Two nurses in white and one white brother leaned over my face, prone at the end of a narrow hospital gurney. “Sorry,” said the head nurse, an imposing woman of the type in Ghana who typically addresses a white man as “you, white man!” although on this particular day I can’t be sure if she actually said that. I do recall her chanting “sorry” like a mantra. And I vaguely recall other hospital employees around my legs and arms—comforting me with their touch, I thought at first, until I tried to bend my knee and could not resist the pressure of African arms, and then understood, through my haze of apprehension, that I was being pinned down in preparation for a “procedure” that did not involve anesthesia.
“Sorry.”
I had spent most of 2009 in Ghana, returning home in late fall. Shortly after Harper’s high school graduation in May 2010, I traveled back to Ghana. It felt good to be back—almost like home at that point—but contentment was short-lived. After enjoying all the comfort, privilege, and respect (however unearned) that accrue to a Westerner in the developing world, the day came when the Ghanaians stopped looking up to me as a fortunate obruni and instead stared down pathetically at the heap of my existence on a gurney. I hesitate to report how I got there, in the interest of sparing the reader not so much discomfort as disappointment. For although the Gothic catalog of pox, pestilence, and horror waiting to befall the traveler to sub-Saharan Africa is long and well documented—from malaria and ebola to AIDS and dengue fever, from car crashes to heatstroke, and from mammals (lions, mercenaries) to microbes—none of these plagues led me to Koforidua’s Eastern Regional Hospital. On the contrary, I must report that my day of infirmary was the result of a freak accident while sitting at a desk. It could have happened in Manhattan, or the Seventh Arrondissement, or downtown Dallas, but it happened in Burro’s Koforidua office on Hospital Road. Fortunately, as the street name suggests and as I have mentioned before, the hospital I never wanted to visit was nearby. Equally fortunate, on that morning the Burro office was swarming with roughly a dozen employees, interns and volunteers, all of them anxious to help me. Burro had come a long way by May of 2010.
Whit’s company was still small and not yet making a profit, but it was no longer operating in a vacuum. Earlier in the year, my brother had met with product designers at Ideo in San Francisco; traveled to Utah to consult battery experts at a company called Power Stream; organized a Burro internship program with the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University; and partnered with Greenlight Planet, maker of an innovative solar lantern for the developing world, to produce a nonsolar (battery-operated) version for Burro. Word was getting out, and Whit was being asked to address organizations as diverse as the engineering department of Brown University and the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), a Seattle-based nonprofit working in more than seventy countries to break cycles of poverty and disease.
Yet just as interest in Burro grew, it became hard for Whit to commit to American speaking engagements, since business in Ghana was consuming more of his time. Four BYU interns were arriving in May, as well as an accounting consultant from Seattle and her twenty-two-year-old son, a QuickBooks savant, both of whom had volunteered to help Whit get his books in order in return for a free place to stay, a few tourist insights, and the occasional use of a vehicle (they had bought their own plane tickets). I had arrived in the middle of the month, and Jan would return in June. Whit was running out of room at the combination Burro office and residence; he needed a home of his own. Still not ready to buy property, he engaged a local real estate agent to secure a decent rental.
In Ghana one finds not so much a home as a project to take over. Virtually no house available to rent is actually finished, at least not in the Western sense. With no mortgage market to speak of, people build homes (and for that matter commercial buildings) in stages, as they acquire the money.* And a key way to get the money is by finding a tenant, who is generally expected to pay at least two years’ rent in advance. The landlord then takes that cash and invests in the house, adding amenities and moving the project further down the line. In other words, tenancy is used to add incremental value to the property, not to generate income. In this way Whit secured a commodious but unfinished four-bedroom home on a rutted dirt road outside town, behind the Capital View Hotel where we often ate dinner.
Whit’s African version of the starter château, while unremarkable by the exuberantly vulgar standards of many upper-class Ghanaian homes, would strike most Americans as the fortress of a rapacious drug lord. A one-story contemporary complex finished in pebble-textured stucco, the house was defined largely by a series of arched porticos and a roof cornice ornamented (in contrasting tones of crushed pebble) with repetitions of the traditional Akan pictograph for Gye Nyame (“Except for God”). Not that you could see much of the house from what I hesitate to even dignify with the term road. Like most detached African homes above the level of village huts, Whit’s estate cowered behind an imposing concrete wall, albeit without razor wire.
Inside the house, large rooms with terrazzo floors radiated from a wide central hallway designed to facilitate cooling breezes; there were three toilets, a large concrete shower stall, and, in the master bathroom, an actual soaking tub, which apparently sealed the deal for Whit.
But it was hardly habitable. As with his renovations to the Burro office, Whit had to add external storage tanks to compensate for the sporadic public water supply, as well as a hot water heater, kitchen appliances, and cabinets. There was also a complete interior and exterior paint job to oversee and substantial upgrades to the wiring. This is the sort of work that in Ghana can take months to organize and execute, as the Ghanaian’s commitment to heart-stopping highway velocity does not translate to the building trades. Months, however, were precisely what Whit did not have. Specifically, he had a few weeks. As luck would have it, an incentive to alacrity materialized in the desperation of the landlady, a woman named Nancy.
Whit and Nancy had agreed on a two-year lease of one hundred fifty cedis a month, all of it payable in advance. In return, Nancy would invest the bulk rent payment in the home—paying for electrical wiring and water hookup, among other basic necessities. But after a couple of weeks, Nancy contacted Whit and said the money was gone. “Please,” she said, “I beg you, I need more money to finish the work.”
“So I agreed to give her more money,” Whit said, “but I made a deal with her. I said, ‘I will pay for one more year, but I need to move in next week, and this is what needs to get done before then.’ We made a list. We divided up the work into inside and outside jobs, basically defined the scope of the work. I said, ‘This all needs to get done by next week; every week that it’s not done, I get one month extra free rent.’ She was three weeks late, so now I have three years and three months on my lease. And I got an explicit agreement that I can sublet.”
Getting the jobs done was not the same as getting them done well, however. An electrician was engaged to install lights and ceiling fans, the latter of which were mounted so that the metal blades rotated about two inches below bare lightbulbs hanging from wires, which created two problems. The first was that at night the spinning fan blades created a stroboscopic effect as they whirled under the lightbulbs, lending the effect of a silent movie to our motions. This was amusing for about five minutes and then generally annoying, possibly even seizure-inducing. The second problem was that occasionally a gust of wind from the jalousie windows would cause a fan to wobble slightly—just enough for the blades to strike the compact fluorescent bulb (the only kind widely available in Ghana) hanging above it with explosive force that would send razors of glass and poisonous dust raining down on floors, beds, and occupants. As I said, these fans and bulbs were installed by a professional Ghanaian electrician, which perhaps adds context to the hurdles Whit faced in training his own employees.
On that front, the first casualty was Kevin. Whit had fired him in the spring over a handful of issues, including absences with company vehicles and a reluctance to work as part of a team, that eroded confidence. “He seemed shocked,” said Whit, “but he took it like a man.” I knew I would miss Kevin, who had taught me so much about his country, but his sacking was a reminder that Whit was building a real business, not a charity. “It was like a giant exhale when he left,” said Whit. “Morale improved overnight. I started driving his route; you know how he used to drag himself back at seven o’clock looking like he’d been hit by a car? I’m finished every day at like four. I have no idea what the fuck he was doing out there.”
In his place was Nkansah, the young Krobo medical salesman who had taken Jan and me to the “secret farmers” a year earlier and who seemed intent on conquering the world. Also new in the office was a full-time route driver, James (not his real name), who had approached Whit at the local car wash about a job for his twenty-two-year-old daughter. After hiring his daughter as an office administrator and battery technician—she was a fast learner and had the charming but unsettling habit of curtseying to “superiors”—Whit hired James himself. Then there were the Americans, who could be divided into two groups: the Mormons and the bean counters.
