Winfred Realizes Her Dream

Winfred was a student in our 2007 class. She attended the sessions we held at Kenya Assembly of God, in Bahati. I remember Winfred, because she sought me out each morning she was on site, to look over her homework from the night before. She wanted to open a bakery. At the time the task seemed daunting, but we all encouraged her to follow up on what she'd learned from her marketing survey, and to keep working on her plan.

Fast forward to 2012. Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Winfred's bakery. It opened a year ago. Between 2007 and 2011 she'd suffered a number of setbacks, including losing her mother, and suffering paralysis (which has left her with a slight tremor in her hands.) Afer her mother passed away, she struggled for awhile, but then told herself that she had to get back on her feet. She started saving money slowly, and mapped out the strategy for getting the bakery opened.

When we visited yesterday, three of her employees were busily at work: one decorating cakes, one baking, and the other cleaning measuring cups. The young woman cleaning the cups, pictured here, is an orphan. Besides opening the bakery, Winfred has dedicated herself to giving back to the community, and thus she helps some of the young people in her community by employing them.

When I first heard from Winfred earlier this year that she had started her bakery, of course I imagined a shop displaying cakes, cookies, and the like. As you can see from the picture, however, the bakery is the actual baking facility. People order cakes and cookies, and the bakery delivers (or you can pick up your order). Winfred proudly showed up her order book, her sales book, her receipts, and her expense books. We were happy to see these, as we spend some time in class trying to help our students understand cash flow, and the importance of keeping good records.

Winfred spoke very positively of the many things she learned in SE101, from her UBC student-teachers (Brent McFerran (Ph.D., Marketing, 2009), Jim Atamba (B.Comm 2008), and Jessie Yeung (B. Comm 2008). She was much more modest about all the hard work she had put into making her dream come true.

Winfred gave us samples of cookies and chocolate cake to take back with us to town. The treats would be competitive in Canada. We are planning to have her bake the cakes for our celebration ceremony at the end of this year's program in two weeks. We want our current participants to hear about Winfred's success, so that they can start to see how opening a business is possible with a lot of hard work, a dedicated approach to savings, and some business knowledge.

We know Kung Fu

Two weeks of teaching has passed and I had a chance to teach a full day class - Financial Plan. Teaching is not as easy as I thought, it sure need lots of preparation and high level of concentration as students might as you many challenging questions. However, the hardest part is to teach basic accounting in only 1.5 hours. At the end of the class, they were supposed to know how to prepare the whole financial statement. Students in our class have different education background, some of them understand the concept right away, but some of them need more time to digest the information; it was not easy to make sure everyone understand within the tight timeframe. Another challenge for the students is to apply the financial plan to their own business. Preparing financial forecasts is one major component in our course. Our students are very hard working, they collected information from suppliers and competitors within few days. However, in Canada, market information is easily accessible by internet and databases. In Kenya, market information do not get centralized; therefore, it is very difficult for our students to estimate revenue. Also, almost everything is negotiable, and this makes revenue projection even harder as prices are different for each customers. Adding more time in lecturing financial plan would be necessary in the future.

Speaking of negotiation, I am becoming an expert through practice. We negotiate everyday. From cab fare to a bottle of water. I was shopping in Maasai Market - a market that only opens on Tuesdays and Saturdays and sells jewellery, crafts, arts, souveniors, etc.- for about 5 hours and almost 2 hours was spent on negotiating prices. I learned that if I am not sure to buy, I should not ask for the price. Once price is asked, the seller will follow and pursuade you until you make the purchase. Since I am obviously a tourist, they normally start the price ridiculously high. I was looking at a necklace and asked the price and the vendor listed 2750 shillings ( ~$45), i made an offer for 500 shillings ( ~$8) but he rejected. I left the kiosk and kept shopping. 15 minutes later, the vendor showed up again and I found out that he has been following us. We end up agreed the price at 700 shillings (~$12) after another 15 minutes negotiation. I learned the the trick to get lower price is to pretend walking away. When I was leaving the market, a local lady showed a Kung Fu pose to me. This remind me that Alvina was once asked in a local disco whether she knew Kung Fu and the kenyan wanted to learn from Alvina. Thanks to the movies, we individuals of Chinese descent were viewed as Kung Fu experts that can jump from wall to wall and roof to roof. One of my students in class even asked me if Kung Fu is in the curriculum in school as required subject to learn. Since it would be to my advantage, I did not deny that I don't know Kung Fu (in fact, I learned Tae Kwon Do).

I finally had a chance to visit Kibera on Friday. My first impression was that there were many people on the street. There is about 1 million people living in Kibera. We walked for about 30 minutes and were being stared by many people. I remembered that a website describe Kibera as a place a tourist should never go because you would be lucky if you come out in underwear. We were very cautious in Kibera, there was a local lady following us and asking for money, and many kids come up and ask for money as well. Kids were friendly, many would ask you "how are you?". Brent were approached by a little boy, he has some bottle caps in hand and we thought he was offering that to Brent as a gift. In fact, he was just pointing at Brent's camera and he wanted that. In Kibera, many people were struggling for money, even for kids. Kids can only see money in their eyes; they are like bamboon that live in Lake Nakuru, who look cute but have to be agressive in order to survive in this tough environment. Hopefully in the future life in Kibera can change and kids can get out from this poverty. SE101 would be a small step in helping this community to create more employment for better lives. When leaving Kibera, I saw one Asian lady walking by herself in Kibera, many of us was shocked but I guessed she will be fine since we Chinese know Kung Fu.

Posted by Jessie Yeung

Long meeting Day

After cleaning up the washroom that I flooded last night with my long shower (as I waited for hot water), the second night sleeping was much more enjoyable. After a nice breakfast, we headed to another part of downtown in search of a Nakumatt grocery store. This part of downtown was more of a tourist area with big name hotels including the Hilton. We were approached by many safari tour salespersons on the street. We rejected their offers to be cautious. Fortunately, we found a tour agency from our Lonely Planet Kenya book, but we had to challenge 9 flights of stairs (since Brent refused to use the elevator) to find the place. Behind a gate was a very old and dirty office without computer equipment, but the agent we spoke to was very helpful. We didn't sign up as the price was not as good as we expected. Despite walking 9 flights of stairs to an office that could potentially be a high pressure sales environment or an 'organized mugging,' it was definitely an adventure.

We walked (I had to jog as the boys were walking very fast!) back to the hotel for the next meeting with the Daystar University students and Ebony Foundation representatives. We confirmed that there will be 3 sites for teaching; however, we UBC students will only be co-teaching with Daystar students at the Kimathi Information Centre and Kibera. Each UBC student is paired with a Daystar student and will co-teach the workshop that corresponds with their specialty. We discussed the teaching methods and came up with lots of great ideas with the local expertise of the Daystar students. The meeting was long (about 5 hours) but very productive and we got our schedules and staffing organized.

Tomorrow is our first day of teaching. I am in Brent and Art's room, which has become the SE101 headquarters, with the rest of the team. Alvina is preparing flip chart slides for the Introduction to the Business Plan session tomorrow, Kevin is updating the 'quote wall' and Art is just being “awesome”. The room is cold and Brent is holding a candle in his hand to keep warm (as if it works…). The team has been doing great and hopefully we will have a good start tomorrow!

Posted by Jessie Yeung