as a Republic in December 1964 - 2 months before Canada flew it's first maple leaf.

dbwa, Sue

The Soul Has No Nation

The World Urban Forum isn't actually for everyone in the world to attend as of course I thought I would be welcome - couldn't even get past the info desk and the enforcement line of very organized and well informed women positioned in the lobby of the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre. Forgoing my usual M16 approach to all things I life, I politely left to go find some more sun. It is summer here now and really during the 2 brief months of July and August - Vancouver is an absolutely stunning place. I have a theory about this too - I think it's how the light reflects off of all the pale green glass bouncing off the ocean and the sand out towards Spanish Banks and then back again filtered through the haze making everything and everyone look beautiful and happy.

A few weeks before I left Nairobi I saw on the news a piece about Canada - which is absolutely rare - an ancient totem pole was being handed back to the Haisla First Nation from the Swedes who thought it would be a good idea to obscond the thing for it's own purpose (like no one was going to notice?) fifty years ago. In typical nature of BC's first nations peoples who are growing much more savvy and businesslike - much more forthright in taking back what is rightfully theirs - they managed to get the thing sent over in return for a new pole which the Swedes are extremely happy with.

So there I am wandering away from the World Urban Forum and into the open space of the art gallery lawn when I spot the thing. The totem pole - in some sort of mystic alliance there it was again right in front of my eyes. So I sat down on what must have been a douglas fir tree and listened to the Haisla Chief talk about how the totem poles tell the stories for children to learn their histories in the future. And that the 'soul has no nation' - for these poles tell of a tragic period for the Haisla's, that they are the 'great silent storytellers' of their culture to be passed down thru the generations. The stage is full of BC legends - all the Haisla in their beautiful costumes, the Premiere Gordon Campbell and David Suzuki who must be welcome anywhere people respect nature. What a treat. And there is a fellow from the Sudan beside me - I can tell because he is very dark skinned and he has scars across his forehead.

As I sit in the warm sun on a felled tree carved flat and smooth to sit on, I feel a deep deep spiritual connection to this place. A Squamish woman jokes with me and asks if I am from here because I know the names of the bands, I know the Mosquito Creek church, I know about Dead Man's Island - and I tell her that my grandfather was the manager of the Hudson's Bay Company. She smiled a big smile that showed her teeth and then said, "Well now that has changed". Standing next to her I felt like I do in Kenya - connected to a more ancient people, a more gentle culture that celebrates and sings. There is a little girl in a pink jumper who stands at my feet and looks up at me smiling - native, aboriginal, first nations. This day is for her.

One of the speakers tells the story of how for years Canada has lobbied with success to create within the new United Nations Human Rights Council a unique and bold bill to ratify the 'Rights of Indigenous Peoples' of which there are 370 million living on the planet. But since our new government, Harper's government, Canada has suddenly - today even, withdrawn it's support at the very last minute. The 3 other countries who do not support it are Australia, New Zealand and America - 2 of which are non-supporters of Kyoto which seems bitter and ironic. Our first nations people have such reverence for nature that it's painful to understand the link between the destruction of their habitat and the lack of recognition for their rights. And how they must have expended so much energy over the past decades, speaking and yelling and fighting for people in power to listen to them just so they could have the right and the voice to say - let us be in peace, let us be.

I find some wonderful sokeye salmon and bannock which reminds of Mandazi in Kenya - a fried cheap flatbread to use as a shovel for all the softer more valuable foods. Sitting on the steps of the art gallery in the sun eating the salmon from our beautiful waters I think about the idea that the 'soul has no nation' and I wonder maybe if it's more like we have forgotten that nations are made up of souls which cannot be held within borders or contracts or treaties. The soul wanders to places that call to it - it leads us instantly towards something that makes us feel. Our souls make us human. They connect us. In moments like this I am deeply connected to my soul and I am never anything but content.

Getting off the Arbutus bus I walk up the abandoned train tracks towards the house I am renting. For a brief few moments I see no cars. I hear no cars. Just the soft old grass that grows wild in this narrow corridor of abandoned land running through the city. For years I have walked and run this railway track grateful that over time the city has decided to let it fall into some wonderful time-trapped decay. It's a secret avenue I travel to most of the places I need to go. My father used to ride the little train that ran up this line to his uncles house with his dog. He told me one day the dog managed to get himself on the train all alone and was ushered off at the right stop by the conductor who recognized him.

Maybe in some way the stories we tell are a part of what makes up our souls. And without these stories we would not understand what we were meant to be.

National Aboriginal Day - June 21st, Vancouver British Columbia.

The World Urban Forum

There is something delightfully synergetic about the fact that during the same one week of the year the World Peace Forum is in Vancouver - so is the World Urban Forum. I come from a pretty cool place obviously - a place that works - that thinks and somehow manages to implement the tools to make people's lives better. Apparently in Vancouver more people than anywhere else in North America walk to work, besides New York City.

It reminded me of watching Al Gore on Charlie Rose and his theory of the completely stupid cycle the North American consumption pattern really is - and I think he's going to have a major major impact with his film. He says the US is borrowing money from China to get oil from the most volatile region of the world so the planet can get so polluted from carbon emissions and the world will perish. And it felt so good after all those crazy years of trying to get out of making television commercials watching all the plastic toys be pulled out of boxes so they could be filmed to show children who would want to buy them and throw them in a garbage a few weeks later. And so the Paxil. My life was not supposed to be like that. It is supposed to be like it is now.

As I watch an advert for the World Urban Forum I see a group of kids from Nairobi who have come halfway around the world with black and white photos they have taken of their lives. And I am here having just come back from Nairobi where I work with kids who take pictures of their lives. This must make sense. When I think about whether there is a God or a spiritual force or something bigger and more mystical than us all - I always answer deeply and privately that yes, this is how life works because everyday so many little doors open and small visions come across my view that mean something.

Some people believe that this is happening to all of us - that you just have to be conscious enough or really super aware and eating lots of Omega 3's - if you can get yourself to this hyper conscious state it is all laid out for you just waiting. So how easy is that? Rather than fight it all and complain and commute all the way to places that don't make sense - just sit down, be quiet and let it happen.

So I will go down to the World Urban Forum tomorrow and somehow find a way to meet these kids from Nairobi and laugh at the similarities of our lives. That it is too special an opportunity to miss something like that.

I miss Africa. I miss the Africans more.

Celebration of the Week - World Refugee Day.

Nyumbani

The word Nyumbani is Swahili for 'home'. It probably means something more spiritual than this as all swahili words do - something like 'the place where spirit rests' that is translated simply to home for people like me. Language is such an untransferable idea in some ways and even though Swahili is a very simple and elegant language it has it's own private deeper meanings like any language.

So I am home in Vancouver feeling very much like a visitor, or a guest in some ways since I don't have a home here anymore and am only here for a brief month. Kenya won't let me stay there for more than 3 months at a time until I get a multiple-entry visa which will likely be the one I apply for during my third trip at the end of the year. When I go back in July I will stay again for three months this time right thru until mid-October when I will likely leave for a closer place than all the way back to North America. I really just have to leave Kenya for one day I think so I could go visit Dennis and other friends in Kampala - my friend Michael just came back from there and said it's the most beautiful African country which I've heard before. Or if I can swing it I was thinking maybe a brief week in Italy.

Life in Nairobi is tough especially the way I live it - describing in ways to my friends here what it's like while I build my business I'm sure it sounds rather dull or restricting. I go to a gym during the day, I walk home after work before it's dark and dangerous, at night I watch the news while moisturizing my feet or go grab some dinner with a friend, maybe catch a movie. All the same things really but what is missing are all the subtle outside transitions of moments that aren't an option for me in a city that constantly reminds me I could be hurt. And I know this to be very very true because I was hurt by the city and it could happen again at any time. So I live carefully in the daylight moments until I learn more about how things work.

So how do I describe what my life is like in Nairobi? As soon as I leave the apartment I rent it hits me - that noisy busy burnt hot feeling of an African city. The drivers are aggressive, everyone is hustling and I almost never ever do I see white people. It does kind of surprise me actually - the only time really is when I pass the Stanley and see them in jeeps coming from safaris or in a very solid looking UN white Toyoto Land Cruiser - someone important going or coming from a 'project' that is helping people. When I did some training for MSF in New York City I learned that there is a Toyoto factory solely dedicated to manufacturing these trucks for NGO's. They are made differently obviously, less cushioning in the seats, more steel in the doors.

I am corresponding thru email with the 10 or so people all helping to build the business in Nairobi. And they are all so sweet and kind - telling me they miss me, that they are becoming like a family of course, as Africans do. Every Friday they are sending a progress report and a breakdown of work done and salaries needed to do so. As we are fulfilling a large order it's comforting to know all this outgoing cash will come back in again in one lump sum which everyone is aware of - a small portion of the profit we will use to get a computer and install high speed internet. But then again, the challenge of securing another order and more worries for me.

When I lie in bed at night worrying as always, I wonder if any of the Kenyans who are starting to see the potential of what we are all doing worry too? I kinda doubt it because I don't think they would see the value in worry - that seems to be a very Western Industrialized thing - not something a Kenyan would fancy. But maybe they do - they all have children who need support and concern for a future. They all have dreams of making their lives better just like I do.

And it's hard being here even though I need to and it's good to see friends. My thoughts are mostly over there - halfway across the world and I can feel how this new life of sorts is rubbing off on the wrong side of how I live here. Like walking through traffic - in Nairobi I look for the gaps - you step and ready yourself to quickly get through the gaps and everyone understands this so no one gets antsy or slows down. But here it's different - people look at me with my feet in the street like I am some heathen or crazy person about to commit suicide or worse - someone who clearly is not playing by the rules. And that's the thing I love about Africa.

There are rules - they're just different and in ways for someone like me these rules make more sense or they just seem a little more reasonable or efficient, quick.

Once in a while I have seen some news on Africa - pretty much the Angelina story of spreading the word on understanding all the tragedy, making all of these atrocities go away which is so incredibly important. But what I miss is the images of Africans living and laughing, working together and being smart about rebuilding their communities and this kind of news is very rare here. It's mostly hunger disease and drought. Or nothing at all.

In this day and age of living in a global world and how easy you can get on a plane and be living intimately in a completely different culture I would think that the problems we see in the world would be shrinking. But they're not. We went and saw the Al Gore film and if that's not the biggest wakeup call I have no idea what would be. There is a major major chance we are completely destroying any possible future for ourselves or our children and it's astonishing really that so few of us care. When I think of the car industry I am surprised really that it's not illegal to manufacture a car like the Hummer or any new cars at all really. I read somewhere that is takes about 3 hours to put together a vehicle now and it just seems so wrong that whoever owns these companies can actually sleep at night knowing that everyday they are filling the world with more and more opportunities to destroy us.

Why aren't we all driving electric or solar or canola oil cars by now? Why are so many of us slagging or sleeping or thinking - tomorrow I'll do that. Why does this kind of information not terrify us more? How can so many people still be shopping?

Walk. Recycle. Listen. Grow something. Care. Be scared. Be terrified. I feel like I am in the first generation of people who will actually see the true loss of how beautiful things used to be. So I am glad the markets are crashing. And I am happy General Motors is bankrupt. I would like everything currently economically destructive to do just that so it can all fall apart and the young idealistic ones among us can have the briliant chance to fix it all.

Maybe Africa is lucky. Maybe they have a chance at something by virtue of being forgotten during such a dark time. Maybe the resistance has been insightful.

Movie of the Decade - "An Inconvenient Truth" - Al Gore. And thank you, Tipper.

Accounts Payable

I am leaving Kenya owing money to 10 of the 16 people who have been helping me to build the business here. Although I feel awful and embarrassed I try and tell myself it's okay - I don't really owe them money, the business does. But of course I do, it's me, my passion, I convinced them something great could be possible for all of us and now I am getting on a plane to travel halfway across the world wondering if they trust that I will make good on my word. Our accounts payable department is busy. Thank god thanks to my friend John we have a very large Accounts Receivable payment in Vancouver waiting for me. The actual amount I owe the team is the equivalent of $300 Cdn so if I hadn't been mugged and still had my Vancity ATM cards to hold onto this wouldn't be a problem but money owed be it $300 or $3000 is the same thing - if you are a person of conscience it doesn't feel good. As my father subtlely but consistently reminds me - the two most important words in business are CASH FLOW.

By the end of August I have promised myself that I will stop investing my own money to finance the business because we will have sales orders coming in and our first approach to the Commercial Bank of Africa will be made for a small but rolling line of credit to avoid what is happening today again. So a part of me thinks and is counting on the team to also have faith in this idea of mine - that they too must take a leap of faith and risk somewhat in order to gain. Our profit margin wheel has been carefully designed to include a team bonus fund based on sales so - the more everyone works together to bring down costs & increase sales the more everyone wins. In a sense they basically own part of the profit through the existence of this fund -I mean not legally yet because all that hasn't been done but through a pledge I have made to everyone that all financial records will be transparent and available to be viewed on our website. What I make, what they make, the rent we pay, our energy costs (intentionally our lowest cost due to the high use of human labour) every single penny that flows in and out of the business will be available for the whole world to see. Transparency. Intention. The competitive advantage of trading fairly.

And I can just hear all the CEO's screaming at me now - "Don't do that! That's no one's business" etc etc etc. But I disagree - I think it is absolutely everyone's business who works their butt off to help the business grow and what better incentive really for them to see what the future could be for them and their families? If we are trading fairly - why not? What do I have to lose really? What would I need to hide? Like the collapse of Kenya's beloved Uchumi - most successful businesses aportion obscenely high executive salaries squeezing all the other margins to be cripled in their own effort to make the balance sheet work. But why would do this to something you love, something you have built that serves people and could, if managed properly, make people's lives better?

Our new Systems Administrator Francis is going to install a beautiful and surprisingly affordable HP computer with a Linux Operating System in the studio that has a webcam on top to connect what I am doing and where I am going - with everyone in Nairobi. I certainly don't expect everyone to get on a plane and physically go to Africa to help alleviate poverty like I have - so what better tool than to bring Africa to them? When the camera turns on we will also be able to show our Costings Wheel - a beautifully colourful assessment of what it costs us to be doing business and I know the Kenyans are going to love this! The chance to physically see the results of their efforts, how to improve on this and where we need to go in the future. Learning how to build a business and make money is something to be proud of, something a very young Africa needs more than truckloads of rice or another rock concert.

I saw on CNN this morning that the telco's in the US are launching a policy bill to somehow regulate the internet - didn't catch the details but the handsomely nerdy fellow being interviewed in defense of the Web made a really basic and brilliant point. If there truly was more competition in the US telco sector these companies would self-regulate and not need to control the Web. But this isn't the case in the States like many other places I imagine (North Korea?) where very little competition exists there is economic bullying and so of course, I thought of Africa.

One of the major criticisms of the NGO world here in Africa - is that these groups heavily market to the rest of the world sitting on their couches that 'Africa is dangerous - that is why we are needed so finance our activities.' One of the results is that these media images of dictators, starvation, AIDS and death will keep people and competition off the Dark Continent. The mobile phone companies in Kenya (Celtel who I use and Safaricom) are making an absolute killing here - growth projections up to 500% annually. But despite the fact that the average Kenyan earns 1/10th of a North American they actually pay over 6x the amount per minute in cell charges. I pay 40 KShillings per minute to talk which is roughly 66 cents Cdn - but back home I don't think I have ever paid more than 10 cents a minute. How does this work?

I know the costs are higher here because the whole chat thing is made possible by satellites and this infrastructure investment is higher. That's fair, I can grasp that. But what didn't really seem very appropriate was when I saw during a news interview the CEO of Safaricom announcing their 500% profit gains. Wouldn't it be a little more fair to perhaps lower the rates somewhat? I don't think the average Kenyan realizes how disproportionate their rates are with much richer countries and in a year or so - the whole thing will shift anyway because an undersea fibreoptic cable is being laid now all the way from Durban to the Sudan to finally bring some friendly competition here. In the meantime, the Dutch based Vodaphone who owns controlling interest in Safaricom is absolutely cash rich from doing business in Kenya.