The Mormons, of course, were the four interns from BYU’s Marriott School of Business. Jennia Parkin and Tara Hair shared what was usually Jan’s bedroom (she was back in Oregon), and Justin King and Andrew Stewart were sleeping in my former bedroom. When they weren’t out in the field doing research, they huddled over MacBook Pros and worked diligently on spreadsheets and reports on Burro’s business and marketing plans. Housekeeping apparently ran a distant third on their priority list. Had I been asked in advance if I believed Mormons to be culturally disposed toward residential cleanliness, I would have certainly guessed in the affirmative; they sure seem clean. Yet based on the general indication provided by this cohort, I would have been wrong. I had never seen the Burro quarters in such disarray. Trash was piled everywhere, dirty dishes languished on every surface, and the refrigerator was a science experiment. Then again, they were college students.
One in their group, however, could not be held accountable for the hazardous wastes inside the fridge. Jennia, blond and cherubic-faced, was disarmingly frank about her food phobias, which might reasonably complicate a one-month sojourn in Ghana. “What are you eating here?” I asked.
“I brought all my own food from home,” she replied.
“For a month?”
“Yeah. MREs.”
“You brought military meals ready to eat?”
“Well, similar. Check it out.”
She led me into her bedroom and opened the wardrobe. On the shelves normally reserved for spare sheets and towels were dozens of Hormel Compleat meals. “Three hundred calories each and shelf-stable,” she said with pride. “The real MREs are a thousand calories.”
“So you brought, like, a suitcase of these over from Utah?”
“Two,” she said. “I also brought fruit leather, trail mix, Clif Bars.”
“And you haven’t eaten any local food at all?”
“I bought some peanut butter,” she said.
“Oh my God, you ate the peanut butter?”
“Why?” she asked, putting a hand to her mouth.
“Just kidding,” I said. “Anything else?”
“I tried a piece of grilled corn.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my father-in-law once contracted dysentery from a piece of street-grilled corn in Yugoslavia. That was actually one of the few foods in Ghana that I avoided. “Well,” I said, “bon app!”
The bean counters were the mother-and-son team of Debi Nordstrom and David Martin. Debi was a Seattle business consultant whom Whit had met through Cranium’s former CFO. David had just graduated—literally, a few days earlier—from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An economics major, David told me he had been balancing his own checkbook since he was six years old, and after watching him power-slam data into QuickBooks, I believed him. They arrived in Accra the night that I flew in, ready to whip Burro’s books into shape and explore Ghana. Burro was putting them up at Rose’s modest but charmingly appointed home, a few miles out of town.
Most of these people were in the office on the morning of my accident. The night before, I had noticed that the antenna of my cell phone was loose, the plastic threads at the base having been stripped. So when we got to the office that morning I scrounged around the storage room for a tube of Super Glue and sat down to fix it. The glue was old and the tip was clogged shut. I took out my pocketknife and dug around the tip while squeezing the tube and pointing it down at the desk, over a slip of paper. To see better, I had taken off my glasses. I was trying to squeeze the tube lightly, but Super Glue tubes are made of fairly rigid plastic and you have to apply a good amount of pressure to get any movement at all. Suddenly the blockage cleared—but instead of squirting down at the desk, in the direction I was pointing the tube, it cleared at an odd angle, sending a fountain of Super Glue straight up and directly into my right eye, bathing my cornea in glue. Naturally, I blinked. Except as soon as I blinked, that was it; my eyelid was sealed shut.
“Fuck!” I think I said that several times, loudly, more out of fear than pain. It actually didn’t hurt at all. There was no sting from the glue; in that sense it may as well have been water in my eye. But of course it wasn’t water, and my eye was glued shut—permanently, as far as I knew. I would have been terrified if this had happened across the street from the Mayo Clinic, but here I was in a small town in Africa, in a state of complete panic. Whit and the others rushed to help me, but nobody really knew what to do. I remember being led to the shower and my eye going under a stream of hot water, which did absolutely nothing. I remember staggering out to the couch on the veranda, lying down moaning, and Debi bathing my eye with a warm towel. I remember asking Whit to check on my medevac insurance. “I want a fucking Lear jet to Germany!” I commanded him, obviously under delusions of self-potency.
Justin came out; he’d been on the Internet, on the Super Glue website. “It says there are no known cases of permanent injury from Super Glue in the eye,” he said. “After about four days it will degrade and your eye should open.”
“Fuck,” I replied. A word that had generally been a significant if selective element of my vocabulary was now representing its length and breadth.
“He looks pale,” someone said.
“Maybe he’s going into shock.”
Whit hovered over me. “Maxy, we should take you to see someone. We can drive you to Accra, where there are good private clinics, or try the hospital here; they do have an eye clinic, and it’s supposed to be pretty good.” I found out later that Rose had called the best eye clinic in Accra, then insisted on speaking directly to the doctor, who recommended the clinic at the Koforidua hospital. “What do you want to do?”
Driving through Accra traffic was excruciating even in good health. “Fuck,” I said. “Let’s go down the street.”
I remember staggering up several flights of outdoor stairs at the hospital, shielding my one good eye from the glaring sun, holding hands with Whit and Adam, trying to imagine what the rest of my life would be like with just one eye. There was a huge waiting room, wooden benches packed with patients, babies crying, a grainy TV blaring from within its iron security cage, fans barely moving. I don’t know if it was the nature of my wound or the color of my skin, but I didn’t have to wait. They took me right in, asked me some questions, gave me an official Ghana health card, and stretched me out on the gurney.
The health-care system in Ghana does not involve a lot of patient hand-holding. Doctors don’t call you into their diploma-lined office, swivel in a big chair, and sagely lay out the scenario and discuss your options; they just roll up their sleeves and go to work. So I was not consulted before the staff pinned me down and the large nurse started to rip open my eyelid with tweezers. “Sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am!” I spit out, feeling like my eyeball was being skinned alive. Apparently my caregivers hadn’t consulted the Super Glue website.
“We must cut off the eyelashes first,” she said after a few minutes of futile tugging. “They are glued together.” Out came the scissors, then more agonizing torture with the tweezers. “Men are not supposed to cry,” said the nurse.
“I’m not crying, I’m screaming!” Still, every excruciating yank on my eyelid revealed a slightly larger sliver of formless daylight, so I held out hope that her brutal ministrations weren’t leaving me permanently blind in one eye. After several more interminable minutes of persecution, she pronounced my eyelid fully opened. All I could see was a blurry kaleidoscope of moving shapes. “Now we must remove the glue from your eye,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Holy shit,” said Whit, who sounded like he was leaning over my face. More tugging and scraping followed; this time it felt like my eyeball was being pulled out of its socket. “Okay,” she said.
And suddenly I could see again. There was the nurse. In her tweezers was a chunk of dried Super Glue the thickness of an orange peel and the diameter of a nickel.
Next stop was the eye doctor himself, down the hall. Reassuringly, his office had all the familiar equipment, and his exam appeared thorough. “Your cornea has many sores,” he said, which I think was the Ghanaian way of saying scratches.
“You can thank Nurse Ratched for that,” I wanted to say.
