The last few weeks have been characterized by tumult: finding a place to live, visiting potential pilot sites, and checking in on our first operational entrepreneur on the other side of the country have left us tired and sick (hoping like hell that it's not malaria), but rich with new information that we'll be able to apply to the project over the next few months (and longer, for everyone else at the company). There is so much promise in our endeavor that it's a bit unfortunate that my time here will be so brief; I'll just have to hope that grad school is all that I've hyped it up to be for the last few years.We had intended to get a house in Dar Es Salaam when we got here, but that has proven difficult - landlords generally require 12 months of payment up-front, and pricing is on par with San Francisco for places with guards (which is more crucial in Dar than in other places, especially for 2 Westerners with a bunch of electronic equipment and a quality of apparent cluelessness). Instead, we're subletting month-to-month from an American friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend that's in Tanzania for a year, as part of her academic studies. It's not as permanent an arrangement as we would have liked, but it gives us a place to put our things, a small sense of home, a little familiarity (made Cinnamon Toast this morning), and most importantly, a kitchen (I can't wait to make dinner for the first time tonight!).
As soon as we "moved in" to the house in Dar, we left for Karagwe, a district in the Northwestern region of Tanzania, near the borders of Rwanda and Uganda. It caught my attention that everyone was saying "have a pleasant journey", instead of "have a good trip", which is the usual nomenclature in the US, but now I understand: the trip from Dar Es Salaam to Karagwe is absolutely a journey, with no guarantee of pleasantness - 17 hours by bus to Mwanza, 1-2 days of waiting in Mwanza (during which we found a really good Indian & Chinese restaurant - yes, both cuisines in one place), 10 hours overnight on a ship to Bukoba, and 2-3 hours on a dala-dala (minivan bus system) to Karagwe (4 hours in our case, since we got stuck in the mud).
We then spent about 4 days in the Karagwe region, meeting with our entrepreneur, holding a focus group with his customers, tying up loose ends (signing contracts, etc), getting feedback on our product and financing structure, and picking up equipment that had been left for us there. We learned a lot of good information that we'll apply to the project, but I'll leave the recitation of those lessons to another time or source. Aside from the pure operational lessons, I learned that Tanzania is much more varied than I had imagined - it was cold as hell in the Northwest, even though it's closer to the equator than Dar, and the ambience was much different from that of Dar. The only thing that remained the same between Dar and Karagwe was that schoolchildren say "Good Morning" to you, no matter what time of day it is (since those are the first English words they learn in school). After our time 
in Kayanga (the town in Karagwe where we spent most of our time), we headed back to Dar with the 50+ kg of equipment that had been left for us.I also picked up a few other insights that I might start putting to use:
- People aren't quite sure what to make of me, since an Indian could be a native Tanzanian or a foreigner. My Berkeley and Apple shirts, the fact that I'm the only adult wearing shorts, and my terrible Swahili have given me away (though one guy ran towards me in Bukoba yelling "You are Pilipino!"), but I might change my attire a little to blend in and get better pricing on basically everything
- Food is incredibly important: I've been eating 0-2 meals per day for the last week (down from my usual 3 meals and sometimes a snack), because I've been getting tired of the Wali Maharagwe (rice & beans) and Chips Mayai (French fry omelet) that are the only vegetarian items available at most restaurants. I simply haven't been hungry, but every meal I've had has made me feel MUCH better. I'll need to start keeping track of what I'm eating, to make sure I'm consuming a sufficient quantity and good balance of foods (today's task: find spinach somewhere, and maybe go to the Subway sandwich shop we spotted a couple of weeks ago)
- I'll need to learn patience (or as I view the issue, I'll need to tolerate inefficiency): The fact that we spent more time getting to Kayanga and back than we spent in Kayanga, the fact that we spent almost as much time waiting for people to show up late for meetings as we spent in the meetings themselves, and the fact that I'm posting this entry 24+ hours after writing it because I've been searching for a working internet connection are testament to that
- Relationships matter: Everything we have gotten here that has made life easier - good pricing, use of the captain's sleeping quarters to store our cargo safely on the ship to
Mwanza, a place to live in Dar, advice on health care and food, etc - has come from friends-of-friends, or friends-of-friends-of-friends in the US. Furthermore, we're making an effort to get to know the potential business partners that we meet (asking about their kids, etc) - contracts and potential profit are not enough to motivate people here. I don't know if that's a Tanzanian thing, or a developing-country thing, or just a non-US thing, but it's certainly different from the strictly numbers-based business cases that I'm used to - Traditional Purchasing Power Parity that we learn in macroeconomics isn't always in effect, even when considering strictly tradable goods. CK Prahalad makes a convincing argument about a potential alternative to Purchasing Power Parity that he calls the "Poverty Premium", which is certainly being played out (and is part of the reason we're here, in fact), but I think there may be an even deeper distinction to be made. I'm collecting some pricing benchmarks and trying to make sense of it; more to come on that later
Most of the above lessons are things that my parents have told me since I was four, but I guess some things have to be learned by doing, rather than by hearing. So far, I'm learning a lot, and really digging the project. For now, though, I sorely need some rest, food, NyQuil, and Gatorade.