Kenya Airways just announced that they can hire pilots from anywhere in the world now - their expansion plan has somehow managed to change policy to open the market and we the consumers will win along with the company. Emirates Air is expanding here, SAA is abundant and of course BA has always been a player so I suppose the aviation sector could be used as an example of how to design effective growth policies for Kenya to benefit Kenyans as well as investors - pamoja or, together.

Dubai has just positioned itself to become the official home of the AID industry. Let's face it - AID is big big business in Africa in what I feel is a complete hijacking of most African economies. Is it just me or is a bit strange to have logistical procurement for draught originating in one of the world's richest cities? The place apprently has been designed along the lines of a 'business park' with one stop shopping for all your AID needs and if most of this is designed for Africa why is it not being built in Africa? Think of the jobs and profit that could be created here for the benefit or the recipients. If there's one thing the Dubai's are good at it's making money and there would be no way such a massive investment would have been undertaken without an expectancy on a healthy return.

The business of AID - I actually don't have a problem with a lot of it - if people's lives get better how do you possibly argue with that? But the thing about AID that is so strangling in the long term changes that need to take place here is that AID doesn't create wealth and technically or legally it's not allowed to. There's not supposed to be money left over in the bank at the end of the day really over at Unicef and this is the thing that Africa needs most - wealth to build investment growth to build more wealth. But is the rest of the world truly willing to create the environment for this to happen - or is it more motivated to keep Africa hungry? It's the primary issue we face as we build a textiles business here - it's very nice of the rich countries to donate their clothes to poor Africans - absolutely and most people are kind and want to help. But if it oppresses the local textile producers from growing here in Kenya than it's not so good after all. There is something better coming next.

I believe it's time for AID to stop in Africa. Things couldn't really get much worse and besides, the West needs it's own money for it's own citizens. What would happen if the whole thing got reversed and we said okay - it's time for the competitive private sector to parachute in and make a buck off feeding, sheltering and entertaining all of our African friends? That's the way it happens everywhere else in the world and Africans know how to make money - after all East Africa is the birthplace of trade and nobody hustles like an African. My friend James writes in his book "Reclaiming Africa" that Africans have a very skewed view of themselves and their abilities thanks to all this AID and 'helping' from the rest of us. That they are psychically wounded after all these years of being told the way they do things is wrong and we need to supervise, consult and donate so it all works in the way we think is right.

Personally I witness this everyday in the studio when I ask everyone who works with us how much money they want to be paid - I'm certainly not going to determine this for them. You'd think I'd have asked them how often they masturbated themselves or something similarly dark and private you would not want the world to know - they get all shy and lower their head and tell me it's up to me how much money they are going to make. It's like pulling teeth. I'm not saying I would pay anything - the business does have a budget (albeit handwritten and in coloured felt pen) but I give everyone the option of deciding how much they want to make for what kind of work they want to do and we mutually agree how many hours I can afford for this exchange.

My friend Carol taught me this in the TV business and I have also learned this with taxi drivers here too. I wait until the end of the trip and ask them how much they want for the journey - whatever they say I pay and it's always without fail lower than if I told them what I was willing to pay before I got into their car. And it feels more respectful. I am guest here. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower but in the end it works out really. I know I get out of the cab and the guy is left scratching his head like what just happened there?

I can feel that my short time here has taught me how to live and do business with Africa. Some of my European or North American friends here may think that I have 'gone Native' which certainly isn't the case - I am still wearing my gold hoop earings and using my Mac toner on a daily basis - but I have created some small start to a life here in Kenya that is African and it feels really really good. When I greet people I extend my hand for that 'clutch', not a 'shake', but more of a peaceful momentary holding of one another that is the only way I know how to express myself here that truly says, Na Heshima, or respectfully and it has made all the difference in the world. The secret African handshake that if you are truly paying attention to you can learn and it will change you.

When I get on the plane at 3:30 heading to Atlanta to see friends I will Lala Salama or sleep peacefully knowing my investment is in good hands. Sure there's going to be mistakes and mishaps but that's my responsibility like being a good parent. As a business person you have to create an environment where people can thrive and use the tools to do so. It's not what you do personally, it's what you cause others to do that counts.

If I had $100 for every time someone has said to me, "Safe Journey" we would have the rent paid for a full year in the studio. I am off to market that to the world.

Safari Jema, Sue

A Suprise Visit from City Hall

If there's one thing I have accomplished in the last four years it has been to design a business that is starting to alleviate poverty in Africa. When I think of the condo I haven't bought, the kids I haven't given birth to, the dozens of sleepless nights in Canada and Kenya - the newly growing gray hairs, the criticisms I have swallowed, the father that worries about my safety, the friends who miss me, the mugging I survived and the interest I am paying to god knows how many people - I comfort myself with the very simple thought that if nothing else, I have done something wonderful for Africa. Although I haven't made is succeed yet financially, it is beautifully built and starting to run slowly and carefully.

So I was ready when I was paid a surprise visit by two very sober looking gentlemen from City Council and completely shocked when they asked me at the door of my illegally operating small business - "What is your intention here in Kenya?" I thought Oprah Winfrey must have sent them and not the office that everyone says will be my nemesis, a funnel of endless corruption and lies - the reason why Africa is so messed up. Intention? Was I hearing correctly? I may have no idea how to run a positive cash flow statement yet but I can certainly talk about intention. And so I started telling them how far I have come and how long it has taken - how my business is not only designed to empower orphan children but women and families and Kenya itself because we will become a corporation and pay taxes and if we are given a chance we will be in very high demand.

I must have gone on for quite a while because they really couldn't wait to leave after they gave me their cell phone numbers and suggested I could pay a lower licence fee than normal given the nature of our work. I don't have a line in my budget for corruption fees and I will refuse to pay them. This business is good for Kenya and I believe when you do something good the world helps you. It has so far.

Who are the corruption fees really for? I got talking about this with James and I believe that in some way perhaps only those who are doing something not so great for Kenya have to pay them. That that's the grease you slide on for taking advantage of people or taking away more than you are leaving like the camping motto of leaving no garbage behind - if you do you pay.

When they left I jumped up and down and thanked the team of 3 who just happened to be in the office designing shirts. I know we got this break because they were there too and you can't fool a Kenyan over corruption. The most valuable asset this business has in stock is the 16 Kenyans I have met in the last five weeks who are working and being paid to build the business from scratch. I have always thought of my business as a cocktail party and that I am merely the hostess - throwing open the door and saying "Come in for a drink! You just have to meet Barbra! and Mary, and Joseph, and Stephen and Lois and Nancy and...

Adventure of the Week - South African flight 85 NBO-JBO tomorrow - back in Vancity before next weekend.

Interdependancy & the End of the Luxury Brand

Finally I met and had coffee with one of my Kenya heroes - James Shikwati, the author of 'Reclaiming Africa'. Although I have suggested some design and editorial changes to the book in order for it to be a popular seller in the US - the book is all you need to know about the hows and whys on how to alleviate poverty using more private sector and less government. We got talking about interdependancy and how I have always felt this is why I am more likely to succeed in Africa than in North America as I am a person with a big heart who shares a lot. It's very difficult for me to think only of myself - I feel incredibly lucky to happen to be me with all that entails and I derive more pleasure helping others.

The reason why I only skirted the NGO world however; is that I am also incredibly ambitious and want to create my own pot of wealth - I just insist on sharing it. Most models we've seen so far have been people like Gates or Pattison or Soros who have become massive givers because they made it big, that the giving comes after the success and I believe there is another way, a way more viable and realistic for the rest of us who will never be that successful.

When we tie our success to others we build teams through strength - interdependancy, interconnectedness. James told me this is the big problem with the urban growth in Kenya - that previousy the village model flourished by sharing strengths and tasks so everyone was taken care of. He said the city is changing this in Africa and I know what he means because I felt it in Vancouver. When I had to go on Paxil a lot of people told me I had low seratonins and that being on drugs wasn't something to be ashamed of. I wasn't ashamed - insulted more really - I considered my soul and my spirit and my heart and mind to be better and stronger than any drug and that if I just got my priorities straight I wouldn't need the Paxil. And it worked.

But can an urban environment do both with the right foresight? There is a place called Emilia Romagna in Italy that apprently is doing a very job of this - the whole place is run on co-operatives and based on all economic and social indicators it has the most healthy functioning economy in all of Europe. It was also the home of the socialism I believe so perhaps it has a history of belief and values that everyone deserves the same thing. I do think cities and the world in general can correct itself and all this poverty but the rich and overly rich and super mega rich are going to have to share because this everyone for themselves bit clearly isn't working. I am not a socialist, I don't believe in squashing drive and creativity that some individuals share with others for their gain but maybe there is a middle ground really. If you have 20 million dollars - do you really need 30 or 40? How do truly enjoy that kind of wealth knowing so many people are hungry and dying? What is Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Prince Al Bin Talal grew their fortunes WHILE they alleviated poverty? Why does it always come after? And what about all those tossed out computers that are polluting our much needed water - does Bill Gates have a personal responsibility for this? And what about all those people who have gotten rich over the last ten years using China to manufacture their textiles - dumping all those dyes from leather and cotton and lycra into the river systems - shouldn't they be on duty to help with some of the cleanup?

Given all of advances and breakthroughs on the planet what happened to the bottom line of morality? You don't see morality on an income or cash flow statement but all wealth is made by people and the only place morality lives is within us. I read in the Herald Tribune this morning that George Clooney and his partner Randy Guber sold their Las Vegas casino development and are contributing the money to debt relief in Africa. We can all thank Angelina for that - Brad was supposed to be a partner and I know in my heart he pulled out and this is why the deal fell through and thank god really. Does the world need yet another casino in Las Vegas? After hanging out with the gal we all know to be a crusader for humanity how could you stomach the idea of using such a huge amount of money in any other way?

If people who believe that casinos and shopping and status and luxury brands truly are happy and peaceful inside choosing to use their money in this way then I will continue to walk around shaking my head. But I couldn't do it and I am a very normal person. I'm nowhere near a radical or revolutionary - I just want everyone to be happy and fed and clothed and housed and I believe this idea is entirely possible in fact after all my years working with Americans in the television business - if ABC, NBC, CBS and Turner all got together to make a plan I bet we could end global poverty in less than one year. TV people are smart and talented and natural problem solvers - you can't survive if you're not. And Americans are generally kind, democratic and giving - the ones not starting wars anyway - so this is possible.

At 38 years of age one of the main reasons I don't have children is I am still pretty much at a loss as to how to explain this world to them. When I watch the news between the draught and the war and the rape and child porn; the poverty, the terrorism, the plagues, lies, noise and cars I just can't fathom how I would protect a little innocent sould from all this and who knows what's to come? I do want to have a child but I don't really drive and I'm not rich enough to pay someone to do that (although this would be a definate first hire) and in the place where I come from it all just seems to complicated. Most mums I know are either stressed, depressed, drinking too much or living in a separate house from their husband. What happened to all that interdependancy? In our quest to have everything I believe absolutely we are missing out on the most important thing, the thing you do when you get a raise or win a game - when life brings us something fantastic or a door opens bringing us a world we only dreamed of. In those moments we do something so human and so perfect and I want more of it back in the world. Sharing.

People criticize what I do telling me I am exploiting children because I have chosen to build wealth for African kids through the use of the private sector. Sometimes this makes me feel bad but mostly a person who says these things is doing nothing whatsoever to make anything in life better so I shrug it off. But sometimes when they challenge me or tell me I will fail I ask them this question and it always proves my point.

It's lunchtime in the city on a beautiful warm day - you find your favourite place to sit in a quiet green space so you can breathe for an hour and enjoy some time to appreciate the fact you have just received a big raise at work. You sit down on one end of a park bench facing a flower garden where there are birds and a pond to the side with ducks and you start to eat your lunch. You have the most fabulous sandwich - ham, ementhal, sprouts, mustard, shaved carrots and black pepper - a Granny Smith apple, 2 homemade cookies, a bottle of water and some pickles. You're starving but more excited really because this is a homemade lunch and you normally eat Chinese in the underground mall. And then a pretty rough looking homeless person shuffles into view with a shopping cart. Without even seeing you really they walk towards you and sit themselves down on the other end of the park bench and say, "Hello, how are you?" You say "I'm well thank you, how are you?" They look at you politely with no agenda whatsover and say "I'm hungry." What do you do?

Luxury brands are designed to fool us into thinking we can afford something better than most people - that's why they're called 'luxury'. Very few people in the world live with any sort of luxury in life whatsoever. It may have been okay up until the rest of us found out about this, but is it truly okay anymore? What else could you do with that $500 than spend it on a purse or a fancy dinner? Money has energy and this energy builds the world we live in. Africa knows this, it hasn't lost this yet.

Song of the Day - "In the Beginning" by K'Naan, the Dusty Foot Philospher

dbwa, Sue

Oil! Kenya has oil!

Maybe this whole running out of oil thing is truly the best thing to happen to us all especially those living in the third world and it couldn't have come at a better time. There is estimated to be a big oil deposit offshore near Lamu on the North Coast of Kenya and if managed properly it could do wonders for the economy. Of course, with Kenya's luck it is the deepest most complicated extraction the world has ever seen but again, this could really work in Kenya's favour. I just can just see it now, Kikuyu and Luo's being asked - "How do feel about throwing on this deep sea diver suit and plunging a few hundred feet below the surface while breathing through this skinny air tube?" Maybe the people who eat fish might give it a try but I doubt any of the pastoralists would be willing. When I told my asked my friend from the DRC if he would like to go through the tunnel going under the sea from the UK to France his eyes went wide open and he said, "No no, no, no - I would not like to do that".

My bet is that Hu Jintao will get the oil so they can keep making cheap cotton blazers for Kenyans to buy at Woolworth's but what Kibaki should really do is the keep the oil here so Kenyan's can make cheap cotton blazers for China. That would be far more worth the effort of a 2,000 metre descent. It would be much easier if the islamic island of Lamu would be willing to have the whole extraction operation base itself there but of good decision I would think, this is not going to be the case. So the helicopters will have to fly an additional 200 miles to service from farther down the coast. No wonder gas prices at the pump are so painful. I think a helicopter rents itself out at about $800 cdn per hour - a far better investment would be a pair of Nike trainers to hoof it to work using human power.

When all the oil finally does run out I wonder what we'll fight over?

dbwa, Sue

Monday Morning Pop Economics

When I was at University and heard that some of my friends were studying Economics I remember thinking how awful and complicated and boring that must be. But now that I am trying to alleviate poverty the term has taken on a whole new world of excitement. If there was one thing I would ask the world's top economists to do this year is to launch a global campaign of 'Pop Economics'. If we all truly understand this whole money thing then maybe we can help out a bit.

We the consumers control the world economy even though it doesn't feel like it while sitting watching the news. Like this morning learning that Goldman Sachs has tossed in a somewhat bloater offer to buy controlling interest of BAA and effectively control the airspace over the UK - and last week when President Bush announced his new Treasury Man who used to run Goldman Sachs I just had to think as I sat drinking my nescafe on the couch this morning - there is a connection here. In order to fight terrorism that seems to be rooted heavily in the UK why not take control of the airspace? Brilliant really - and the ports too I suppose. That's using economics to actually do something about the problem. I know the spying and wire tapping is a bit of a worry but rather than be a victim of air-terrorism why not nip it in the bud.

And this is so similar to what Kenya faces - the struggle to control their most vulnerable assets of land, natural resources and human capital. Not for others rather for it's own domestic gain but in this day of globalization assuming a nation has the right to protect it's own economic interests in somewhat passe. How utterly ironic that we've ended up here in time - that a foreign group has more say over another country's domestic policy than the locals because they can and they have more money and clout.