“I will give you some drops to take away the worst pain for a little while, but your eye will be uncomfortable for a few days.” As a semiprofessional kidney stone patient, I knew that “uncomfortable” was medical doublespeak for agony. Here I was expecting the whole hospital experience in Ghana to be completely unfamiliar, possibly satanic, but it was basically the same as ours, with the same vocabulary. I wanted to ask the doctor if he played golf and subscribed to travel magazines, then thought better of it. “The biggest danger is infection,” he continued. “I will give you a prescription for antibiotic drops. Use them three times a day. Come back next Tuesday and we will see how you are doing.” We thanked the doctor and went downstairs to fill the prescription and pay the bill. The total, including eyedrops, came to sixty-six cedis—about forty-six dollars.
I was doing much better by the next morning, and better again the next day. My use of the F-word had returned to its traditional frequency. Within a week I felt my eye was back to normal, albeit without eyelashes and still a bit bloodshot. I ran into the big nurse on the street, and she treated me like a son. “Oh, how are you?” she said with a wide smile, clutching my hand with both of hers. “Your eye looks so much better!” I thanked her for helping me, and I meant it. I decided that while I would still want that Lear jet to Germany for a seriously traumatic injury (medical supplies in Ghana are limited and blood transfusions still carry the risk of HIV contamination), the country’s government-run medical system wasn’t nearly as scary as I had imagined. Nurses and doctors were just as caring and professional as their Western counterparts, perhaps more so. For the rest of my time in Ghana, I considered myself a proud, card-carrying member of the Ghana Health Service.
“Whit, breakfast is ready,” I said. “And there’s a woman peeing in your backyard.”
“That would be Akosia,” he said from his bedroom, sprawled out over the sheets with his laptop, crunching numbers. I brought in his morning mango smoothie, as usual. Some men might be humiliated to find themselves, at age fifty-three, serving breakfast in bed to their younger brother every day, but I didn’t mind. Our morning ritual of mango smoothies gave us a chance to talk before the insanity of the office, where at any given moment a half dozen people vied for Whit’s attention.
I pulled up a chair next to Whit’s bed and took a swig of my own smoothie. “Akosia?”
“She lives in the blockhouse in the courtyard. The landlady said I could evict her if I wanted, but I won’t. She has a little boy and another kid on the way. I mean, she’s got a sweet deal—no rent and free electricity, but no plumbing.”
“So I see.”
“I pay her to do my laundry.”
“What happened to Mena?”
“She still does Jan’s laundry, but now that I’m out here, it’s just easier.”
“Does she have a husband?”
“Victor. He travels a lot. I think he’s a bit of a rogue. I feel bad for her; she seems well educated and speaks very good English, but I don’t think she lives on much except what I give her for laundry and what she can grow in the backyard.”
“Are those her roosters?” The property appeared to come with five cocks who started crowing outside our windows at the break of three A.M. every morning.
“No, but thanks for reminding me. I need to ask her about them.”
At this point her boy was stooped outside our kitchen window, emptying his bowels onto the concrete patio. His mother watched with a worried frown as he cried. “Oh man, that doesn’t look good,” I said. “The kid’s got serious runs.” Diarrhea caused by unclean drinking water is a major cause of child fatality in Ghana.
Whit got up and went to the back door. “Good morning, Akosia,” he said.
“Good morning, Whit,” she said. We walked outside; Whit introduced us and she smiled.
“Your boy, he is sick,” said Whit.
“Yes,” she replied. “Please, can you loan me some money so I can take him to the clinic?”
“Where is your husband?” Whit asked.
She frowned. “He has traveled.”
“He left you no money?”
“No.”
“When will he return?”
“Please, I do not know.”
“When is your baby due?”
“I do not know.”
“Have you been to a clinic since you got pregnant?”
“No.”
Whit dug into his pocket. “Here is ten cedis—an advance against laundry. I want you to get checked for your baby as well, okay?”
“Yes, please,” she said. “Thank you. Bless you.”
“Oh, Akosia. Do you know who owns the roosters?”
“Agbe,” she said, pointing over the wall of the backyard. Agbe was a nearly toothless hunter who trekked about the encroaching suburban sprawl with a cocked and loaded shotgun, on constant alert for ferrets, small antelope, and other game he could annihilate and sell.
“If you see Agbe, can you please tell him he should take his roosters away? They make too much noise.”
“Yes, please,” she said.
“Good luck with that,” I said to Whit as we went back inside.
Herding roosters might be a fool’s errand, but back at the office Whit and his team had made a lot of progress since my last visit in late 2009. The counterfeiting issue was solved with new battery coupons printed by Camelot, the security printer we had visited last fall, with a watermark and an engraved Burro donkey logo. Six thousand new, high-capacity batteries had arrived—each one holding 2500 mAh, versus 2300 mAh on the old ones. “And we’ve gotten much better at certification,” said Whit on the bumpy drive into town, referring to the process of determining whether a freshly charged battery was strong enough to be sent back into the field. Being able to cull bad batteries was essential to maintaining customer loyalty.
“We’re doing one hundred percent testing of batteries before they go out, which has completely changed the game,” said Whit. “We had hundreds, maybe thousands, of batteries that were somehow damaged in circulation, and we weren’t weeding them out. We still occasionally get a complaint, but it’s nothing like before. Shit, we were losing so many customers. We had agents quitting, saying they couldn’t put their name on this. That whole problem has been eliminated. And we’ve learned we can’t test batteries right out of the charger. Several experts told us that’s nuts; you’ll get a false reading. You have to wait at least an hour, preferably eight to twenty-four. We’re also re-skinning the old batteries with new labels, which has helped with perception. We engrave them, so we know which ones are old and we can track them. I also got a hundred Sanyo NiMHs, widely considered the best in the world; they cost three times as much as ours. We re-skinned and engraved those, and we’ll track them through the system as well, to see how they compare.* So we’re learning a lot, and it’s all adding up. I can’t say there are no problems; you’re bound to have issues with all this growth, but we’re getting much better at our business.”
Another big driver of growth was the battery-powered phone chargers I had brought over in my luggage—nothing more than a plastic case holding four AA batteries with a pigtail wire that could be spliced to a mobile phone’s charge plug. The cheap carbon-zinc AA batteries sold all over Ghana (Sun Watt brand) weren’t powerful enough to charge phones, making Burro just about the only game in town for that application. The chargers, selling for three cedis, were a hit in nonelectrified villages, but they weren’t perfect; they didn’t work with every phone (some phones had circuitry that shut down the current, mistakenly thinking it was an overload), and cutting and splicing the wires to the phone’s AC charger was a pain. Whit was working with a Chinese company to bring in more sophisticated Burro-branded phone chargers that could be coupled with a diode to get around the circuitry issues, as well as a selection of charging tip adapters so customers wouldn’t have to splice wires.
Also contributing to fast growth was a new Burro credit policy—interest-free short-term loans to villagers so they could afford the one-cedi battery deposit or the phone charger. As Whit designed the plan, anyone in a village who was deemed creditworthy by a committee of the chief and elders could borrow the deposit money from Burro, so long as they paid it back within a month. It was plainly modeled after the microfinance innovations of Muhammed Yunus, whose Grameen Bank relies on peer pressure to guarantee loans. As Whit explained it, “We make it clear to the chief that if somebody doesn’t pay us back, the whole village loses credit, and then we start calling back batteries. So you have to let the chief advise you on who’s creditworthy or it’s not fair. You can’t have the chief saying later, ‘Oh, you gave credit to Larry? I would never loan money to Larry. He borrowed my saw last year and never returned it.’ There has to be some accountability.” (Burro later refined the policy to make the agent responsible for the credit of his clients, which significantly improved repayment rates.)
Then there was Nkansah. “I have no idea what Nkansah is telling people in these gong-gongs,” said Whit, since they were generally conducted in Krobo, “but he moves like three hundred batteries at each one. Maybe he’s telling them the batteries will make their penis large or their kids smarter, I don’t know. And he does this clever thing at the end where he says, ‘I need three volunteers who can read and write to help me sign up customers.’ So he’s pre-screening new agents in the village.”
Nkansah, twenty-five, had a broad smile and the easy manner of a natural salesman. He was comfortable with himself, and when he spoke he drew you in with mannered gestures and broad sweeps of his long fingers. There was something actorly about him, but it didn’t seem put on or exaggerated. He grew up near a busy market town about twenty kilometers north of Koforidua. His father was an English teacher; his mother owned a small shop—nothing more than a shack selling dry goods, hard-boiled eggs, and a few groceries. Every day after school, Nkansah’s mother gave him money to buy bread at the market in town for the shop. He quickly learned how to leverage his mother’s cash: by buying directly from the bakery at a discount (instead of from the resellers in the market), he could sell the bread at a profit in town, then turn around and buy more bread for his mother—getting home in time to do his homework, with spare change in his pocket. “I have always known how to make money,” he told me. “I sold bread until secondary school, but then I stopped because the other kids would laugh at me.”
After graduating from high school, Nkansah moved to Accra and found a job as a receptionist at a restaurant. “There was a Big Man who always came in, a regular,” said Nkansah. “One night he put a note in the suggestion box. Nobody ever read the notes except me. I read them all. In his note he said he didn’t like it when his tilapia soup took too long, and he complained that no one ever brought him hot water and lemon to wash his hands after a meal. So the next time he came in, I served him myself. I went to the kitchen and made sure his soup was ready in two minutes. I brought him his hot water and lemon. That night he put another note in the box. It said, ‘Tell whoever served me to call me.’ And there was a number. I called and he offered me a job as his houseboy. He lived in a big house with his wife, and I did everything—folding laundry, cooking, cleaning. But then Kufuor became president and the man was appointed ambassador to Liberia, so they had to move there.”
Nkansah wants desperately to go to college, preferably in America. “I shall go to Brigham Young University,” he told me confidently. Clearly he had been spending a lot of time with the Mormon interns.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes. I know I can go there because I don’t smoke, I don’t take alcohol, and I can stay away from women.”
“So you are familiar with the school’s honor code?”
“Oh yes, I have been on the website. I am hoping to impress your brother so that he will help me get in.”
“Well, I’m sure Whit would be happy to help you get in to any school.”
To save money, Nkansah was living with his parents in the distant town of Somanya. (His family had moved when his father took a job as headmaster of a Presbyterian school.) The arrangement made Whit and Jan uncomfortable because Nkansah was commuting an hour each way in unreliable tro-tros and was often late. Typically Whit advanced new employees rent money, payable directly to the landlord, so they could get situated in Koforidua. (Most came from Accra.) But Nkansah convinced Whit to loan him money directly—fifteen hundred cedis, the equivalent of almost four months’ pay—so he could buy a motorcycle and continue living with his parents. On a motorcycle, he reasoned, he could zip into Kof-town fast. And by living at home he could save more money for college. Whit agreed, but after several weeks the motorcycle had still not materialized. Nkansah said it was being repaired in Accra, but when asked to produce a bill of sale, he stalled.
Despite this distracting sideshow, Nkansah continued to rack up phenomenal sales. Nobody could work a crowd like him. He understood that the best salesmen don’t simply talk about their products; they ask questions designed to make their prospects aware of their own wants and needs.
“How many people here would like to save money on batteries?” he often began.
I know I would!
“If you could save money on batteries, when would be a good time to start?”
Umm, now?
I tagged along on one of Nkansah’s gong-gongs in a village called Aframase. Only about fifty people showed up because someone had died and many villagers had left for the funeral; the chief said he had tried calling Nkansah, but the village had poor mobile coverage and he couldn’t get through. So the show went on, and Nkansah had them in the palm of his hand. Knowing that customers who handle the merchandise are far more likely to buy it, Nkansah made sure everyone got to hold a battery and adapter. He called for villagers to bring up their flashlights and radios, then removed their rusty Tiger Heads—handling them with dramatic disdain—and replaced them with the bright green cells. You didn’t need to speak Krobo to know he was regaling the villagers with how bright, and how loud, the Burro batteries were. At one point he said something that made the whole audience roll with laughter.
I turned to James, our driver, who was also working the crowd as Nkansah’s assistant. “What did he say?”
“He was explaining the credit policy,” said James. “He told them, ‘We will come back next Friday to collect the payment. If you cannot pay then, we will come back the next Friday. If you still cannot pay, we will paint our truck black and it will say police on the side.’”
Nkansah was a model salesman for the agents and other employees, but other basic job skills were lacking, especially when it came to managing his territory. One morning Whit called him into the office. “Nkansah, what do we need to do to get to the point where you are filling out receipts in a way that can be entered by Adam into the books? Because we’ve been through this before, and Adam has trained you, but there are still issues.”
“I can explain,” said Nkansah.
“Well, it isn’t about explaining it to me, it’s about doing it.”
“It will be done.”
“Remember it’s not just about bookkeeping,” said Whit. “This information will help you grow your business. For example, we’re really trying to get the resellers to focus on exchanges over the last two weeks, because that’s something they can really impact.* One week is too short—maybe they’ve traveled, maybe someone is sick—but two weeks is a good measure. You see what I mean?”
“I do,” said Nkansah.
“So let’s look at Daniel Larweh.” He was one of Nkansah’s resellers in Adenya. “He went from two hundred and seventy-four exchanges to a hundred and fifty. So his numbers are down forty-five percent. That’s troubling because he is one of our biggest resellers. Why is he down so far? Are his clients sick, or angry with him? This is something to watch.”
“I understand,” said Nkansah.
“You should also be paying close attention to phone chargers,” Whit continued. “Chargers I believe are one of the biggest things driving exchanges and thus revenue, so someone with low exchanges, it could mean they have not sold many chargers. That’s why we are tracking charger sales. So if a reseller has one hundred clients and sold one hundred chargers, the number in this column is one hundred percent. If he has one hundred clients and has sold fifty chargers, what would the number be?”
“Fifty percent.”
“Right.”
I went out one day with James on his route, a broad loop up to the Akwapim Ridge and back down through the junction town of Nkurakan. James, a youthful forty-two, navigated this treacherous mountain circuit with one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn all the way, in approximately half the time it would have taken me. It may be possible that he clocked more miles in the oncoming-traffic lane than his own, but I had my eyes closed for much of the trip. Unlike Whit’s other employees, at least James was an experienced crazy driver.
In fact he had spent eight years as a delivery driver for Guinness. He and his wife and five children (including Burro’s new office administrator) had been living in Guinness company housing—a one-room apartment—when he met Whit at the local car wash.* “Guinness was very tough,” said James. “They would never loan me money for my children’s school fees. Burro pays more, and I can borrow for school fees. When I resigned from Guinness to work for Whit, they offered me more money, but I said it was too late.” With his increase in salary he was able to move his family into a more spacious two-room house in Koforidua.
“Whit is my angel,” he said. “I pray for Whit to have everlasting life.”
His gratitude extends to Whit also hiring his daughter, who had been staying with an uncle in Accra, attending college, but things didn’t work out and she came home. “She will return to university, maybe next year,” said James. He drove on. “I wanted to go to university,” he continued, “but my father died and I had to go to work.”
“He died young?”
“Poisoned by a friend.”
“Some friend.”
“He was working in Lagos, and he had a car. His friend wanted the car. One night they went out drinking; the next day my father got very sick, and he died. His friend disappeared with the car.”