But should the market always win? What about the rights of the citizens who aren't quite ready or educated to compete? Ones who have recently just started wearing shoes and stare wide-eyed at a computer - formerly simple rural people who do realize that they must adapt in order to survive but they need more time - just a little more time before they sign away a future that could bring stability.

I think of the closing of Uchumi and wonder if the shareholders greatly underestimated the real consumer power Kenyans hold and that their bid for expansion failed to recognize that it will be 2-5 years more perhaps before local productivity translates into buying power. Given the two different ways to grow an economy - productivity vs. consumption - what Kenya needs far more now than consumption is work, manufacturing, investment, knowlege tranfer and not so much of the stuff hanging in the shop windows of Woolworth's. Doesn't Woolworth's realize this - that if they focussed instead of providing the average Kenyan a way to earn income and not spend it in their stores they might be making more money? Service sector jobs are the lowest paying in town and they can't build wealth. I suppose Woolies is making some money but mostly during the days the shops seem quite empty, the employees bored and the whole thing a bit inappropriate. The people really making the money in this whole mix are of course, the manufacturers in China. And when the dumped textiles from the first world don't sell in the 3rd world - where do they go after that? Who can Africa dump on?

So when the Kenyan government sits down for it's Monday morning meeting I wonder what it determines is the most important item on the agenda. Should they motivate their people to be productive and take care of themselves and build the economy up through their own ingenuity? Or should they attract foreign investment that seeks to double and triple it's money here? And what are the proven policies that blend these two forces together beautifully so at the end of the day there is security and peace and a reason to go see the football match on Sunday? Is it possible for us to build a world where we all win through trade or do some of us have to serve others?

Royal Rock Star of the Week - HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud who is jetting in to view his latest acquisitions and have tea with Kibaki.

dbwa, Sue

The People Who Eat Fish

One of the things I find so charming about doing business in Kenya is how universal an idea can be. This morning in a meeting with Joseph who does textile sector research for the business (dumped, new, organic), we sat eating bananas afterwards and I asked him about his life. He has a large family and holds the position of 'Vice Chairman' - his cousin being the Chairman. I think of my own family and wonder who is the Chairman? Definately not me - I suppose I would be the foreign adviser. When my mum died I inherited a whole new blended step-family so all these relationships have been reworked over the years to give us all some sort of sense of place within the new clan. Sometimes it works and other times it hasn't - it's terribly awkward when a parent dies leaving this empty silent void within the group like a place that's set at the table that never gets filled. Divorce is different - the torture continues on forever - but a family touched by death leaves a much more solemn and cautious group. Nearly twenty years later it seems the wounds are healing.

So Joseph who is Luo from the West (the people who eat fish) tells me he would like to have his own family and ten years from now he sees himself living elsewhere. Where? I ask - 'Canada' of all places he tells me. When he was a kid he read this series of books written for children and there was some sort of character who came from the land of the maple leaf - something he never forgot. I think of my own childhood and the age when I first discovered lions and giraffes and a wonder about Africa. Joseph would definately go crazy for Montreal - he is such a handsomely stylish guy but when I think of the Kenyans walking out the door in -25 degree weather I see them walking right back inside and thinking, today is not the day for going outside.

I can imagine Joseph walking through the West End of Vancouver, over the Granville Street bridge and having a cup of tea at Granville Island. Everything would make him so happy and he would make the most of it. When I asked him if he liked doing research for us he said that 'opportunity knocks once' and that he was starting to think about things differently these days which I see everyday on the streets of Nairobi. Opportunity is one of the only things missing here - it is what everybody is seeking and open and hungry to learn. It's what I represent by being here.

Maybe one day I will find a way for Joseph to visit Vancouver. A big successful business can do that so if I can keep this ship afloat maybe we will find a way together. Although I guess he would have to get the whole family committee approval on this but the way Kenyans think, I can just see the minutes from the meeting. It would be decided that a fantastic opportunity for Joseph would be something similar for them as well. I love this about doing business here - the group is always considered and it makes me feel incredibly optimistic about the future for Kenya. Things have been so hard for so long that people will endure. They're not going to jump at the chance of a cheap solution - they will continue to be patient and to wonder - 'Is this good for all of us? Is this good for Kenya?' It is so fascinating to basically watch the construction of an entirely new economy democratically decided by the wananchi, or citizens themselves. Corruption still exists, but Kenya is being smart and calculating and the investment sectors are opening with mostly careful restrictions in place. Nobody is going to bully Kenya and the ones who are truly corrupt are getting older and eventually will be too tired to cheat the others.

Thirteen of us will have our first meeting this Thursday in the studio before I leave back to Vancouver for a month. We are all going to see if the same amount of work can get done in my absence through the use of technology. My dream is to have a wall size plasma tv connecting the Nairobi studio to a smaller sales office in Vancouver so I can be in both places at the same time and anyone else who wants to visit Vancouver can do so whilst still working. White people say to me - but that's ridiculous - like people living amidst poverty shouldn't have access to this kind of effective business tool - and of course the Kenyans love the idea although I can tell for some it's still a bit spooky. We will definately have to have a mirror installed to appease everyone's vanity - looking good is very important.

By the time we can afford the TV there will be a major fibre-optic cable running all the way from Durban, to the Sudan so all telcomm costs are going to plummet and we could do this easily. I have designed the sales market to primarily be 'American boomer women' of which there are roughly 40 million to date - with 40 million male counterparts. Nearly one third of the population of the USA (300 million) is over the age of 45 or 50 while nearly half the population of the 30 million Kenyans is under the age of 18. I have called our target market 'Erica' - in her 50's, wealthy, travelled, a mother maybe even a grandmother - socially responsible, open minded and very interested in shopping and looking au currant. What is more in style that trading fairly? Now all we have to do is find a way for Erica to come across our path. The great thing about marketing to women is that we are a chatty bunch - when we find something we like we poco poco, or spread the word with passion.

My mum would have been an Erica if she had lived past the 54 years she did and I would give nearly anything to have her sitting with me here in the studio cutting out fabric and meeting the people who want work. She would be in her element. If my mother was anything she was smart and funny just like Kenyans. Particularly I think she would like Mary who is turning out to be our champion sewing gal. Mary does not have enough income to raise her son so he lives with her mother. When she told me this she had tears in her eyes and I told her this is the reason I am here and why the business exists. All she has to do is stitch the threads and it will happen for all of us.

The thing I like about Joseph the most is that like me, he lost his mother and his father as well when he was young. He is missing a front tooth that he told me came out during some trouble he got into when he was young and lived in a rough neighbourhood basically on his own. I think of my own trail of mistakes I made in life without having a mum to turn around and ask 'Is this right?' Like me Joseph is strong, yet tender. I know in my heart when Joseph and I each choose it to be time to have a child this part of us will heal. If have a daughter I would like to name her 'Atieno' - Luo for 'born at night' unless of course she is born during the day and I don't think there is a word for that anyway. In that case she'll be called Meg.


Friend of the Month - John for ordering 100 of our t-shirts designed by Barbra - our first big order I can take to the Commercial Bank of Africa to show them we mean business.

Uchumi Closes it's doors

One of the biggest grocery store chains in Kenya has declared bankruptcy and closed it's doors. They expanded too fast and ran out of investor's money. Let that be a lesson for us all.

I called Rose when I saw this who worked at Uchumi and does sewing for us - her son did our first new drawing that has put him into pre-med school. Of course I thought she would be bummed out and desperate but she sounded excited and ready to roll - we had talked about her getting a better job one day so out she went and purchased with her own money one day after getting sacked - 10 dumped t-shirts for us to turn into product. With her own money - I was speechless. If that wasn't a sign from God I don't know what is. An unemployed single mum in a third world country investing her own money in my business idea. But it's not really mine anymore anyway and I guess it never really was - I mean the idea itself is mine but as it comes to life slowly it is being taken out of my own sole grasp and held by others - the most beautifully humbling experience I have ever known and worth all the adversity, fear and worry.

When I designed this business nearly four years ago I used to joke to myself that I was completely naive because I was building it backwards starting with the labour. That was all I knew for sure - that Kenyans needed work - so I created everything to be supply driven figuring somehow I would manufacture demand. That somehow if I could find a way to hire 50 people and put a few hundred kids into school, people would buy our t-shirts because the world does want this kind of systems thinking to exist and it is possible. We can find a way to end all this hunger and illness and greed and inequality. We are too smart and too advanced a species to let ourselves suffer on like this. Trust. Faith. Endurance. Humility. Humanity. Love. I guess I spent ten years in the movie business for a reason.

Movie of the Week (cheesy as it was in some parts) "Failure to Launch". Nobody makes a simple lesson about love so easy to digest like a big Hollywood movie.

Pendo = Love

dbwa, Sue

Export Processing Zones

When you're a poor developing country I suppose at times you have to make choices to get a leg up and into the game of global trade. In some ways I think of this as kind of a sad thing, like say you're a person or a community or even a nation that is pretty happy with the way things have been in the past but that freedom to 'non-produce' or 'fail to grow' has ceased to become an option.

An EPZ or Export Processing Zone is a place generally in a developing nation like Jamaica or Kenya where the possibility of any job can be decided by policy makers to be better than no job. Textiles make up most EPZ's in the world - a cheap geographically isolated way for rich countries to get poor countries to make stuff for them. When I see photos of EPZ operations it makes me cringe like I would last maybe seven minutes after having some fun with the high-powered sewing machines - and I wonder how on earth do people do those jobs? No wonder they resent the rich countries and our absolutely unsatiable appetite for wearing new clothing.

When I used to shop at the Gap I remember going in on a few Saturdays in a row and seeing almost completely new stuff each week. That's new stuff in every store every week 12 months a year. It comes across the ocean on ships burning millions of gallons of fuel and if it doesn't sell it gets packed up again, put back on another ship and sent somewhere like Kenya. This is what is called dumping. I remember the first time I went into Old Navy last year at Xmas and the place looked like a bomb had gone off inside the store. Absolutely shocked at all the merchandise unfolded, on the floor, forgotten, unloved and definately not going to be purchased - I wondered where does all this stuff go after here?

The biggest hindrance to the development of an indigenous Kenyan textile sector is dumping. A local producer cannot compete with $1-3 dollar clothing items sold by street vendors called 'hawkers' that comes in from the Port of Mobassa by the bulk container and sold at auction by weight. Looking around the cyber cafe now pretty much half the folks are likely wearing dumped clothes. I must admit it's actually very relieving to not be surrounded by so much high fashion like I am back home. People here look great but not because they're wearing the latest swag - more so how they put it all together with a great sense of panache.

The design studio is full of 'dumped' textiles in a very political move to adhere to the 4 r's - reuse, recyle, repair and one more I can't remember now. I just can't stomach the idea of pumping even more chemicals and cotton into the consumption chain - flying over Lake Naivasha yesterday it's easy to see the lake has definately receded from flower production so I just couldn't do it.

I wonder about fashion twenty years from now - if it will eventually slow down or come to a grinding halt due to high energy costs and lack of water. Given the massive fashion craze that has been roaring through North America alone in the last five years destroying China basically and drying up ancient water holes like the entire Aral Sea in the Balkans, I think there must be a direct correlation between Fashion Week and the increase of diseases related to air quality. The world does work that way - it doesn't feel like when you're in that well-lit dressing room squeezing into those hot-ass indigo designer jeans but some farmer somewhere is paying the price. Isn't he?

Working in an EPZ sometimes means leaving your citizenship at the door in order to gain labour opportunity. If this is making the world better in some small way I want to know - but it sounds like a place where you have to spray yourself when you enter, or leave, and that at the end of the day you do just want to leave until you have to go back again. I don't think this way because I come from a rich country and I'm spoiled or priveleged, I say this because I'm human. I may have more social power than others because I just happen to get lucky in the draw at birth - but if I refuse to do that job does that make me unfair or enlightened?

dbwa, Sue

Over Nairobi

I think I must have been the only person who came to Africa, went up in an airplane on a scenic flight of the Great Rift Valley and spent most of the trip curled up on the back seat with my jumper over my eyes clutching a plastic air sickness bag. Plunging down into Hell's Gate on what felt like the at least a 90 degree angle I realized that flying a Cessna 182 is slightly removed from an experience of pleasure for me. Give me a jet anyday.

The Americans

In the middle of incredible criticism of the Americans here and in general I always try to say to people - 'but they're not all like that'. It's incredible how differently biased the media in East Africa, the UK and the Middle East is and I'd give anything to be able to hear what they're actually saying on Al Jazeera. I love Americans - always have - always will. Certainly there is a bit of concern about how isolated and perhaps naive those land-locked states truly are but Americans are good people at heart.

Yesterday we had two of them in the studio designing t-shirts to take back to Maryland and school where the young lads have come from to do a 'field study' in Kenya. I wonder if that's what an African would call going to the USA? Anyway - as soon as the guys saw how the business worked they were completely in to making and buying shirts because they have positive impact on kids lives. Not every culture is this open-minded and truly supportive of helping others. I imagine a Belgian would inquire what was in it for him - and a Chinese person would likely balk at the price but Americans love this kind of stuff - ingenuity, trade and creativity.

When I watch Condoleeza Rice on the television I try to imagine what she wears on the weekends. She seems to have a fabulous collection of suits - maybe they're borrowed - and just the right jewellery to come across as charming and bulletproof. Her job must be so bloody hard and unforgiving and tiresome really - while the rest of us just sit back and watch. I can't imagine wanting to do a job like that - what would make it worth while really? I'm all for civic involvement but to have a job where you feel that you are the global police and self-approving of how the entire worldly network of foreign policy operates? It must be like playing chess on speed.

And this is just so incredibly removed from what it's really like to be an American. I love watching the Americans here in Kenya - they are so happy and so surprised that people know how to do stuff. They wear these great safari outfits including ladies bags with stenciled animals on them - so preconceived that I know the Kenyans derive much pleasure out of being with them. How could you not when two slightly overweight pasty smiling people walk out of the departures gate wearing Tilley hats and money belts? I imagine these outfits are never worn again back home - they are only for Africa in defense of everything that's about to happen to them.

It's Friday afternoon and the city hotels are packed with safari vans full of travellers headed for the showers. After it's all over and you get on the plane to leave Africa that's when it seems to set in - how far you have really come and how different it really is here. Most people only come to Africa once I think - like a tick on a list of things to do before you die. Have kids, make money, have a dangerous affair with someone that might wreck everything you carefully built - and go to Africa. I don't think the affair thing is actually on people's lists but have you really lived if you haven't cheated and lied and hurt someone badly?

Will be heading through America next week on my way home and am looking forward to it - so advanced and out of control and open 24 hours a day. And I know, like before when I have left Africa it's like I will feel things getting quieter and calmer and cleaner as soon as I get out of the taxi and walk into Jomo Kenyatta. It always makes me sad to leave Africa for some reason, like if you turned around to look there would be hundreds of people watching and saying with their eyes - why are you leaving?

dbwa, sue

A Camera-less Photographic Art Gallery

About a dozen people have now asked me in Nairobi about the photography aspect of the business I am building here in the place of cold water and everytime I explain it I just have to laugh. Like the day I mailed 6 plastic cameras to the middle of nowhere in Africa thinking it was a fine start to a business, here I find myself struggling to build the most beautiful photographic gallery in the world and the one thing I don’t have is a camera. I tell the Kenyans that it doesn’t really matter at this point, that I am trying to build something with a much deeper more humanistic purpose but still it does sound somewhat unplanned. At least one camera would be good.

The American Express Corporation has swiftly replaced my stolen card and for some dangerous reason has issued me a temporary one – with no limit. How strange really to show up to a credit card bureau with one piece of ID in a poverty stricken third world African nation and be handed a piece of shiny plastic with absolutely no limit to the amount of spending I could hurl at it. Clearly they must not have access to the Canadian credit bureau files back home. I have yet to use it though – trying in the most Scottish of ways to stick to my budget and not replace my camera even though I desperately need it not only for the design studio but for my sanity. Luckily a friend has come to visit from Canada so I had him take 2 photos for me of the studio and our new shirt designed with the imagination of Barbara Okeyo, future human rights lawyer.