I took Debi and her son David to the bead market one afternoon. Since arriving several days earlier, they had been holed up in the office, poring over QuickBooks reports and bank statements on their laptops. David worked nonstop all day with earphones firmly implanted, listening to sports podcasts; Debi just worked. They needed a break. Besides, I wanted to learn why Debi, at age fifty, would pay her own way to Ghana to help Whit straighten out his books. I got the impression she had a pretty nice life in Seattle; she was talking about buying a boat, and the boat she had in mind (I happened to know) was not exactly a dinghy. Okay, she was a divorced empty-nester, but that could describe lots of middle-aged women who satisfy their wanderlust by going to yoga retreats in Costa Rica; how many set off to the world’s poorest countries and volunteer their professional services for a month?
“I just get bored,” said Debi as we walked over to the market grounds. “I like adventure. I mean, lots of people say they’d like to do stuff like this, but they never do.”
Sorting through Burro’s books didn’t seem all that adventurous—I was glad when Debi and David took some time off to see the country—but there were plenty of issues for them to resolve. For a modest start-up, Whit’s business was complicated from an accounting standpoint because it involved rental inventory (which depreciated), security deposits (which could not be counted as regular income), and coupons that functioned a lot like gift certificates but cost different amounts depending on how many you bought. “You definitely can’t count coupons as revenue until they’re exchanged,” Debi told Whit over a poolside lunch, also attended by David, one Sunday at a new hotel in Aburi.
“The problem is, some of them will never get used,” said Whit. “They get lost, or whatever. So at some point I need to move unexchanged coupons into the revenue column. And to do that, we need to get a weighted average value of coupons, which means tracking how many are bought at each price point.” Whit was no accounting savant, but he knew enough to understand the issues.
“Right,” said Debi. “I’m starting to look at depreciations and values this week—what can be counted as what. So far we’ve just been getting up to speed on Adam.”
David looked up from his menu. “It’s scary.”
“Adam doesn’t know how to balance the checking account,” said Debi, “and he’s never balanced the cash account. He just plugs the accounts every month to make everything reconcile.”
“Great,” said Whit.
Thirteen of us gathered in the Burro conference room one morning to hear two of the BYU interns, Jennia and Tara, deliver their final presentation after three weeks of field research. The pair’s assignment had been to come up with recommendations in two areas: marketing and human resources—that is, hiring, training, and retaining good resellers. “To compile our data we interviewed eighteen agents in the field,” said Tara, “nine high performers and nine low performers. That was the qualitative research. We also interviewed forty clients, mainly to look at brand perception. That was a relatively small quantitative study, but we feel it was valid, as you’ll see.” The pair had put together a PowerPoint show that we all loaded onto our laptops and followed along with.
“We wanted to get a handle on why some agents are exchanging hundreds of batteries every month and others are only exchanging ten,” said Tara. “The idea is that Burro can apply those best practices to hiring and training. One interesting thing we found was that both high-performing agents and low-performing agents face similar issues in their villages—people have little money, people are farming and busy, it’s a lot of walking, and so on. That tells us the discrepancies between high and low sellers are not based on market forces; it’s about the sales abilities of the individual. When asked why people don’t buy Burro batteries, low sellers often cited strangely negative social pressure: ‘They think I’m selling to make money for myself’ was one response. Another was ‘They are jealous because I’m making money from it.’
“On the other end, we found that high sellers had several things in common. They typically go house to house instead of waiting for customers to come to them. People who sell other things seem to do better with Burro. My guess is they love business and have sales skill. And the top sellers have an understanding that Burro is a service, not just a product. They’re selling energy.”
“I’m wondering,” said Whit, “since there is not a rich range of potential resellers to choose from, what hiring practices are we doing that you think are good, and what do you think we could be doing better?”
“Well, your policy of meeting with chiefs about potential agents seems to be working well,” Tara said. “Perhaps the interview process could be more codified: pick five candidates with the chief, then interview them with a point system for possible answers. So the answer ‘I plan to make customers come to me’ would be worth zero points. Then select a candidate based on that process.”
“One problem I see,” said Rose, “is that the chief could pick five people and they could all be his sons. We use them for two months and it’s a waste of time; then we just have to find someone else.”
“The chief is often too simple,” agreed Nkansah.
“Still,” said Rose, “at the end of the day the chief has to know the reseller and respect him. But he doesn’t necessarily have to pick the person.”
“However they end up being chosen,” said Tara, “I think Burro should promote the perception that this job is important and the person has been selected for their skill. They need to be made to feel serious about it.”
She moved on to the issue of agent training—arguably even more important than the initial hire, since even natural-born salespeople would be unfamiliar with Burro’s business model. The challenge, she noted diplomatically, “is training people who have very different cultural values. We recommend Burro move to a hierarchical system of divisions within each branch, where top sellers become division leaders who can reach out to other sellers and help them reach their sales goals. The division leaders in turn would be trained by a specialized training staff—trainers who can train the trainers, basically.”
“It’s possible these division leaders could also be exchanging batteries for their agents,” said Rose. “We tried getting Dorothy in Bomase to do that for Seth and Victor; it didn’t really work, but then again we weren’t offering her any incentive.”
“I like the idea of having someone at the village level with training expertise,” said Whit. “Tara, you had mentioned a company in Accra with some experience at this.”
“Health Keepers,” she said. “They’ve had a number of BYU interns, and they work around here.”
“I’d love to learn more about their operation.”
Debi spoke up: “I think you have to be able to have these division leads if you’re going to grow as fast as Whit wants. Rose and Nkansah can’t do it all. It can be really hard to give up control and delegate, but you have to be able to do that, and find people who can do that.”
“You’re right, Debi,” said Whit. “I mean, right now we have about ninety resellers in the pilot branch. To pay a return on investment with net profitability, I figure requires about three hundred and seventy-five resellers per branch. Now, can I see Rose and Nkansah training that many resellers with one or two other people? Yeah, possibly. As effectively or as rapidly as with this division lead structure? Probably not. And I’d like to see us get to the point where we can spool up a new branch in six months, versus eighteen.”
“Rose, you mentioned incentives,” said Tara. “I’d like to go back to that idea. One challenge we identified is that resellers make very little in commission—currently one pesewa per exchange. That is less incentive than other comparable sales jobs and it could be more competitive.”
“Well, actually they’re making more like two or three pesewa per exchange when you factor in coupon sales,” said Whit. “And keep in mind that other sales opportunities around here require a buy-in: you need working capital to buy inventory, which is often perishable, so there is risk. With Burro there is no buy-in. Having said that, it would be interesting to explore more ways to incentivize and reward high performers. We especially need to rethink the mix in compensation for registering a new battery versus exchanging a battery for an existing client. We’ve favored the former at the expense of incenting exchanges, and we need to flip that.”
Next came Jennia’s presentation. “Our objective in the marketing research was to better understand Burro customers and why they consistently use Burro over other brands,” she said, “then to apply what we learned to a marketing and brand-awareness plan. The most consistent positive comment about Burro we heard was that the battery ‘doesn’t rot in machines.’ Virtually everyone knew someone whose device had been ruined by a leaking Tiger Head.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Whit. “Isidor Buchmann, the battery expert, told me that all carbon-zinc batteries will leak if you run them all the way down, which is what people do here. It’s the nature of the chemistry. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a question of when.”
“So Burro can definitely own the phrase Doesn’t Leak,” Jennia continued. “Another negative feature of Tiger Head was the child-safety issue. Several customers told us they had seen children putting discarded batteries into their mouths. One subject told us how a child she knows had sucked on a battery and was taken to the hospital. Because Burro batteries are not thrown away, and possibly also because they don’t leak, Burro is perceived as safer for children.