Barbra’s real name and secret African name is ‘Atieno’ which means ‘born at night’ which I absolutely love. My girlfriend from Kenya, Barbra’s aunt Grace has the same name as she is Luo from the West of Kenya. Otieno is for the male. There seem to be a lot of Luo’s here in Nairobi – next to Kikuyu they might be the second largest group and they are a really gorgeous group of people. Another young guy who has been sourcing dumped textiles for us is also Luo and he said that the Luo’s are the ones with the most style. The Kikuyu’s tell me they are the best looking and the Masaai seem to be the richest next to the MP’s who again, are mostly Kikuyu. Sortive like in Canada how most of the MP’s are Quebecois. Either way there is a very strong sense of vanity amongst everyone here – looking good is very important.

I went to Lake Naivasha on the weekend and got completely frustrated with the rather awful road system that trails around the North side of the lake. Coming from Canada it seemed tragic at first that this beautiful lake had such a pathetic transport system circumnavigating it but amidst all the dust and bumps I started thinking that if all the land around the lake is privately owned and the government doesn’t get any revenue off of that then why should they build a road? We stayed on a 200-acre plot of the most beautiful waterfront land which seems to be pretty much owned by one family. Again, absolutely bizarre to see nearly a million people huddled and crammed into a slum here in Nairobi and within 75 kilometers one person is the sole owner of such a massive empty beautiful thing. I wonder if in time Kenya will take back all this land from the colonial white landowners like what happened in Zimbabwe and now Bolivia. Lord Delamere’s grandson is sitting in a jail somewhere for killing two people with a shotgun and the machination of picking tea leaves has become illegal for it’s destruction of human labour jobs. It’s possible I suppose – land is one of the most secure ways to generate revenue and Kenya definitely needs that.

It’s nearly 2am and I am sitting on the balcony of an apartment I am renting right downtown on a street called Koinange – a few blocks from my favourite breakfast joint and rather inconveniently located beside what seems to be a 24-hour car repair shop. There is always noise here – always sounds of human activity and movement and always the sound of tinny dance music coming from some car driving very fast. I guess they fix the matatu’s at night here so as not to lose vital daytime revenue. I calculated that it is possible for a matatu driver to earn anywhere from 60-100,000 KShillings per month which is $1,000-1,600 Cdn per month. Each passenger pays around 15 KSh per trip with 12 people in the bus all day long. The owner of the matatu’s apparently take up to 5,000 KSh flat off the top each day which means the driver/conductor team must make at least 2,000 Ksh to make it worth their while each day. With anywhere from 3-4 million people living in greater Nairobi and despite the car traffic, most residents don’t own one – this fast-moving dangerous as hell Toyota mini-van transport system is good business.

Looking over the balcony I can see at least seven matatu’s in a queue to be repaired which means it will be a sleepless night if I don’t pull out the earplugs. I can’t sleep after some great days this week working with Barbra and helping her realize her dreams of becoming a human rights lawyer. For her the yearly budget she needs of $10,000 Cdn to go study at Langara must absolutely seem like the most impossible goal to accomplish but to me I know people who have spent this kind of money on a weekend with friends. Who knows I could probably squeeze the whole thing on the new limitless AMEX. But instead she is doing it the old fashioned way, the best way, the way that nobody can take away from you no matter how hard they try – she is working for it and saving some of her earnings from me to finance her education. I keep telling her it’s going to be okay – that we’ll find a way somehow to get her into school because I cannot think of anything more important for this country to have than a young creatively ambitious advocate for the rights of it’s citizens. That’s an investment worth making – low risk, high yield.

A new friend from Denmark was over for dinner and he told me about all the construction going on in Dubai where he is based. In one area something like 150 skyscrapers are being built simultaneously to form some unbelievable new city world for tourists and residents and all those seeking gold. But when I think of all the cranes sitting on Dubai soil, 16% of the world’s total cranes are in Dubai right now, and I think of Barbra lying awake at night dreaming of being in school it just doesn’t make sense. Don’t all those people who fly over Africa on their way to Dubai with pockets full of money stop for a few minutes to look out the window of the airplane? Do they see or feel or somehow connect through the psychic energy that binds us all on this planet – that if they alighted in Nairobi or Juba or Addis or Lusaka and spent just a tiny fraction of what they’ve saved for Dubai that slowly in some way we could all breathe a sigh of relief? I know there is a powerful connection between war and poverty and if we can somehow get our act together and get rid of all this poverty that soon after, like that soft light of daybreak you see when you just can’t sleep and it feels like a secret that only you are seeing, this is the kind of moment when we could begin to see the end of war. I know this to be true. When we're happy we don’t fight - we share.

Activists of the week – the Grannies on 5th Avenue in New York because, as they said, there is goodness in grandmothers and the first president of an African nation is one.

Design Breakthrough!

What is it about life that you can be moping around feeling like nothing is going as you planned and that maybe it might be best to give up and BOOM! something happens to completely change your mind. Like during a month of pouring rain and then a bright sunny morning - or a good hair day or a truly handsome man like Cary Grant. What happened to those kind of men anyway? Old-fashioned charmers like my dad.

So there I was shifting through paperwork in the studio while Barbra quietly sat on the floor cutting some fabric for a shirt. I have been encouraging her to design a shirt because that's where she can really make some money - the way I have designed the business pays fees to youth who make designs for us mostly through photography but since my camera got stolen, we are sketching only. She was giving me this 'I'm not creative' stuff so I just gently kept nudging and saying that I would only ever be able to afford a limited salary for her but if she got entrepreneurial on me there was no limit to her earnings as long as we sold shirts - which is where I come in - not many people can say no to me when I sell the shirts and who on earth does not want to alleviate poverty?

Getting up to grab something off the table I caught a glimpse of her work and there it was - one of the best t-shirts so far! We had been talking a lot since we started working together about how trade is what Africa needs and not more bloody aid. I know the West wants to help but enough with the fundraisers and charities and tax sheltering for rich folks - buy stuff from Africa! Let's get them in the game. There it was - Barbra's ticket to an education to be a human rights lawyer - just 3 simple words TRADE NOT AID but in her humble little hand-cutout design of red and white and orange the message we are trying to spread jumped right off the table at me. It will be one of best sellers for sure.

I sent her off to our sewing gal Rose, who takes the designs and turns them into wearable items of art in the evenings when she is at home after work. She is saving some of the money to pay for school uniforms for Dennis who was our first youth at work here in Nairobi. His earnings from 'pre-paid Vancouver' shirts got him into his first term of pre-med school - not bad for a cheap sketchbook, a pencil and time on his hands. When I think of Dennis sitting on the bus 10 hours to Kampala with school fees in his pockets that could be stolen during a hijacking on the highway - and Barbra who dreams of becoming a powerful human rights lawyer I calm my own fears of how difficult this whole journey has been. Five years ago I lay in bed and thought maybe I could figure out a way to help African kids make their own money so they didn't have to wait and wonder if someone was going to be generous enough to invest in them. And when I look at how beautiful the studio looks because Dennis and Barbra and Muba and Rose and Amit and Nickson have all shared their gifts with this funky little enterprise I remind myself, it's actually starting to work.

No bank would ever take me seriously at this point so now I have to figure out what to do next. My budget is gone at the end of August and I am still standing in the foothills of a very huge mountain yet to climb. I thought I might have a lead on an equity partner but something happened at the end of the meeting that was a bit disconcerting. The nice gentleman who works in serious finance suggested I go home to his rural community with him so I could meet his grandmother which I thought a bit unnecessary for a potential business relationship but a rather sweet gesture nonetheless. Not completely out of the question I suppose. But then he told me that he had been inolved with a 'mzungu' (white) woman once before and it didn't really work out because she moved away, and married someone else and that he felt he had lost his chance and then I got it - I was being hit on in what I have come to know as a completely ridulous but rather honest Kenyan way. I think of all the years I wondered why no one asked me to marry them in Canada and that in less than one month I could have been married at least a dozen times.

So it's back to the drawing board to find more money which is something that makes me completely squeamish - if only I could just sit and cut fabric all day. I know there has to be just one person to say yes - given the situation here in Kenya and all of Africa how absolutely paramount the issue of TRADE NOT AID has become - with all the work and research and groundwork and praying I've done there has to be some way the world will support the financing of my business. Was watching the Enron convictions this morning on CNN - billions of investors dollars lost and nobody's murdering those guys. If the world can finance an Enron - it has to be able to finance the most beautiful art gallery in the world right here in Nairobi.

There has to be a way. I will pray for that and also pray that everyone else who supports this business will pray because it had been designed for all of us.

Comment of the Year - George W Bush apologizing on CNN for the things he said after 9-11.

Fear, Anger, Hormones and a Manicure

So now that I am living in fear of getting mugged everyday and basically pissed off at this and how it affects by favourite way of stealthily moving around the city - I am trying to figure out how to cope. I am walker, a person who knows the secret places of the places I live and I absolutely cannot spend the rest of my time here in the back of a taxi. Besides, I'm too cheap for that - and trying to figure out how to squeeze a second video camera out of my humble little budget.

I actually think everyone here is afraid and thus angry everyday here in Nairobi. Not always and not everywhere but on the streets. It's like the first time I went to London I remember thinking, where are the people who smile? Of course, no one smiles in London unless they're drinking or laughing at someone which they do here too but in a much more jovial - it takes a village kind a way. This would be a good place to launch a spy school maybe - I noticed M16 was hiring (they put an ad in the Economist of all places, in what I would have thought would be a major security risk). Someone hustling on the streets of Nairobi would be a great choice to go undercover for HRH.

Now I am carrying not only my cash but my mobile phone in my brassiere so no one can see that I am packing heat. It's a bit embarassing pulling Shillings out of my shirt but it's the only place I figure even a Nairobi robber wouldn't have the guts to reach for. I was thinking today that when I go back home this summer to regroup will I carry with me this same new paranoia I am experiencing here? Will I look carefully at every open swinging hand that approaches near my person and wonder if it will quickly reach out and grab me?

I think I can now tell who the bad guys are - the ones to stay clear of because you can divert from them i think. They grab quickly so I figure I should be able to dodge quickly too. If I notice someone crossing to my side of the street in rough attire and empty hands, age 18-30, I cross the street the other way just in case. Haven't determined yet whether walking in the street or on the sidewalk is safer - the street feels safer but it's a faster getaway. The sidewalk might protect me but it's also congested and blurry and nobody's going to help me there anyway. So I keep stashing my cash in the bra and the phone is cheap so I just think about all the money I save on taxis.

For the last two days I have been nothing but angry. Hormones of course are a strong factor but I think too the mugging is starting to affect me - not the reason - that's obvious, poverty and circumstance. But what makes me pissed off is that this place is better than that, the people are amazing and they live in this compromised storm of ineffectiveness, suspicion and worst of all - apathy. Everything is here for the taking and making of a really great beautiful fun city but there's a pall, or a film that lies on top of everything and everyone, this subtle and numbing fear. This is so hard for someone like me - naive and trusting to a fault - I don't function at all living in fear and with anger. Standing in my office crying the other day because so many things didn't seem to work - I looked out at everyone getting on buses to go home to feed their kids and it made me bitter. I feel so strongly that this place has the ability to change but only time will tell, a long time really. Keep looking for a cement mixer and a taped-off street to maybe be a sign of change and clean shoes.

Sometimes it's the little small moments that make me forget this new fear I have, like a manicure. Or an ice-cream cone. And a hot cut of Kenyan tea, mixed with milk and lots of sugar and if there's a donut or a cookie nearby for dunking. Writing these stories lately without my camera makes me feel like a blind writer. I miss the colour and the shapes of all the beautiful things I was taking photos of. It's always gives me hope and reminds me why I'm here.

Strangers of the Week - 2 taxi drivers who said it was okay to cry and told me to call if I felt sad or I needed a ride.

dbwa, Sue

Nairobi Design Studio

BADLY missing my digital camera - it took me 20 years to buy finally buy one and only five weeks to lose it - how strange.

The studio is almost done - thanks to Nickson's innovative and simple furniture building we will have a gorgeously oval 6'x4' design & sewing table + a 2-story sample t-shirt rack including polished aluminum rails. 2 coats of varnish and you would think there was an Inform Interiors in Nairobi.

First t-shirts being sent to the USA, Canada and Australia hopefully this week. Our first systems are basically in place with a few kinks to work out in the next month but the shirts look amazing and finally Barbra has decided to think of designing one. She has been training as a 'Design Researcher' - this woman can find anything in Nairobi and hopes to use her income to go study at Langara in Vancouver. I keep saying to her - just make sure you come back with all your new ideas and share them with Kenya - the brain drain doesn't have to be permanent - it can be cyclical and we can 'mutually use each other' as I like to say. My space is available in Canada - she can take it for a while.

Boatloads of Africans washing up the shores of Europe are an opportunity aren't they? And it they were crafty enough and warmly dressed for the journey through the North Sea - Putin wouldn't have to pay people to proliferate. Why is everybody so afraid of Africans? They may not be as organized as the Japanese but they're definately tidier than the French. Didn't the colonies think about this when they came so eagerly last century, that one day the common language and a reversal in fortunes might bring explorers to their doors? Why do France and Germany and England and Italy and Spain get all these great historical explorer books written about them but the Africans are only afforded short CNN-shock news sound bites? If the Africans had big white sails and shiny weapons would the Europeans behave more graciously?

Was watching this terribly slow-talking migration specialist on Sky News this morning who said the most insightful thing I think I've heard on the network since I've been here. Although I think the weather girl is rather charming, let's face it Sky News is a bit like watching a football match - all hype and timeout music. Anyway, he said that the main problem adding to global poverty was that although capital was free to move around the world people weren't. That millions of dollars could be zipped into a foreign market within minutes but that we are using some of that same money to build fences to keep people out. Those of us with capital are able to take advantage of it going somewhere to increase it's return for us - but we're not allowing those without capital this same luxury. They really only have themselves and their hands to build a future but if we don't let people move as easily as money does the rich are only going to get richer.

So we have Barbra, Dennis, Rose, Joseph, Nickson, Jake, Muba and Amit all doing work for the business on a trial/freelance task basis. Everyone has such different skills and schedules that I am trying to find ways for them to contribute in the best way possible for the demands of the business while complimenting their existing needs. I am hoping to put together an evening sewing team of a dozen or so gals or men I suppose, who will see this kind of hand work as valuable - so they can pick up extra cash, mind their kids and pass some time in the evenings. Joseph has fabulous style and do does Barbra - Dennis as well although he's a bit quieter. I don't think Rose quite knows what hit her when I took her up on her offer to find some work for her son and 3 weeks later he's off to Med School. Muba and Amit are entrepreneurs, Jake is a techie and Nickson, my favourite of all things, is a builder.

I was telling my friend last night at the Carnivoire that the reason I love building and architecture so much is having grown up around it with my dad. Freshly cut plywood is like home-baked cookies for me so being around Nickson and his crew is so lovely - to watch them cut, nail and polish the furniture we sketched out and quoted together on a dusty piece of paper is so gratifying. Can't wait to send photos back home so all the amazing friends and supporters can see our progress here.

In less than four weeks we have a fully operable design studio with orders being exported to 3 different countries. If I had made a list of all the people who answered all my questions about how to get things done it would have at least a hundred names on it like Frederick or Josephine or Samuel. And when I think back to the past two years when I stared out the window or lay in bed awake in the week hours of the night wondering how the hell was I going to make this work halfway across the world in Nairobi - it all seems so clear now. This business was designed to work in favour of Kenya - it's passions, it's less-than-educated, it's craftspeople, it's women and orphans - and it is starting to work despite all my fears or others dumped upon me by those more fearful than I. And that is what Africa needs most from all of us - a big leap of faith that if we can just get out of the way and empower people here who have good ideas and the talent to bring them to life, that trade will eventually replace aid.

I absolutely cannot wait for this moment - when the Kenyans are too busy to be angry or disappointed in the rest of us or a corrupt system of their own - that they instead increasingly turn inwards and remember that right in their own hands they have everything they need. Like Nickson and his tools and a beautiful little money-making skill-building studio that a month ago was an empty room with a view.

Wish of the Day - that Barbra will be accepted to Langara College in Vancouver
Consequent of this wish - that I will have to replace her when she does

dbwa, Sue

Getting Mugged - later thoughts

Well it's absolutely confirmed that getting mugged, robbed, held at knife or gunpoint, jacked (car stealing) is rather universal here in the place of cold water which seems strange to even write - but with an economy that's basically been in shambles for 30 years - to be expected. And Nairobi isn't the only place random violence is happening - Sky News every morning with my coffee (god they need new music on that channel) you can't get away from the story about a 15-year old kid who got killed by knife outside his school in London. And before I left Vancouver a kid in his 20's was kidnapped right off the streets of Southlands - where I go rollerblading to relax.

I have to say I would not want to be a youth today - it must be an incredibly confusing and isolating world for them. When I think about all the young people here who see crime as a viable alternative it makes me think of the Crystal Meth epidemic that's hit Canada. Obvious that there's no cure - but what I wonder is why do so many young people even consider the very first time that they will snort deadly chemicals into their beautiful young bodies? Instead of all these forums on dealing with the problem and treatment and increased policing shouldn't we be looking at what kind of society we have created that is making young people so unhappy in the first place - so they don't want to pick up knives or needles?

Before I left Vancouver I read this book called "Generation Debt" or something by a US woman who basically is lambasting the yuppies for creating a world so void of opportunity for young people that they feel almost no hope of ever succeeding in life. Sure some people percolate to the top and we all think that if you work hard enough you can - but the reality is that most people struggle and are on the verge of collapse. Financially, emotionally and psychically too I think. When I think back to the 2 years when I was in a pretty real depression - this is the reason why. I wasn't lacking seratonin or receptors and I certainly didn't need drugs - I was freaked out and afraid that the world as I knew it was over. I even told my doctor this and asked him how many people were coming in for Paxil and didn't he think there was a connection between unhappiness and the increase in poverty in the world. He was a nice jewish guy and didn't really dialogue with me on the topic, but he did retire a year later and I like to think it was because he knew, like I know, that there is a link between all the awfully unfair and tragic inequalities we live amidst now and why so many of us find it hard to get through the day.

After going over all the socio-economic reasons in my head and in discussion with hundreds of people here in the last week I have decided that my friend Alphayo's reason is not only the most likely - it's the most precious to consider.

He thinks the reason why all this crime happens here is a spiritual one - that before the white people came the Kenyans, like many Africans (and First Nations people in Canada, the US, South America, Australia etc) always had a belief system that included the concept of the 'Curse'. If you stole your neighbour's cow - you were cursed forever - so you didn't and during this time the communities didn't experience much crime. I don't know if this is entirely believable because the Turkana's have been looting and killing with the Samburu's for decades up North in Kenya - but in general - petty crime was non-existent.

The problem he thinks lies in the fact that when the white people came they brought with them a 'god that forgives' so in a modern day translation, if you mug someone god will forgive you. You will not be cursed. Which makes sense and I like that because coming from the West Coast of Canada we talk a lot about 'Karma' - which really is the same as the curse - that it is bad Karma to take something or speak badly about someone - that those of us who live with bad intentions towards the world or others will ultimately be faced with bad Karma one day.

To me this explanation makes the most sense because it is the most universal - whether you say Karma or Curse - in the North of South or East of West - rich, poor, hindi, black, disabled or beautiful - many of us around the planet share this idea as a universal truth. If you harm others you will pay for it because we are all connected and no one does anything that does not affect the larger system at work.

The bad Karma I would like to wish upon my muggers - all five of them - is that one day they meet me again and look me in the eye and tell me they want the curse to end not just for them - but for all of us. I could care less about the credit cards, camera and mobile phone - those are just tools to achieve other more important things - the reason why I'm here. Their bad curse is to face me again so I can tell them it's okay, that I understand why they feel so desperate - but what they now have to do is share their skills working with me to build my business - I will make them pay for the harm they did to me by making beautiful t-shirts to show the world another side to Kenya. How great would that be? A band of street rogues all sitting in a sewing circle making good money from all the consumers in the world I am targeting to pay for this reversal. Don't we all deserve this kind of opporunity in life? To happen upon a way to make our own lives more healthy.

The day after I got mugged and was at a loss about what to do - I wanted to get on a plane and go back to Vancouver where I feel safe. But my friend Tery emailed me and said this is why I am here - to participate in the building of something different. If I can be even just one small light that illuminates one small dark street then I suppose that's one safer street to be able to walk down. So I am here, working even harder to put together the most humanly positive message of a business I can possibly create before I run out of energy, time, money and faith. To do this I just think of what my Kenyan friends always say to me, "Susan, if you put all your effort into something - you will succeed. Pole pole." (slowly slowly)

Pulitzer Prize Book of the Week - "Britain's Gulag" (launched by Mrs Kibaki at the Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi)

Jumped, Mugged and Torn in the Rain

This next series of entries is a description of a terrifying mugging experience I had this past Sunday in Nairobi. My intention is to take the proper time to understand everything about what happened with the proper analysis is requires. Like most post-colonial emerging economies - violence is an incredibly common result of systemic poverty. Five young men came running at me tackling me to the ground and ripping my bag off my back, and as I screamed and yelled at the only one who hadn't run away - yanking desperately for my belongings - he looked me straight in the eyes as much to say - "Let it go" and so I did.

Almost every country in Africa has cheated and mugged and fought it's way out of an awful indigenous slavery then colonial exploitation followed by a brief window of democracy from independence (ie. Nkruma in Ghana, Lumumba in the DRC) usually closely met with a dictator next (as in Moi, Kenya) and now, in the beginning of the 21st Century - foreign investment fighting it out for the huge profits to be made in the massively underserved consumer market.

So besides crying, being terrified, bleeding and having to borrow money from strangers to get home in my torn clothing in the pouring rain - history is what I think about as an important lesson explaining why I got mugged. I have been given dozens of thoughts on why this happens, and happen it does - EVERY SINGLE PERSON I told has also been mugged in Nairobi - some many times. My favourite reason I think is the best, the most meaningful and maybe most worth exploring for all of us when we think about the cancerous marriage of fear and Africa. It comes from a spiritual perspective, from a time when in this place of cold water, nobody got mugged and people lived safely together.

My friend Alphayo sat with me and shared the following theory in my gorgeous newly painted t-shirt design studio, a tiny room I could never abandon despite what happened to me because in it's own little 300 square foot way, it represents to me the future for Kenya and Africa. To partner with and invest in young people who aren't discouraged by all the misery and sadness of the past, who desperately want to use their skills and ideas to build and rebuild their lives into something extraordinary. The ones perhaps who are lucky enough to believe it is possible.

More later. No photos for a bit - digital camera stolen in the mugging.

Movie of the Week - Tsotsi (South Africa)

The University of Nairobi

My love of architecture got me researching the Jomo Kenyatta Library at the U of N - it's like the Simon Fraser of East Africa.

First Cash Flow - hopefully...

I think I have secured our first sale in Nairobi - a custom-designed information poster to generate revenue for a kids foundation here. The wall we measured for it is perfect now all I have to do is get it successfully designed here. The talent is here, the technology is good enough here - it's just that with such little outside design influence and the lack of travelling people have done because of the poverty it's a challenge to create the truly powerful design/branding/and marketing results that are required to compete in this world. I met a South African designer who is having business cards done in Dallas. What's with that?

And when I picked up my sample cards the other day the information was a bit crooked so I asked, "Isn't this a bit crooked?" to which the guy says, "The printing is straight, it is the cutting of the card that is crooked" - making me laugh of course. What do you say to that? And it made me think - that's what the rest of us don't get about Africa - there are very few sophisticated business card cutting machines here so my guy hands cut them leaving more room for error and uniqueness really. I just tell people they have to cock their head slightly when they read them. Anyway, it's the information on the card that counts. The straightness will come in time.

Am trying out 3 young souls to see how they do working for the cpgkenya. One is painting and drawing, one is shopping and researching and the other has gone into the wilds of 'textile dumping' to find us some cool shirts to use as raw material. This is a big issue for Kenya - the local industry cannot compete with all the cheap imports and dumping that arrives from the rich countries. All the stuff that doesn't sell in the stores by the time it's out of fashion back home goes somewhere - quickly. As consumers this is a vital awareness link we need to make - that developed countries' unwanted products hinders and clogs the economies of the developing countries. If we didn't shop so much it might allow others to experience the same gain.

I ask everyone who expresses interest in working with the business to think about what they want to do, what they're good at and what future opportunity they want the work to bring them. Then I tell them that we have to find ways for the business to pay them out of our sales so they can participate in building the bottom line and sharing in it's growth. Access to information - respectful trading - upside down and backwards like everything I do.

Just so happened to walk past the Actis Equity Nairobi office this morning...on a quiet little backstreet closed and dark on a Sunday morning. This is big money investing itself into Kenya with hopes of even bigger returns. Can't wait to pay a visit and show them the most unusual business plan likely to cross their desks. Who is going to invest in a bunch of kids with little education in a country with few jobs? Isn't this actually the best investment to make or I am missing something? I could hire 50 of the coolest, most quick-witted eager fun young souls today on the streets of Nairobi and I know deep in my heart every one of them will make something of the opportunity.

Fingers crossed getting the business licence and bank account.

Bank of the Week - Commercial Bank of Africa (formerly Bank of America)

A Tree Grows in Nairobi

Strolling along Harambee after the dustiest noisiest nightmare of being stuck on the wrong side of Hallie Sellasie Boulevard during rush hour - I came across this beautiful little tree. Surrounded by big Kenyan love of rich red soil I stopped in my tracks and smiled. Whoever planted this must have a lot of faith for it is such a tiny little experiment in the power of nature and at least 20 years until it is grown and strong.

Looking at this wonderful sprig of green I thought of my business here. Just like this little tree it is going to take 10-20 years to build something vital and lasting as a success story in this country and it comforted me to think that no matter how hard it gets - I have this little friend to encourage me. The tree is never going to give up or feel like a failure - it is going to keep growing as much as it possibly can everyday with the love of water and sun and dirt. Against all odds that exist in this big noisy concrete jungle of a city - this tree will endure. Privately I have decided to adopt the tree and care for it in my own way - I have even given it a name 'Le Verte Fier' which in my tragic french means something like 'the strong green one'. I'll just think of it as Verte though - green.

Last week I went to an Anglican church service in the city and was blown away by the dozens of plasma tv's hanging all over the church with the camera focussed on all things biblical. What a great idea - that's getting seriously religious. Anyway, besides the chai tea and buns afterwards I must admit the service was rather lost on me which seems awful considering my grandfather was a big time minister. So I have decided that instead of going to church on Sundays I am going to visit Verte and sit on Harrambee and be thankful for everything I have. The city is very quiet on the weekends which I love - it reminds me of walking through Vancouver in and out of all the cool shaded spots beneath the towers. So I will go sit with Verte and think of things like reverance and faith, kindness and humanity and the absolute need to above all in life - have faith and try to use our lives for something meaningful. I will remind myself on days like Sundays when I feel lonely in Kenya and I miss my friends and family, that when my faith meter lowers I will think of Verte. If he can do it alone in the middle of a sea of concrete hoping that the goodwill of someone will come by and water him, I can build this business with the support of the 1.5 million Kenyan orphans whom I think of as partners.

I think back to when all this began in the summer of 2004 and remember that it was Grace who taught me how to have faith. She believed in my crazy idea to build a beautiful art gallery for the orphans in Kenya and halfway across the world through 2 computers we became good friends. I could never have gotten this far without that gesture and for that I will always be grateful.

Magazine of the Day - African Business (May 2006 - The Management Issue)

Coffee

Tuesday morning is big coffee business in Nairobi at the Kenya Coffee Board and Auction Room on Hallie Sellasie Avenue South East of the CBD. As I sat in the back right hand corner of what feels like a university lecture hall as with all things economical in Kenya - the disparity is the first thing I noticed.

The farmers seem to sit on the right side of the hall who have been struggling for quite a while to remove some of the middle supply-chain obstacles to them getting more of the revenue margin on their crops. I was told that new legislation is going into place to allow the farmers to sell their crops either at the auction house or now, independantly to roasters and buyers on the world market. For example, JJ Bean is a Vancouver roaster that sells Kenyan coffee - so a farmer who grows coffee North of Nairobi could contact them directly now and do a deal instead of at least 3 levels of middle-person supply chain and thus, loss of profit. Kinda like Dell Computers - why pay someone in the middle when you've got the goods? The growth of technology here means a farmer could create sales oppportunities through the internet and the end buyer can use this tactic for value-added marketing - "We buy from the little guy!" If we trade, we don't need to aid.

The middle of the room seems to be where the action takes place and the spending occurs. One guy said he spends a million USD every Tuesday in Nairobi buying coffee that he will then sell to foreign roasters. This must be where the bulk of the money on coffee is made in Kenya - the brokers, the dealers, the ones in the middle like anything in life who work both sides. The guys with the ties and the clean shoes - the entrepreneurs who travel farther and faster and turn this experience into opportunity.

On the left side of the room it didn't quite seem as clear to me who this group was. They definately weren't farmers and they didn't seem to be doing anything so my guess is they were large scale producers watching their lots go up in value. The whole thing was quite deflating actually considering how much money is made in this room every week and month - I was hoping for some yelling and screaming like in the old days but the exchange has been computerized so everyone is very focussed on reading what's going across the big red screen and reading paperwork.

Coffee is one of Kenya's biggest commodity exports that has traditionally been value-added offshore in the retail markets. The big guys like Starbuck's know what it means to say "Grown in the Kenyan sun" whereas I would think a small Kenyan farmer would likely read this and think, 'of course our sun is in Kenya'. Access to markets is one of the biggest issues here all over Africa but access to 'marketing' is almost more important as consumers are growing increasingly aggressive in finding and purchasing fair-trade products be it coffee or clothing. But they have to see it and internalize the visualization of this and the farmers need to learn how.

I look at the dirty blue baseball cap of the farmer sitting in front of me in the exchange and wonder how many people in his family is he feeding. How far does he have to stretch his sale today? How hard has he worked to physically and experientially bring his product to market? And if he had the opportunity to put on a fancy suit and head off on an international trade mission to promote his brand would somehow the lives of his small rural community get better? Farmers all over the world are unhappy and it doesn't make sense. There has to be a way for all of us to get what we need and be able to sit back at the end of a long day and believe that tomorrow will bring good things. We are too smart as humans for all this poverty - our trade systems are too sophisticated to accept that producers are unhappy. If they slow, or fail to survive - what do the rest of us do?

Thinking back to all the cups of 'English Breakfast Tea' I have consumed over the years with milk and sugar and gratefulness I am surprised it has taken me so long to be more aware that tea doesn't grow in England. When I go into the small stores to buy my food here I pick up a big bag of Kenyan tea that has a simple label on it, packed full of bags and quality and value and it is so clear to me how the changes coming to Kenya could and should benefit the average citizen working hard to feed their families. They have to get into the 'value-added' game to be able to stand proud and say 'Kenyan Breakfast Tea' and that's why it costs more because it's some of the best in the world and that's fair trading. We fly all the way to Paris for croissants, and to Montreal for smoked beef - why not to Kenya for coffee and tea?