“But Tiger Head also has many positive perceptions,” she went on. “The first is huge familiarity; people seem to trust the brand, despite the leaks. And many customers perceive them as lasting longer or being more powerful than Burro.”
“And as we know from our tests,” said Whit, “Tiger Head is slightly more powerful at first, and it does last longer, albeit at very low output levels.”
“Because of that,” said Jennia, “we think Burro can’t really own the phrase More Power, because it isn’t always more powerful, depending on the device. It’s also a bit vague: does it mean Lasts Longer or is it Brighter-slash-Louder?
“In addition, the phrase Do More did not elicit any response. In all of our interviews, the idea of doing more never came up. It made me wonder if that is a Ghanaian value, at least expressed in that way.
“However, we did identify a phrase that we believe Burro can own: Stays Strong. People liked the fact that Burro batteries are not constantly getting weaker and weaker like Tiger Heads.”
“I love Stays Strong,” said Whit.* “As far as Do More goes, it’s important to keep in mind that we are delivering productivity enhancements. Every Burro product has to either enhance income earning potential, or substitute for something else they already spend money on. So we need to get people excited about doing more. It may not be a pithy tagline to sell batteries, but in terms of overall brand positioning, I don’t see us backing away from that. However, we do need to figure out how to make money from the battery offering. The throwaway battery market in Ghana alone is fifty million dollars. And beyond that is the low-hanging fruit of devices like lanterns and phone chargers that showcase our batteries. Near term, that’s where we’re headed.”
A few days later, I sat in on a meeting Whit called with Andrew to discuss his own project, which involved some follow-up on ideas raised by Tara and Jennia. Andrew said he wanted to pick four villages and see if he could raise the reseller exchange rate with Nkansah.
“I’m for this,” said Whit, “but I’d go bigger. Let’s identify one or two zones we want to test in. Then you can work with Rose and Nkansah and try to speed those interventions with multiple resellers. That would have a multiplier effect, and it will help us test this idea of zoning and the division manager organization.”
“So you mean we should be training zone managers?”
“Yes, picking people who have at least five resellers under them, making sure they’re selling effectively, identifying new territory effectively. Rose is already working on that, and you could jump in. So you guys train the trainer. Then you’ve really made an impact.”
The next day they met again, with Rose. After reading a lengthy written plan that Andrew had drawn up, Whit said, “You’ve gotta keep it real simple. Remember there’s not a big tradition of reading here; it’s all about oral interaction. There are cognitive studies showing that humans can process like five plus-or-minus two concepts at a time. I think we should err on the lower side. Keep these training materials to chunks of three or four things with at most three or four layers under them. It’s gotta be really crisp, something they can completely memorize in one setting. Distill it into brief, bulleted stuff—three things you need to do this job; under each of those, three or four things you need to do for each point; under those, three or four things you need to do to achieve those goals. It’s gotta be that simple.”
Meanwhile, Justin was organizing a business plan that would help Whit present Burro to potential investors. He was a bit older than the other interns—he had a wife and baby daughter back in Utah—and came with real-world experience executing business valuations. He met with Whit one afternoon to talk about the plan. “What’s the exit strategy for an investor?” Justin asked. “Would they take dividends? How much of the company would they get for a million dollars?” He was asking the right questions.
“Well,” said Whit, “I’ve got a quarter million of my own in this company, so I’ve got some skin in the game; I wouldn’t give up control of the company. But I’m also comfortable putting more of my own money in if revenue continues to grow. My financial guys would say I’m out of my mind, but if things look good I’m willing to roll some pretty big dice. As for exit strategies, I know dividends are less attractive to investors than going public, or a strategic acquisition. Maybe I have people invest in starting a branch, and they get convertible three-year notes.”
“If Burro were acquired, do you have any companies in mind?” Justin wondered.
Whit shrugged. “I could see P&G, Unilever—some monster consumer goods company. Or I could see a major Chinese manufacturer being a strategic investor, but they’re so shitty at brands. For me, I’d want someone who understands the value of the brand.”
Justin asked how Burro would use venture capital.
“Well, first, we’d beef up our training and marketing materials, deepen the team more quickly, show that we can spool on growth more rapidly, and of course move towards a first trial of replicability with a second branch,” said Whit. “We’d also invest against medium-term technology to better support growth—especially a low-budget IT solution that integrates all our current operational needs more robustly than the Fodder program Jan and I hacked together in Access. We probably need a more industrial-strength charging capability as we scale up. It might also make sense to invest in a proprietary battery design that could get costs per cycle way down, provide better performance for clients, and protect much better against fraudulent charging. More product development definitely makes sense. People want better entertainment and information solutions, better communication solutions, more versatile lighting solutions, maybe even battery-operated tools. Expanding the line of efficient, battery-powered appliances makes sense so long as we stay focused on things true to the brand—creating new income capabilities or displacing existing expenditure. We need to demonstrate that we’re building assets far more valuable than a battery store. Hell, who knows, maybe I’d even pay myself a salary.”
Justin asked if Whit would be interested in smaller stakeholders who are as passionate about the company mission as making a buck.
“I’ve definitely thought about it,” said Whit. “We’re operating in a weird nexus of social enterprise and creative capitalism where the reality is, even if you’re just barely sustainable, you could probably get people to underwrite and subsidize and help roll out additional branches. I’m not terribly interested in that, but I wouldn’t rule out keeping the baby alive that way. It would mean getting donor support of some sort to play the role of a central corporate structure that manages the whole thing and rolls out new branches. So the branches stand alone and are sustainable, but there’s not enough fat in the system to make it scalable. You’d have somebody who’s driving the opening of new branches and who is advising and training new branch teams; they would need donor assistance at their level, but they’d be creating viable and sustainable small businesses on the local level that deliver energy and increased efficiency to poor communities. I personally would see that as a failure, but many people involved in social capitalism are aiming for exactly that. In other words, you could design a template that puts donor money to work on a rollout that could be a screaming economic success, or barely sustainable.
“So yeah, I could see angel donors where you say, look, for fifty or a hundred thousand you can provide power to these rural villages. We’ll manage the whole rollout and operation for you, we’ll keep you posted on agents and clients, and you’re gonna feel real good about it while earning some modest return on your investment. I mean, I think it’s pretty impressive what we’re doing here. We’ve got close to a hundred semiliterate agents out there, selling batteries to hundreds of customers, advising them, counseling them, getting information on them, building a business model that has never been tried before in this country or continent. And people are saving money on batteries and doing more for their money.”
Outside, as if on cue, a cheer erupted across Koforidua and floated up over the streets and into our windows like smoke from the charcoal braziers of the snack sellers. But they weren’t cheering Burro; the Ghana Black Stars soccer team had just scored a goal in a lead-up match to the World Cup.
Whit continued. “I think right now we’ve got a pitch that a lot of donors or socially minded investors would love. But we’re driving instead to demonstrate truly attractive unit economics—you know, like a branch spinning off fifty or seventy-five thousand dollars a year in after-tax profits. That would be huge. Then it’s like the McDonald’s model. But you can’t franchise something that loses money; you’ll just lose money faster. So we have to demonstrate that running a branch is a good business. Then maybe, if we go for outside money, you can sell branches to investors for a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars once you prove that within a year or two you can get them spinning off substantial nets. That’s going to be attractive to a lot more people, real investors. Like me.”
Burro also had a Ghanaian intern—another recent graduate of Ashesi University, named Priscilla Osman, who had been a classmate of Rose’s. Priscilla—quiet, very dark, with a wide face and high cheekbones—was from Bole, a town in the country’s dry and sparsely populated northwest. She was a member of the Gonja tribe, of whom there are about a quarter million people. Their language (also called Gonja) is a subset of the Guang linguistic group; many people in her remote region don’t even speak Twi, let alone English, but Priscilla was fluent in both. She told me she learned English by listening to the Ghana News radio broadcasts as a child. “Many Gonja do not speak English, but they listen to the news anyway,” she said, “because they like the sound.”