After all my research in the last 2 months of creating a business to work in the US and Kenya I think I am slowing coming to the conclusion I am here to stay. There is so much opportunity, so many amazingly ingenius people, such a great opening for Kenya to be an emerging small tiger of an economy that increasingly it seems this is the place to be for me. I have to revert back to my original name of THE CHILDREN'S PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY OF KENYA too as the president used INAWEZEKANA for his last election slogan and proprietarizing Swahili words is quite political right now especially I feel for a foreigner. So it's back to the cpgkenya - my original vision four years ago and the plan to build the most beautiful art gallery the world has ever seen. Right here in the place of cold water, doing business with Kenya.

Design Studio of the Week - "Paro Cultural Project" (Ambira Rd, Nairobi)

dbwa, Sue

Fresh, Frozen, Organic

One of the highlights of my day is eating whether it's smoothies, peanuts at the side of the road or homemade Kenyan cooking. But today I went to - of all places - an organic restaurant in Nairobi. Who knew? I think it must be a pretty hard sell getting Kenyans to pay more for organic food as I imagine they would think that all of their food is organic to begin with. That's one thing you can see changing here fast is the cost of living especially in the city. Taxi prices are going up daily and I can't even imagine what it costs to truck in things like fruit, milk and ice cream into the downtown core. Visitors like to think they can get stuff cheap here but it's not the case really - a lot of stuff is the same price and bargaining to get the price down is a bit insulting really if you think about it when families have to pay for school and that. I don't know, I know I pay more because I'm mzungu or white, but I am here because I am trying to add to the economy so putting cash in people's pockets is a good thing.

Newspaper of the day - "The People Voice" - Nairobi

jua = sunshine

What is more universal than a pretty young lady eating an ice cream cone on a hut sunny day in the city? What is harder for me to grasp is the wool turtleneck sweater when all I can stand wearing is a t-shirt and trainers. It's awful actually looking so haphazard and dusty with all the gorgeous clean divas surrounding me. How do the Kenyans stay so clean? I noticed in a street laundry shop that the prices for white clothing is higher - good plan.

When it's sunny here the city is so great - noisy, full of people husting and bumping into each other like a tropical New York where everyone's a little more elegant and stronger looking. Life is hard here and it makes the people so much more savvy - to overcome all the obstacles that we never face in North America the Kenyans pull off the wildest stuff with very few resources usually. It's like there's this secret MacGyver Academy where they teach kids to do all the stuff that seems impossible to me. That's the thing I would most want the world to wake up and realize is what unbelievable partners the Kenyans are - what they bring to the equation to build and make something work.

A young gal whose doing some work for me witnessed a very angry Kenyan guy lashing out at her white friend from Israel - all his rage built up over decades of white domination here just dumped on the poor guy as he boarded a bus to the airport. When I met up with her later she looked like a ghost and told me how sad she was from the experience. She is saving the money she will make with me to go to Canada and asked me if this was going to happen to her in Vancouver. I told her this would be very very unlikely but what she needed to be prepared for was to be seriously underestimated and I wondered what was worse? To be yelled at for bad things other people did in the past or to be passed over because of historical misinformation?

We can find ways to mutually gain from one another - to trade our wares and experiences and bling and dreams to blend our shared needs into a world that flows peacefully through all the data lines, airports and blind dates. It doesn't have to be so lopsided and political and awkward anymore. It can be fair if we truly madly deeply want this to be the world we live in.

Restaurant of the Day - The Phoenician (Lebanese in Westlands)

Aroma Restaurant - Koinange Street

There's something about this street that feels different. My girlfriend works in one of the towers so in my habit of bumming a ride home with her I keep noticing that this street in Nairobi seems wider or more systematized or something. Will have to check with the City Archives. When I look at the city from more of a distance I can see the old blueprint of what it used to look like when it was small and usable. The photos from the 60's are amazing - it's like a completely different world that you would never recognize in the mass of people today. The black and white shots remind me of the 60's in the American South - like Martin Luther King was going to drive by in a big black car and kids hung about in their saddle shoes. Before all the cars and people crowding it up in a completely unplanned vision of confusion.

Seem to have located a favourite restaurant - it's a Kenyan diner really - the Aroma on Koinange Terrace, connecting to Koinange Street. As I photograph it and the new highly designed and branded 'Java Hut' it makes me realize this is the very dilemna facing Nairobi - the old familiar local hangout that's a bit cheaper but more run down and the new upscale chain across the way where everyone is wearing suits and chatting on mobiles. Personally I would rather stare out the windows of the diner but if I need chai to go - it's to the Java Hut because the Aroma doesn't have take away cups. Guess I should suggest that to them.

Again here it is - the funky joint is an opportunity for someone to transform into a viable future competitor to the Java Hut to give it a makeover and preserve all the warm simple Kenyan-ness I love about it inside.

Hanging out at the National Theatre across the street from the Fairmont/Norfolk Hotel near the University. These kids are Nairobi's future. When I ask them what it is they want to see here they go a bit silent. Most of them have never even seen or walked through any of the amazing cities in the world to give them ideas of how much potential surrounds them. If I had my own 747-400 I would fill it with kids from the theatre and university and street and jet them to Manhattan with video cameras for five days. It is always by going away that we truly appreciate the coming back.

The Factory. Theatre for the people - one minute from the Norfolk and Tusker baridi.

Brand of the Week - Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Kenya (kwaheri Lonrho - jambo Kingdom)

Swimming in Gigiri

Security check at the Canadian High Commission in Gigiri where they used to grow tea. Apparently we built the joint in a very controversial plot of land that I think is some sort of unique forest and pissed off the Green Belt Movement. It's too late now - and we have an incredibly beautiful swimming pool to boot. Don't know if I would feel comfortable lying around in my bikini while passersby were free to see my frightfully pale mzungu skin all greased up in my effort to look at bit more African. I think it would feel a bit strange really in a place where so many people are struggling to feed their family - but I guess the best thing for all of us is to not be fearful of our differences economically and turn away because of them but to focus on the future and what can be done to make things better for everyone.

My friend told me that he doesn't feel comfortable going to Mexico anymore on holiday because inevitably his beautiful relaxed environment is surrounded by poverty and it makes him feel bad reading, eating and be a sloth all day like you're supposed to on holiday. But holidays are good and sunny ones vital when you live in a rainforest like Vancouver. How did all this get so messed up? Why is it that one person's well-earned yearly reprieve is another's bitter reflection? Doesn't every single one of us on the planet deserve the opportunity to drive off with the kids and a cooler of food to find somewhere different and recharge and remind ourselves of what's important? Is it possible to shrink this divide - do we want to?

Adverstiy. That's why I love it here so much - and I don't know if the Kenyans see it as clearly as I feel I do as an outsider. Everyone says there are so many problems here and hardship - but that is always where true opportunity lies. All the things that don't work are actually chances to revolutionize and innovate and employ. Those working already see this, but the majority of folks who have struggled through the difficult past few decades also have fatigue and discouragement to overcome. Just like the expression 'compassion fatigue' when we turn away because the tragedies of others is just too great to witness anymore - there is 'poverty fatigue' or what some call the 'broken window' theory. If this is all you ever knew what would suddenly make you feel optimistic and brave enough to overcome?

I am completely convinced that Nairobi can transform itself into a great world city -it has all the basic elements in place already if the government, private sector and civil society can find a way to blend their differences into something fresh and dynamic like what happened in Curatiba Brazil thanks in part to Jaime Lerner. Instead of the Brazilians being weighed down by all that was malfunctioning they used every chance they had to flip their problems upside down and make the solution work in favour of the average person.

In Nairobi there is - great weather, plentiful food, amazingly talented people who are also caring and warm, basic infrastructure in place and a highly centralized location to other major hubs like Mumbai, Cairo and Rome. The lack of development here could actually work in favour of the urban planners because massive big mistakes haven't been made yet - like huge parking garages that encourage vehicles to enter the city core and cause havoc. Essentially the CBD is a major walking economy which is great -the sidewalks are falling apart but they are mostly there and just need some love. There is green space and roundabouts - a ring road and water and food sytems established.

We all love great cities like New York, London and Sydney and we flock there with all of our savings to spend within them. This could happen in the place of cold water. I have always loved cities and the cool shade they provide by the towers filled with industry and employment and humanity. At this point in time it seems there exists the opportunity to turn our great cities into havens where people work together using new systems of thinking. Urban poverty doesn't have to be the only answer to all this. If we think like the Kenyans and copy their basic design of how a village provides for all - INAWEZEKANA.

This blog does not address the very important issues of HIV/AIDS and rural poverty. There are far more informed and enlightened resources for this kind of information that falls outside my area of expertise. My business is committed to functioning in the city of Nairobi - to celebrate the beauty of what Kenyan urbanization was, is and can become. Jane Jacobs, architecture, piazzas and tourism - come to Nairobi.

Urban Lifestyle Magazine of the Week - QZ (published by www.capitalfm.co.ke)

Architecture and Design

Had 2 offers of marriage this morning - both by security guards who told me they loved me very much already. Leonard was 6'3" at least, 250 pounds I'm sure and had his own Kilashnikov which might come in handy really. What more could a girl want from a husband than weapons protection? Riding the matatus all day reminded me of the mini-bus experiment going on in Vancouver right now - it's the best idea going and really is nothing more than paid hitch hiking and a chance to meet new friends. The thing I love most about meeting Kenyans is their names - like a collection of nametags in the church basement of the ladies auxiliary annual craft sale - Joyce, Barbara and Marjorie. Even met a 2-week old baby named Betty - what an old name for such a young soul. I know they all have other secret Kenyan names but they choose to tell me their English names and every time they do I laugh.

Kenya has an increase in it's trade deficit thanks to the rising strength of the shilling - the flower growers are worried and apparently already 3 rose firms have packed up and bought land in the Sudan. Can they even grow flowers there? What about the Janjaweed - would they come riding into town to steal flowers in bundles of 10 to export themselves to Holland? At a meeting this morning with Picasso Productions I was told that if I was looking for a real opportunity I should consider Southern Sudan and that five major investors from the US had just been there including a film maker. Sitting in a tent in Juba trying to email isn't exactly my cup of tea but it would be for someone - hard core entrepreneur - the first to take. The Chinese are supposed to be building a road from Kenya into Southern Sudan which makes me think they're going to pump the oil out through Kenya to keep all their factories running so we can all keep buying plasma tv's and Louis Vuitton bags.

Spent last night helping to network a room full of new HP computers to train dozens of oil company employees how to use the new accounting software. About the same price for a monitor, CPU and keyboard as we would pay in Canada although the internet costs here are insane. Nobody bothered to lay fibreoptic cable into Africa like they did into India so it all comes in through satellite. $300 USD per month for broadband connection. I suspect the USA is thinking about running something from Manhattan into Angola - that would make sense. Or Nigeria and Liberia too.

Seem to have penetrated the first layer of design here - the cutting edge restaurants, fashion types and even Nairobi's first organic restaurant. Off to the Canadian Embassy to mix with some expat types - will be asking if anyone else had the good fortune of losing a shoe down Wayaki Way. Probably not - that moment I imagine was something that only could have happened to me.

Website of the Day - www.zamoya.com

dbwa, Sue

Drainage

It finally happened - my first disastrous day in Nairobi. Now I know what 'the rains' means here - coming from Vancouver I figured rain, no big deal but I failed to appreciate what rain does - when it has nowhere to go. As I stood at the side of Wayaki Way in front of a massive rushing pool of dirty brown water I just missed the break in the traffic to run across the road in my flipflops and jump into the dry safety of a matatu back to town. Taking no mercy on me whatsoever the rushing cars, buses and transport trucks did not slow down as I quickly realized my fate to come - I had nowhere to go back to having climbed down a dirt embankment behind me, so there I stood, getting waves and waves of Nairobi rain splashed on me over and over and over again.

My $5 burgundy umbrella I bought on the streets on Atlanta tried to protect me to no avail. Rather than curse Africa like I started to do - I just laughed. What an idiot I looked like to the Kenyans waiting safely under the bus shelter across the road and I couldn't even appreciate their laughter of me because when I did finally start to run through the lake of water to safety my flip flop came off and started floating away. Not wanting to walk through the streets of Nairobi with one shoe I ran after it (I could have easily have used a canoe) and speared it with my umbrella and managed to get it back on my foot. Everyone was far too polite to say anything to me but I must have been the morning's entertainment. Thank god I had put on some jewellery. When the matutu came by no one on board wanted me to get in but how I love the Kenyans, they were far too polite to say anything.

Off the make the first t-shirts today and check out the Central Business District Association. Think I might bring up the concept of storm drains to them. If they let me open a business here I would be happy to pay some taxes to finance this. That's really the whole debate here right now - the country has to start financing it's own growth and get away from all the donors and the aid because they create a false sense of economic stability and Kenyans have to start coughing up their own dough to have infrastructure in their lives. Everyone is realizing they are the ones who are going to be paying for all the better things to come here like schools and roads and trains to come home for the weekend. So people need income and good jobs to get it into their hands. They can't get angry anymore about the cost of things because the economy is growing whether they like it or not.

It's very clear to see here right now - in the next five years Kenyans are either going to get their hands on the opportunity presenting itself or others will be the winners. I wonder if the average guy selling newspapers realizes this? Half the population is under the age of 20 so will this group be able to gain fast enough before it's too late?

I saw on the news Bolivia's president nationalizing the resource infrastructure so his people can have access to the country's wealth. So what happens to the investors who came years ago with money to spend? Do they just walk away? Should they because they have likely gained tremendously and maybe it's time to share? Will the Bolivians be able to figure out how to run things in time before some sort of kink in the system brings some of it crashing down?

There is a place in Italy that is supposed to be the most succcessful economic commuunity in all of Europe - in all the world perhaps even in terms of equal distribution. It's called and the whole place runs on co-operatives including daycare and banking in some sort of perfectly respectful trading model. Shouldn't we all be looking to mimic this? Or do some of us want the inequalities to exist through the reinforcement of how we choose to trade? Do some of us want to be able to have a 'better car' or a 'bigger house' just so we can feel like we are winning. And what is the price we pay for this advantage? They say the pitfalls of a wealthy economy are family breakdown, health crisis and depression. I wonder what is better -to have everything you desire and still be unhappy? Or to be happy no matter what you have because it still is after all a choice.

A friend of mine told me get still hadn't gotten married because he was restless and he got bored easily with girlfriends and it made me think that it wasn't his girlfriend's job to entertain him. Was it? With everything he has in the world he is expecting happiness to come from someone else. There is nothing that he is wanting and everyday he dreams about having a family but every day he struggles with the compromises he must make to have that. A rich person's burden - the price we pay for the stormdrains I suppose.

Magazine of the Week - EVE MAGAZINE published by Oakland Media (Grace Seneiya on the cover girl!)

dbwa, Sue

Kibera - the Manhattan of Kenya

I am sleeping a few hundred feet from Kibera - the biggest slum in Nairobi where about a million people live. This is where they shot those great scenes from the Constant Gardener where the Rachel character spends her time and has her baby. Kibera means 'forest' or 'wooded place' which you would never guess now - low rent urbanization is the only density visible. The original people who inhabited Kibera were Nubians from the Sudan - 'Niholitic' peoples who came to help construct the Mombassa-Uganda railway line and then stayed. Kinda like the Japanese in Vancouver who built our rail lines before we forced them into internment camps in the interior during the 2nd world war. Thanks for all your hard work - now take your rice and scram.

In my bed I am locked inside the room, behind a locked outer house gate, behind a yard gate that's padlocked inside a gated community with 2 sets of 'askaris', or guards who I am convinced sleep peacefully thru the night instead of protecting me - who wouldn't? All this security to shield me from the offspring of Nubian railway workers - and I wonder how did all this turn out this way? Why weren't these people given a musuem and a big thank you plaque for all their banging and bending over to get the Queen her tea? Slum. I hate that word. In 5-10 years Kibera could be like Soweto - emerging and transforming itself into something dynamic and wealthy. If things really were thought differently it could become like Manhattan with towers and street vendors and taxis bringing foreigners in to strike it rich. This could happen if we chose to believe it possible.