Rose and Priscilla were teamed up writing scripts for a Burro pitch that could be played over the loudspeakers on the truck—the pitch Whit was hoping to have created by MMRS Ogilvy in Accra. Despite many email follow-ups, Whit had been unable to get any commitment from the global agency, and he couldn’t wait any longer. Burro was a do-it-yourself operation, and Whit was not exactly a marketing neophyte; he and Richard Tait hadn’t waited for permission from any multinational corporations to start Cranium, and he wasn’t going to wait now. Besides, Adam’s brother knew a small recording studio in New Tafo, a town about an hour north of Koforidua, that said it could handle the physical production. The cost would be only a few hundred cedis; it was worth a try.
The plan was to create two pitches—a short, thirty-second teaser that could be played from a moving vehicle, and a more detailed one-and-a-half-minute pitch for stationary events like gong-gongs. “Make them like testimonials,” Whit told Rose and Priscilla, “so we hear other voices, not just the narrator.”
After lunch, Whit asked me to help review the drafts that Rose and Priscilla had put together. Since the actual recordings would be done in Twi, Ewe, and Krobo—the three languages commonly spoken around Koforidua—the English-language versions were really just for the benefit of Whit and me, a common base to work from.
I read the first draft. The opening line was: Attention all battery users, Burro batteries have broken barriers and status quo! To my ear that sounded a tad wooden, but I had to remember that the advertising culture in Ghana, while pervasive, was untainted by the jaded irony that characterizes current Western salesmanship. In Ghana there were no TV commercials with wise-guy babies pitching brokerages, no cavemen selling car insurance. Billboards and TV commercials—we did occasionally watch TV in restaurants—generally featured smiling, happy people embracing the object of their desire—a naïve enthusiasm that, for me, evoked a lost world of postwar optimism. “You are too known,” Africans would often say to us—a polite Ghanaian way of calling us uptight honkies—and when it came to advertising, they were dead right.
So I read on: Thanks to Burro, no longer will we pay more for expensive, leaky and fast-failing batteries.
“Doesn’t that imply that now we will pay less for expensive, leaky, and fast-failing batteries?” I asked.
“I see what you mean,” said Priscilla. She changed it to read: Thanks to Burro, no longer will we buy expensive, leaky, and fast-failing batteries.
We read on, and Whit weighed in: “This is really close and very strong, but I would just jump right into the Burro battery is better, somehow. I don’t know the word in Twi, but Priscilla, I would just encourage you to take the first two sentences and make the point very explicit and as crisply and quickly as possible. You mention how other batteries expose your children and the environment to danger, but I wonder if for the short version we should just focus on the no-leak guarantee. So I guess where I’m headed is, what’s our overall positioning and what are the three things behind it? I just want to hammer those three points as quickly as possible. So the overall message is it’s a better battery. Then the three things are the no-leak guarantee, stays strong, and more value for less money. I don’t know the tightest and most impactful way to get at more affordable in Twi—you guys need to tell me—but that’s the kicker. So it’s a better battery, no-leak guarantee, stays strong, and—you’re not gonna believe this—but it costs less.”
“Should I add something about how you get the batteries?” Priscilla asked.
“Good question,” said Whit. “I don’t think in the short pitch. This is definitely a case where less is more. I wouldn’t even mention the coupons. But certainly in the longer one.”
To make sure we could better understand what the actual African scripts were saying, Whit asked Rose and Priscilla to translate the final revisions into Twi and then “reverse translate” them back into English from Twi. It was sort of like a game of telegraph, but it worked. After a few more revisions, here was the final script:
MAN’S VOICE: |
Attention all battery users, there is a new battery in town called Burro! Burro batteries do not leak, stay strong, and the best part is that they cost less. |
WOMAN’S VOICE: |
Thanks to Burro, I will no longer buy leaky batteries that do not stay strong and cost more! |
MAN’S VOICE: |
Try Burro too, and you will testify to it. Burro! Do More! |
As artificial as the dialog sounded to us, we had to remember that a lot was getting lost, or garbled, in the translation from an African tongue that has no etymological correlation to Western words and phrases. And Rose and Priscilla were not professional translators. So it was natural that the English version of their script (which no one would ever hear) sounded a bit like something from Google Translate. Rose promised that the Twi version sounded completely natural, and there was no reason to doubt her. Nkansah translated both the short and long pitch into Krobo (from Twi), and Adam handled the Ewe versions. Priscilla and Rose drove up to the studio in New Tafo to start work on the rough cuts. The next day, Whit, Priscilla, and I went up to watch some of the voice-overs be recorded.
Quayem Productions was located in a nondescript stuccoed hut no larger than a standard garden shed. We pulled into the dirt yard under an oil palm tree and were greeted by the owner, an easygoing young man whose name, Stocky, adequately described his athletic build. Sitting around a wooden table outside the studio were several other young men, all of them appearing to be weight lifters, who would be performing the voice-overs in the various languages. For now they were handfeeding small chunks of dried fish to a ravenous kitten no wider than one of their wrists. Stocky explained that he and his colleagues had a rap act called DNA. “It’s short for Drugs ’n’ Alcohol,” he explained matter-of-factly, although I couldn’t picture any of those guys taking drugs, except maybe steroids.
The studio itself had barely enough room for a battered wooden desk covered with computer equipment, a small electronic keyboard, and a couple of plastic chairs. The walls were draped in woven sisal fabric to deaden the sound of car horns outside. A bare compact fluorescent lightbulb hung above. In one corner was a phone booth–sized recording chamber with a stool and a microphone. Stocky sat down at his desk as several of us squeezed into the room. Then the light blinked out: power failure. We moaned and filed back outside. Whit called the office and reached one of the interns. Power was out in Koforidua too. This could be a while.
We sat around the picnic table and watched Jah, a tall member of DNA who would perform the male Twi voice-over, feed the kitten more dried fish while we talked. Stocky, it turned out, was an ambitious young man. Besides his Accra-based band and his recording studio in New Tafo (where he grew up and still had family), he was also studying supply chain management at Koforidua Polytech, where he had met Adam’s brother, a fellow student. Before deciding to pursue college, Stocky had spent three years in Guangzhou, China, exporting clothing and footwear for the Ghanaian market. It was not an experience he held fondly. “The Chinese are racist,” he said. “They spit on the sidewalk when a black man walks by.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“I am serious. Especially African blacks. They always thought I was American because I’m big, so they didn’t hate me as much.”
Which is not to say they showered him with respect. “One Chinese man couldn’t believe it when I bought my own plane ticket,” Stocky recalled. “He wondered how I could afford it. They think we are slaves.”
Stocky had also worked in Egypt and Dubai. Besides a passport filled with entry stamps and visas, he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Ghanaian import business, which operated by its own strange logic. “The things I have seen you couldn’t believe,” he said. “People bring in used American cars and smash the bonnet to pay less duty,” he said. “Then they fix it here.”
Jah screamed and shook his hand, which was dripping blood. The kitten had taken a chunk out of his index finger.
Stocky glared at the cat. “Biting the hand that feeds you!” It looked up and purred.
“He didn’t mean to,” said Jah. “He thought my finger was food.”
So does the lion, I thought. Never much of a pet lover even back home, it was easy for me to avoid the village dogs and cats in Ghana. But Whit was always petting and holding these frail creatures, despite my nagging warnings.