One million people packed and squashed into a small plot of land on the outskirts of town. My girlfriend used to live in Manhattan and she paid over $3,000 Cdn per month to live in a tightly squashed box with a shared laundry 10 floors down. What's the difference really? If these were white people would we expect something different from Kibera? Do we imagine or actually fail to - that this force of humanity could rise above it's difficult conditions, get down to business and grow Kibera into something remarkable? Because it is dirty and dangerous and dark, does it force us to turn away? What are we so afraid of? Grandmothers and children and toilets? Or are we more afraid because of what we fear losing in our own lives? Human conditions are the results of choices - not permanent fixtures of failure and despair - those are perceptions through lenses of familiarity.

I never thought I could get this far, living in Nairobi trying to build an art gallery for little Koi to use as an opportunity to make her own little life better. Four years ago I lay in bed in Vancouver dreaming about these days, hoping and imagining that one day I would have my hands dirty with the work. And from all this I learned that the most important thing to accompany your dream is having the faith and courage to believe it is possible. It is possible for Kibera to turn itself back into the beautiful place it began. It is possible for us to see that dream too and help it bringing it to life. It is possible for all of us to be okay.

If we can turn men into women through surgery and shoot a rocket to an exact point halfway across the world to kill someone, we can find a way for little Koi to realize her dreams. But none of us does this alone, it is only through working together and supporting each other that we can thrive. All the friends and strangers and t-shirts that got me here are evidence of that.

Book of the day - THELATHINI: 30 Faces of Contemporary Art in Kenya (published by www.kuonatrust.org)

dbwa, Sue

Mangoes, Bombings and Coca-Cola

This is why I believe in the long run Africa is going to be just fine - this Coca Cola bottle has seem safaris. The label looks like it was from the 70's and there are so many chips and dents and scars on the thing that I wonder how many people have had a drink of Coke from this same bottle. If it is from the 70's and was used to sell a coke once a week for 30 years then this bottle has given 1,500 people the real thing. Maybe it has actually come from another country too like Benin or Namibia - trust an African to see the value in something and get the most from it.

I think of where the Vancouver economy is in contrast to this young emerging and struggling force of energy in Kenya. We are so over the curve of providing needed goods and services that we have fashion stores for dogs while in Nairobi they're working on sidewalks still. But people in Vancouver probably aren't any wealthier than the average working person in Nairobi considering the amount of debt we carry as North Americans. The trick is to use your money to build wealth for the economy - not just use it to buy stuff. I know this seems to be the priority but it doesn't have to be - as long as you get something for your money who cares what it is?

Sat with a Kikuyu family on the sidewalk two blocks from Kibaki's office, my bank and the old bombed out US Embassy. I wonder if anyone in Hollywood like George Clooney is making a movie about the bombing. And I wonder if this old woman, Diana like the Princess was sitting here selling mangoes the day the bomb exploded. What did she think if so? The very very old people walking the streets of Nairobi are genrally Kikuyu like in the film 'Out of Africa' because the greater Nairobi area has always been their hood. They kinda remind me of the old Chinese ladies that comb the streets of the downtown eastside in Vancouver - the ones who brought their families over through secret mahjong parlours and 'benevolent' societies. My mum told me once when she used to go to Chinatown for supper when I was a child she could hear the ivory mahjong chips being shuffled around on the upper floors of all the buildings. I think it's illegal now - which is strange to prevent a bunch of really old men and women from hanging out and cheating each other over tea.

The first time I came to Africa I felt like a target - like people wanted to take advantage of me and that I had to be cautious. But now I realize what I represent is opportunity because I come from a place where things have mostly always worked. I can actually share what I know here and make a difference in people's lives especially knowing all the mistakes my country has made in development like bailing on public transit systems until they become far more costly than need be. We don't need to see ourselves as 'donors' anymore for Africa - we can be something far more powerful and lovely - friends or 'aunties' and 'uncles' as the kids say here. We can share what we know and don't know if we are humble enough to realize how much the Africans can teach us.

Think I found an office to get things going with the gallery and a lawyer to help me get a business licence. Downtown Nairobi though - truly the wild west but it could get me started and hire someone. Bought a little girl lunch today on the street named Koi, gave her some change yesterday and I have a feeling she will become a friend. This is the result of the urbanization dilemna - if you can't get in the game then you're left on the sidewalk really, pushed out quite literally. As she took my hand and walked through the angry traffic with me like I had known her for years I felt deeply in my heart this is why I am here. Little Koi and her Coca Cola, if she only knew how far I have travalled to meet her.

Speech of the Holiday - Kibaki announcing a major fund for kids businesses.

dbwa, Sue

'Capitalist Nigger' by Chika Onyeani

I can't even believe I wrote that word - 'nigger' - I don't think I've even said it more than 3 times in my life but it's the title of a very hot book here right now that basically is criticizing the emerging black middle class for becoming consumers and not wealth builders. The author's point, which I love, is that black South Africans should be focussing on manufacturing value for the black economy (ie. a black-owned restaurant chain or video company) and then exporting this to the rest of the community or world at large. The mass consumption of foreign products only means the bulk of the margins what build wealth will leave the country - it looks like you are rich on the outside but you're not really. The Americans are starting to realize this too - after all the handbags and high heels and SUV's - who really are the ones who can sustain?

So how does an 18-year old newspaper salesman whose parents are both dead get into the wealth building game? He could do it by selling so many newspapers to get him into management so he can quit and start his own paper. When I gave him my business card and asked him if he had access to the internet he didn't quite know what to say. He was curious and wanted to say yes but it seemed to stun him in a way. But if given the right chance and someone to believe in him he could become a major success story - but someone has to see him as valuable capital and at this point in the economy it feels as though we are afraid to invest in a nation of poor kids, like somehow they will get in the way of our already organized systems of hiring and earnings. That they will disrupt us and maybe even make us think.

If I wasn't doing what I'm doing I would open an employment centre for street kids in the middle of the city like a waterpark or a playground where everyone was welcome. And then I would send the ones who were ready off to the growing Kenyan firms who are going to need this great labour pool - youth willing to learn and build the future of this country. If they were clean cut and well-spoken and knew how to use a computer they would be interviewed. But if their clothes are soiled and they are hungry who will look deep into their souls and little spirits just begging for a chance and say 'Okay watoto - I will invest in you'.

Am trying to convince my friend Lisa to come over and help me with my reality tv show. She is a kick ass producer who could really make what I am struggling to do something special and is looking for her own opportunity as well. Don't know if she'll be game for the matatu rides I love so much but if I keep her busy working maybe she won't notice all the things that usually keep foreigners in five star hotels like the smoky air and the absolute chaotic scramble of it all. Africa.

I read the Denver school system is starting to pay better teachers more money than the bad ones. How great is that? Must have been a student's idea and it reminded me of Hector Peterson who took a bullet for insisting the kids in Soweto not be forced to learn in Afrikaans because they could see their grades going down and they knew they were a smart class and they refused to accept being taken advantage of. I guess that's the moment when you choose to fight for something - when you can see it being taken away right in front of your eyes and you react. This is what it means to be a hero I suppose.

The absolute best example of creating wealth for Africans was a story I came across about a mining merger in South Africa - Swiss-based Xstrata is giving 26% of their 50% ownership of the Motolo platinum mine to Kagiso Trust Investments - a black-owned firm who will fund the equivalent share of the capital expenditure. Maybe one day we will live in a global economy that celebrates the fair-traders and punishes those who take advantage of others. If the ad world got hold of this idea it could be the most revolutionary marketing trend for the alleviation of poverty. Are YOU trading fairly? And if not, why not?

Book of the Day - "Capitalist Nigger" by Chika Onyeani

dbwa, Sue

Nairobi - place of cold water (Maa)

What is the dream of a 14-year old boy selling peanuts along the roadway? To be a 'driver' he told me - not a matatu/bus driver or a taxi driver - a private driver with his own car. And James just might get there if I have anything to do with it. Already he makes 150KShillings on the average day which is about $2 USD so if he made that 25 days a month he'd be pulling in 1/10th of what an architect makes. Not bad for teenager working a part-time job in Kenya. And he goes to school which he know is his ticket out of peanut-ville. I gave him my card and he said his mother could help him email me to say hi and I paid him for his video interview too.

Nairobi means 'place of cold water' in the Maa language spoken by the Masaai signifying what was found here when the British showed up to build the Mombassa-Uganda Railway Line 100 years ago. Kenya stems from 'Kiny'aa' from the Kamba language - the people who had first contact with the Europeans around Mt. Kenya. It's ironic what this word means now after all the years of colonial development - 'Kiny'aa' actually means 'where the white meets the black' or the neck of an ostrich or what Mt. Kenya looks like with the snow peak. That's why the English say Kenya the way they do - not because they say everything a bit strange but because of Kinyaa.

Interviewed the La Palm Investment Group last night at the Parklands Sports Club where I am living. Wish I had known the pool was drained for repairs - but the fruit, yoghurt and omelette breakfasts are pretty wonderful. I am thinking of getting a fake wedding ring to wear around otherwise I am going to end up getting married without me having a say in it. No one can believe I am 38 years old, single with no children - including me of course. I did try rather hard to remedy this in the past few years to no avail - seems like I got to the party too late and all the balloons and streamers were just lying on the floor soiled. The 'Marriage Party' that I thought would go on all night seems has ended just as I leaped out of the taxi with my brand new dress on. Did I miss it? Is it over? They say one of the main reasons why real estate prices are so high in Vancouver is because of divorce - at least 35% of marriages end now so this means 2 dwellings instead of 1. How weird and sad too. Same thing going on in Toyko too.

Anyway - the La Palm crew is destined to become the next generation of homegrown millionaires here in Kenya that's for sure. Am going to hook them up with the Ken-BC group and AKPA in Atlanta - over 200 professionals in the diaspora all saving their fedha to invest in the growth of the Kenyan economy in the next 20 years. Smart. We talked about the CNN wall and I told them that everyone keeps telling me something bad is going to happen to me but it just doesn't. The only slightly insulting gesture I have experienced was getting rudely honked at by a middle-age Indian woman driving her Toyota on Ogigo Road. When I gave her the 'excuse-me' stare as I walked along she had the nerve to honk again at me. Cheeky stuff - but not one rude remark, or attempt to rob, molest, mug or murder me like all the warnings. My only real fear is a slightly expanding waistline from all the chipati, tandoori chicken and smoothies I keep eating.

And when I ask all the kids I meet if they think a t-shirt business connecting kids in Africa with kids in America is a good idea - they all say yes! When I ask them if they would like to work with my business they all say - yes! Is it possible to build a business backwards and upside-down starting with the keenest youngest most aggressive labour force I know of and making something from this? Can these kids become the powerful investment I absolutley know in my heart they are?

Roasted peanuts wrapped in a piece of dirty white paper: a 1996 Water/Sanitation survey done in Machakos - an aid consultant's words becoming valuable recycled packaging - "lower proportions of households reporting this source were evident in other divisions". Give me the peanuts anyday over tables and reports and figures.

Magazine for Sunday - 'News Africa' (publisher Moffat Ekoriko - www.newsafrica.net)

Kayole, Embakasi Division

Imani Children's Home - Movie Night. The thing I love the most about technology is that it is a universal language. Jury rigging my Canon videorecorder into the back of one of the gnarliest monitors in Kayole - 60 orphans watching black and white dailies from the first shoot with them. And what I compeletly missed was that the show needs to be comedy. Kids laugh at a completely different set of variables than adults and the shots that I would have cut are now keepers. Big bums, falling over, stuffing food into their mouths - making tv with African kids is going to be fun. Even the one year olds get in on it although balance is a bit of an issue with them.

Falling asleep on the roof of the orphanage in the mid-day sun listening to crack blast Kenyan rap - clean white sheets flopping overhead is some kind of slum heaven. 400,000 people live in Kayole in the most fasinating inter-dependant network of trade, child care and transportation. In Soweto - Joburg they told me about these things called SPAZAS - secret fake stores in people's homes where one lady sold soap and the other sold flour so everyone wouldn't constantly have to leave the slum to get daily stuff. But now Soweto isn't really a slum anymore. I met the guy whose about the get a McDonald's franchise and there's an Indian woman building a four star hotel. Ten years of BEE and things are getting better for blacks in the Republic.

In Alabama they say 'blacks' and not Africans. In South Africa they say 'black Africans' but you don't hear that in Kenya - if you even said it you'd have someone's sister on your case with one of the coldest stares on earth. So could the old-fashioned language itself be part of the problem? Angola was given one of the most isolated languages on earth - Portugese so what were they going to do with that? Thank god for Brazil I guess - they're pointing their bows back that way now - Angola is the 2nd biggest provider of oil in Africa. Am trying to figure out if going to Luanda might be worth my time. The port looks amazing and I met a woman who knows some kids who might want to make some t-shirts there.

I think of the old slave routes that bled so many Africans off the continent and imagine now the arrows going in the opposite direction, back across the Atlantic Rim for what was left behind. There is a prison in Tennessee called Angola - one of the worst in the country they say. I read they have a radio station that broadcasts issues like faith and salvation and that they are trying to get a tv station going too. When I head back to Alabama I will have to visit Angola and show them photos of Luanda. Two sets of Africans both living in Angola on opposite sides of an ocean. And all those 'black' men sitting beyind bars in Tennessee - what if their families had never been shipped across the ocean and instead had stayed home and raised their families there, built schools and highways and grew food and fished for dinner? What would Luanda look like today?

Imani Filamu - kids making movies in a Nairobi slum. Is the world ready for this kind of systems thinking? Can we finally end the work of all the charities and NGO's and humanitarian groups who were supposed to be going home anyway see if Africa is ready to stand on it's own 2 feet?

Free the capitalists! Lend us capital and we'll save the world better and faster while paying taxes in the process. The Undergrowth.

World Premiere - "Moja Moja" by Sam Oliver (on the CBC Sunday April 30 - Moving On)

Human Capital

Human Capital - it's everywhere you stop to look in Africa. When I interview people and ask them "What would you want to tell people in America?" they all say to come to Africa and that people are hard-working here. Which is only part of it - not only are they hard working but they've got this mental gymnastics thing down pat and I think it has to do with the way Africans have always learned. In the schools I go to there isn't always much in the way of infrastructure but what I always see is what is called "the teachable moment" - the moment when you can see that a person is learning - a small window gap in all the other moments when we are distracted or tired or bored. Teachers search for these moments everyday because they know that is when retention occurs.

In Kenya they need to hire 162,000 teachers - and that's just to make the primary schools function with less load. If 40,000 aren't hired the teachers will strike. With a population of 30 million people & 12 million under the age of 18 that means about 6 million kids are in primary school so with an additional 150,00 teachers that means 42.25 students per class. What on earth are they doing now? When we had the 2 Kenyan kids over in Vancouver they told us usually 100 kids are in each class and one Canadian student turned to his teacher and said "Now don't you feel bad about going on strike?"

When I see all the amazingly talented people here I want to believe investment will come in the form of investing in human capital and not just cheap labour thinking. Why is it that we insist on spending less on humans and more on machinery in the industrial economy? What made us forget that paying people good wages was good for business?

After all money is infinite - it's not a finite resource we all have to fight over like land or fresh water or oil. We can grow money just like food if we believe it is possible. Brazil has said that if there is an oil crisis that they're going to be okay - already 20% of their cars on running on ethanol from the sugar industry which made me laugh. If we start driving our cars on sugar then that could mean diabetes will decrease because the cars companies will beat out the junk food barons and the end of oil could spurn a major health boom in North America. I say let's use up all the oil - it's not like human nature is ever going to stop using it because it's bad for the environment. That's like saying people don't have a problem losing weight or abusing their credit cards. Some people handle these things well and write books about it for the rest of us but let's face it - most of us are lazy.

So maybe what's coming now after this whole failed "Industrial Economy" can be called the "Salvation Economy" - using business to heal us all. Whether it's cleaning up a river or feeding a child - we can use the making of money to save us from our excesses. The motivation of money could reverse all the disasters and we could have things cleaned up in a few years if we all get in on the action. And if we bundled to this a system of trade that focussed on the end of war maybe we'd have peace too.

A 13 year old from Haiti told me about this video game called WARCRAFT where up to 3 million people are online at once playing a game based on war. But what if there was a game where the motive was to end war? That game would sell more copies because more people want peace than war and if the game actually became real it could work - it would be a system well worth investing in to pay people good money to end war. I heard on NPR in Atlanta that the dirtly little secret about the weapons industry is that gun sales are actually going down for the first time in history and that Walmart was replacing guns with fishing rods in 1,000 of it's stores. What if Walmart actually sold things like the END OF WAR or ALLEVIATION OF POVERTY as products in all of their stores. The reality is they're not going anywhere soon but they don't really care what they sell as long as they make their margins and give their shareholders what they're looking for. If these kinds of products sold for say $50 or even $100 dollars wouldn't millions and millions of us go in and buy them? I'd buy five probably - or maybe even 20 if I knew they would work like a fishing rod or a bicycle and I could get my money back if it didn't.

If we melt the guns and forge the steel into bicycles using power from the sun we don't need oil. That's what I see here in Africa - Human Capital overcoming adversity - INAWEZEKANA.

Book of the Weekend - Finite and Infinite Games (James Carse, Amazon)

dbwa, Sue

Muthaiga, Nairobi

China. If that's not the most important word on the planet right now I don't know what is - besides oil of course but then you're back to China. Hu Jintao lands tonight in Nairobi so will be keeping my eyes open for him from the Matatu windows. Apparently he's looking for oil which nobody else bothered to think was in Kenya but just might be after all. Angelique Kidjo is here too at the Carnivoire which is so great to see an African promoting African trade. And there is a high speed internet launch going on which although frightening in terms of costs should change things quite a bit. God we take it for granted being able to Blackberry and wifi - it seems Kenya is going to encourage telcomm competition so all the better for everyone.

Seems Sam Oliver may have a distribution deal for our documentary in place www.mojamojafilm.com - they want to take it to Banff and Cannes of all places - can't wait to tell Grace to pratice her French. This is excellent really to help with what I have started to sniff around for - a US development buyer for my reality tv show. All the kids so far in Alabama, South Africa and Sierra Leone are involved - just have to see if the Imani Kids will as well as they will be the first ones to make our new INAWEZEKANA t-shirts. Heading off there tomorrow to stay in Kayole Slum, Embakasi Division on the East side of town. I think 400,000 people live there so it should be just like Soweto - only with different languages. Also heading up to Naivasha to meet another 100 kids at Uburu Secondary School who have a trust that might want to partner with the business. It's so easy for them they won't be able to believe it how much work I have already done to make it possible for them to trade with us. All these kids with no parents - hungry and motivated to learn.

I think back to when my own mum passed and it all seems to make sense. I do believe things happen for reasons in life and when mum died when I was 18 I remember thinking, okay, so my life has to become something now - I have to survive some way somehow and I think that's what the kids in Soweto, Kayole, Maralal and Freetown feel too. Youth does that for you - it prevents you from knowing that life is full of downturns and disappointments by buoying you up with such blind optimism. At 18 if I had had any idea of how many mistakes I was going to make by not having a mum around it would have frightening. Thank god dad gave me that cheap plastic camera for Xmas - it gave me something to hold onto and it made me feel special. That's why I'm here, that's why I do what I do. After all the research and networking and sales and marketing plans at the end of the day it's about how I feel just like all these orphans do. There's a hole and the best thing to fill it in in a positive and healthy way is with the opportunity to exercise our abilities. No one can take that away - it is the sun that makes the flower bloom.

The thing I love about the Kenyans the most - and all Africans really - is there propensity to joke around and laugh with you. Got nailed at customs yesterday at NBO Jomo Kenyatta for going in and out of the arrivals area to get cash to pay my Visa. Nothing speaks like Greenbacks anywhere in the world - so the official guy didn't quite like my strategy. After having a few laughs with me he said not to do it again - which of course I'm sure I will until they move the ATM machine inside the area I need it to be.

For the first few nights on this trip I was waking up in a cold sweat freaked out thinking what the hell am I doing trying to start two businesses in Africa with no partner and really no officially mapped out plan. That's the CNN wall - the deep-seated fear we all carry around in North America that bad things will happen to us here. That's why the Chinese will end up with all the contracts here because they don't think that way - they don't really care about all the problems and the history of the colonial abuses - they just want the resources and have the cash to pay for it. The African population is around 900 million and China should be at 1.3 billion by now so really that have a lot in common. A whole bunch of rural land, thousands of languages and a shared history of thundering in on horseback to take over the local town. I think the Chinese and the Africans will make great business partners really - they're both quite silly in a way and go for the whole ceremony bit too. No need to feel sorry for Africa anymore - Ghengis Khan has arrived.

Just before I left Vancouver I had the most awful email from a very old friend who I basically have lost touch with who told me that I was 'everything he disliked in a person' because I believe the world is overpopulated and maybe I don't need to have children - and that I am trying to increase trade with Africa and teach the kids here how the game of business works. He continues to send me these emails about 'viruses and plagues' in Africa and I was pretty speechless. I think Africa should start suing these people for slander - that's what it is really - defamation and slander. It's like all those black and white 'feel sorry for Africa' charity and NGO tv ads you see. Really what all that is is economic hijacking and if I have only one criticism of all the wonderful Africans I know it's that they haven't gotten angry enough yet.

I wonder if you added it all up - all the money people have donated to help Africa that never arrived here - how much would that be? If all that money had actually be spent responsibly to increase infrastructure, education, the environment - how different things would be here? Or maybe it's some sort of blessing that Africa has been left behind because what is coming now is the cleanest, greenest, most transparent foreign investment the world has ever seen. Maybe in some way this is what Africa has been waiting for - for the rest of us to behave fairly and answer their prayers that we will come as friends because we are always, without fail, welcome here.

Book of the Week - The Backyard Tribe (US/Kenya) Neil Shulman

dbwa, sue

Orlando West, Soweto

If ever there were sister cities it would have to be Soweto and Selma - the similarities are baffling and I hope every African American would come to Soweto to feel this. Think I found 4 girls who might want to help me build the part of the business that would function in South Africa. That's the thing about kids and t-shirts - it's the same thing the world over. In the kitchen this morning Dave said to me 'there are no jobs here for the poor people - only the rich are getting richer' which is true anywhere. I told him not to think of finding a job but of creating jobs for others - that is the promising future for Soweto. Already I can see it in the shops - products being sold here from China. Getting my hands on indigenous tourist items is already hard but worth the extra effort.

Like anywhere there are economic struggles the opposite is always always true - where there is adversity there is opportunity and there's lots of it in Africa if the locals can get their hands on it. I think about 60% of the population in South Africa is under the age of 20 so in ten years this group will be a major source of social and economic change. Having seen the Hector Peterson Museum yesterday where the end of Apartheid essentially began - it's easy to see how much power the young people have. Hector was killed by police at the age of 13 years for protesting in the streets for the rights of black South Africans to be educated in their own language. It seems absolutely stunning for such a young soul to have acheived this much awareness. But I guess that's the gift of youth - to still be able to believe in what is possible - INAWEZEKANA.

Will be heading to Kayole Slum in Embakasi Division Nairobi on Tuesday and somehow somehow getting in touch with the iEarn kids in Freetown Sierra Leone who have art for the business already done. Airplanes - powerful economic engines that can fly them into the future of economic sustainability. How is that kids from Selma Alabama, Soweto South Africa, Nairobi Kenya and Freetown Sierra Leone all have the same struggles? Why are the histories of African children the same the world over?

I think back to the day I quit my job in television advertising and realize I never really stopped doing it - I am still doing it today in Soweto. But I am selling a different thing - that of a 'value-added' Africa and the creation of opportunity for those without access to it.

Book of the Week - South Africa, 2014 (a look into the future)

dbwa, Sue

INAWEZEKANA - made in Alabama

Tuesday midday - sitting in Atlanta after a five-day business trip to Selma Alabama where I have pretty-much decided to develop a sister business of the CPGKENA - INAWEZEKANA. The purpose of this secondary offshoot is to connect kids living in the African diaspora with the US consumer market - probably one of the world's most powerful potential agents of change. After running the CPGKENYA for two years I started getting emails from kids in other African countries and thought I better create an opportunity for these kids too and what better place than within an African-American community? Hence my trip to Selma. I used to think - what am I crazy building two businesses and a reality tv show all at the same time? And then I think of businesses like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Chevron and think - if they can do it - I can do it.

Selma is an absolutely amazing place - 20,000 residents who are 69% African American. Like most urban centres that experience resource poverty - the original downtown core is suffering while new sub-urban mall areas are thriving. In Selma key market initiatives have been identified to redevelop through private-sector investment the old city core which is where I spent five days doing a feasibility study of bringing my t-shirt business. Without a doubt within hours really it was apparent it was the perfect home for INAWEZEKANA - made in Alabama. The word INAWEZEKANA (in-a-way Ze-can-a) is Swahili expression meaning 'it is possible' which is the driving force of both my businesses. Swahili is the main language spoken in East Africa - a mix of the African 'bantu' tongue + an Arabic dialect that blended to become a trading language linking the two geographic regions across the Red Sea. The reason I imagined the possibility of connecting African kids with African American kids was through their history of having survived the slave trade. In all the places I am developing my businesses - Kenya, Alabama, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Guyana - the most incredible indisputable resource that exists is the amount of human capital just ready and waiting to be invested in - fairly and equitably.

Walking down main street Selma I come across a business called IMANI ENTERPRISES - which I know of because Imani is also a Swahili word that means 'unity' - and the name of the orphanage in Nairobi I work with in Kayole Slum where 350 kids live. I think this is what is called a 'tipping point' - the exact same idea occurring simultaneously in 2 foreign environments on opposite sides of the world. It's what surprises me most always too is how few African Americans have ever gone to Africa - I mean I know the reasons but what is so interesting is their own relationship to the idea of their history being in Africa. One women I met in Selma said she has always wanted to go to Africa but she was afraid - which astounded me - I know why I was afraid the first time I went being a skinny white blond girl from Canada but her? How could this beautiful powerful African American mother possibly be 'afraid' of Africa?

An equity finance executive told me in a bar in Vancouver that this was called 'the CNN wall' - that most people living in North America are so bombarded by negative images of Africa that fear is the only powerful thing the know about the continent. And my other Kenyan friend David in Atlanta said to me 'Sue you know we love the Masaai - but they have done Kenya a great dis-service as well' which I completely understand. My motive being doing business with the African means just that - regular everyday Africans just like you and me - raising their families, working a job and trying to matter in the bigger scheme of things. I know it's important to save the animals but if we save the people first - they will save the animals on their own.

I am off to Nairobi via Jo'berg on Thursday where I will visit the Kliptown Museum in Soweto - the place in the recent film 'Tsotsi'. It's quite a marvel I hear and something I would be interested in helping to get going in Nairobi - maybe in Kibera along the Mombassa-Uganda railway line built by the British. I can just hear all those Kenyan kids now - "How are you?" - has got to be one of my favourite sounds in the country. After getting the ball rolling for the CPGKENYA in Nairobi I will shoot some video for the reality tv show I am trying to make for INAWEZEKANA between Selma and Nairobi this summer. Then I will meet with James Shikwati from IREN-KENYA about finding a place to build an art gallery and involving a Kenyan partner to help grow the business. This is truly what all of Africa needs most - not just good jobs but opportunities to generate and accumulate wealth - transferring equity and investment vehicles into the very hands of Africans and their families. The private-sector has the power to do this - I mean look at Bill Gates - and if there's one thing Africans love it's doing business.

I did a shot shoot in Selma with a 21-year old named Marcus (even though I think he looks older) about the 2 of us trying to start our businesses at the same time in Selma. He wants to import products to sell in Selma - I want to make them in Selma and export them to buyers across the US. Despite our incredible differences like the colour of our skin - we have the same dream of bringing investment into the community and offering opportunity for the people who live there.

We both believe it is possible despite the odds and all the empty storefronts. We are going to take advantage of a program paid for the U of Alabama to encourage enterpreneurs in communities like Selma to rebuild the economy through small business. Anything to get me back to eating more of Marcus's great-aunts co0king at Johnnie's - black coffee, orange juice and a bacon-egg + cheese fried sandwich first thing in the morning.

After meeting everybody I possibly could in Selma again I was convinced that my passion for doing business with the Africans is going to pay off. Every time I told people what I was trying to do they smiled and said things like "We sure need more businesses here" and the best part by far besides the people, the food, the sun and the cool breeze coming off the river is the fact that street parking in Selma is still free. How many places can you say that about?

Movie of the Week: "The Defiant Ones" (Sidney Poitier and Jack Lemmon)

dbwa, Sue

Matthews Avenue, Vancouver

This blog is a public record of my attempt to build a for-profit business in Africa: The Children's Photographic Gallery of Kenya - Trade NOT Aid for kids.

After nearly four years of learning how to alleviate poverty in Africa I believe the most effective tool is well-intentioned for-profit private-sector investment - or as I call it - DBWA: doing business with the Africans. It must drive the Africans mad to watch all of us outsiders sit and decide what is right for their economies when all they really want is the same thing as the rest of the world - to be able to work hard, care for our families and have some money in our jeans at the end of the day. But ever since the colonial days Africa has been so completely hijacked by foreign interests - everyone flying in on planes asking African governments to pay them to "humanitarianly" take notes and assess the situation.

Coming from Vancouver I often wonder what we as locals would think if a planeload of Africans showed up and started giving us advice on the complex socio-economic issues going on in the Downtown Eastside. Pretty simple really - shut down the drug dealers, give everyone a place to sleep and a little piece of land to grow their own food. But would we let a team of African consultants do this - let alone pay them good money for it? As I spend my last week in Canada before heading to Nairobi I am trying to explain to everyone what it is I am actually going to do and why I hope and believe my Kenyan colleagues will welcome me. In a nutshell? I am going to make money in Africa - lots of it - with my fair-trade business partners who are the 1.5 million orphans who live in Kenya.

I know if I can grow a business in Kenyan soil by borrowing capital, hiring people and bringing much-needed sustainable products and services to market the pressure of poverty will lessen in some small way. And if I learn how to do this in partnership with kids who are the future of Africa then they can have a powerful say in how the business should function so it benefits them and me together or - pamoja. It will likely look completely foreign to anything I believe to be true - but they will make sure it will work and grow for them.

Nearly two years ago I started this whole thing by mailing 6 disposable cameras to an orphanage in the remote central province of Kenya called Samburu where 100 kids with disabilities lived. For the month I waited for my package to arrive I thought if the Wharton School of Business got wind of this - I would be laughed out of class. And when I asked the Canada Post guy if he thought my package would arrive he looked at me with a blank stare and said, "Maybe". Well not only did my package arrive but the cameras came back and the pictures were fabulous! And In 12 months the kids were able to earn nearly $12K Cdn in partnership with my business + getting a trip to Vancouver to attend an art event where we sold $30K Cdn worth of fair-trade art in 4 days.

I had told the kids in emails to bring as much jewellery as they could get their hands on because all my friends would want the chance to buy it. During our first "home party" the kids priced each piece around $5 and by the time they left the prices had increased to $20. Good for them - why should we be the only ones making good money in the world? Why shouldn't the Africans be able to get into the game? They saw an opportunity to trade to their advantage and they took it.

The most powerful thing we can give the Africans that won't cost us a dime more in foreign aid is the opportunity to fair trade with us. And it's the only truly measurable device that has ever created peaceful and prosperous societies. Whether it's a cow or a feature film - trading our wares is what allows us all to live in dignity - something I learned from doing business with the Africans.

WEEKLY BOOK - "Reclaiming Africa" by James Shikwati (available on Amazon)

dbwa, Sue