The light flickered on and we tramped back into the studio. The Krobo voice guy (I never got his name) had to leave soon, so he went first into the booth with a script. As he started reciting his lines, Stocky directed from the computer terminal: “Shout!”
The guy started again, louder.
“Shout!”
Again, louder.
“Shout! Excitement!”
This went on for about twenty minutes, running through all the lines over and over. Stocky clearly got it, and knew how to drive his actors to perform. At one point all the guys started laughing at a joke we didn’t understand. “What’s so funny?” Whit asked.
The question made Stocky laugh even harder. “There is a word in Krobo, twε, which means ‘patience,’ or ‘have patience.’ But in Twi it sounds like the word for ‘vagina.’ In this context it would mean ‘Burro is the only vagina.’”
“Well I don’t think we can make that claim,” said Whit. “Seriously, is it okay?”
“It’s okay,” said Stocky.
“It won’t offend people?”
“No, it’s a different language,” he said. “It’s understood.” And he laughed again.
Out went the power, again. After an hour of sitting around, we decided to leave; Priscilla needed to catch a bus to Accra. Stocky and his crew promised to work through the night once the power came on.
Sure enough, he called Whit the next morning and told us to come up.
The cat was still eating. Jah had a bandage on his finger. We sat down in the studio and Stocky ran the audio files. Whit had brainstormed an idea for a signature Burro sound: two clicks, like a finger snap—the sound made when clicking a Burro battery into the D-sized adapter. The short pitch began with the click-click sound, which Stocky had enhanced, followed by the voice-over: “Hey!”
The rest, of course, was in Twi, or Ewe, or Krobo, over an instrumental music track of generic, bright-sounding Ghanaian pop music. The only English was at the very end: “Burro! Do More!” Click-click. And then it started all over again, in a constant loop.
Whit listened carefully, grinning. “Can you give it another, you know, split second to come down before the click-click?”
“Okay. So, Do More … click-click,” said Stocky.
“Yeah. It’s like the click-click is coming a little bit into the Do More, you know? So just a little cleaner break on the Do More. It’s awesome though, man, it’s great.”
Stocky adjusted the levels and beat measures, then replayed it.
Whit paused. “Play it one more time. It’s weird, it’s almost like there’s a little reverb on the Do More.”
“There is.”
“Yeah, and it sounds like the click-click is hitting the echo. Which might be okay.”
More adjustments followed.
“Yeah!” said Whit. “That’s good, huh?”
Jah came in. He was shivering with a fever. “I am going to the clinic,” he said, as a taxi pulled up outside. I wondered about that cat bite yesterday. Stocky’s girlfriend from Accra had come up, and she offered to take Jah to the clinic. We kept working.
“Who did the woman’s voice?” asked Whit, assuming it might have been Stocky’s friend.
“That’s me,” said Stocky.
“That’s you?”
“I pitched it,” he said—electronically manipulating the pitch to turn his own deep voice into a woman’s.
“I would never be able to tell,” said Whit. Stocky smiled.
The last job was rendering all the recordings through a program that would “brighten” the playback by subtly shifting up all the frequencies. “It will give it a ‘wall of sound,’” explained Stocky. Almost fifty years after Phil Spector invented the concept in an analog New York City recording studio with a legion of African-American girl groups from the Bronx, a young African man was using a computer program to duplicate the effect in a mud-walled village hut in Ghana.
When it came time to pay, Stocky asked for two hundred and twenty cedis. “That’s not enough,” said Whit. He gave him three hundred cedis and a brief Business 101 lecture about pricing strategy and the value of services.
Driving home, Whit said, “That was amazing. I paid like two hundred and thirty dollars to make two commercials in three languages over three days.”
We threw a party at Whit’s house one Friday night. Actually we put on a pork show, as we called it, having bought a shoulder of pork from a guy along the side of the road, next to a hand-painted sign announcing PORK SHOW. This odd nomenclature was typical in Ghana, where the words sale and show can be interchangeable. Pork can be hard to find in Ghana, so in that sense any pork retail experience is something of a show. But our local pork merchant’s presentation fell somewhat short of spectacle. It was, in fact, nothing more than a large aluminum bowl filled with fly-covered chunks of pig, shaded with a banana leaf. Nevertheless it made a fine barbecue.
Everyone from Burro except Adam showed up; he begged off, claiming an engagement in Accra, although I suspected the evangelical voice in his head was dissuaded by the all-day preparations, which included strategic planning by Rose, Debi, and David on the variety and quantity of liquor to be offered. Still, that didn’t seem to put off the BYU interns, who turned out to be pretty good dancers. Considering that my brother’s sprawling home had approximately five pieces of furniture including both beds, there was plenty of room for dancing.
My clearest memory of the pork show was Rose dancing with a drinking glass perfectly balanced on her head, which may be the Ghanaian equivalent of wearing a lampshade. My second clearest memory was of Nkansah and James complimenting me on my barbecue, a new taste experience for them—until I told them it was pork. “Oh,” said Nkansah, setting down his fork politely. “We are Krobo; we do not eat pork.”
Late in the evening, while watching Rose and James dance in the dining room to a very loud techno-funk beat, I looked out past them and saw Akosia, the pregnant woman who lived in the hut in the backyard. She was outside, her elbows on the cement-block balustrade around the porch, watching the party through the open jalousie window.
“Akosia!” I said, waving to her.
But as soon as we made eye contact, she disappeared into the night like Cinderella.
The local Mormon meeting house was a few blocks from the Burro office. On a Sunday in late May, Justin, Andrew, and I were the only white people in the large congregation. We sat in straight-backed chairs. All the men wore white shirts and dark ties, except me, who never brought a tie or even a sport coat on any of my trips to Africa. I had put on a clean shirt and pressed slacks, but my sincerest nod to sartorial formality was a pair of pointed white leather African loafers I had bought a few days earlier. Although I meant well, in hindsight they were a poor choice for the service. I’m not sure why I bought them, other than thinking they looked cool. But as I sat in church clutching the Book of Mormon, I remembered that when I was a kid spending summers in Detroit we used to call similar footwear “pimp shoes.” So I was wearing pimp shoes in the Mormon church on a Sunday morning. Perhaps worse in the eyes of God, I was thinking about pimps in the Mormon church on a Sunday morning. If only it had been like Jonas’s church, where you had to take off your shoes at the door.
But it was nothing like that. There was no dancing, no drumming, no music at all except for one hymn sung a capella by the children in honor of their mothers. (It was Ghana’s Mother’s Day.) The service was in English. In his sermon, which constituted pretty much the whole event, the leader talked about the importance of learning English. “I have heard the Mormon service in Twi,” he said, “but it was not good for me.”
“Maxy, wake up.”
“Piss off.” I was already awake, a condition I had been trying to reverse since three A.M., when the roosters started crowing directly outside my open bedroom windows.
“C’mon. We gotta go,” said Whit.
“Go where?”
“Accra.”
“Fuck.” Another day of traffic in Accra, another conference room. Whit had an appointment with the people who ran Health Keepers, the agent-model NGO that Tara, the BYU intern, had mentioned in her presentation. It was one of those companies operating in that “weird nexus” (to use Whit’s phrase) of charity and for-profit. And it had a network of agents, some around Koforidua, selling useful products that did not directly compete with Burro but certainly complemented Burro’s brand. All in all, it made sense to get to know them. I crawled out of bed like it was a foxhole and grabbed a shirt.
A combination of bad directions and an obscure location made us late for our meeting at Health Keepers. When we finally arrived, executive director Daniel Mensah greeted us warmly. A large man with thick glasses, he seemed genuinely eager to hear about Burro. We sat around a conference table and were joined by Sandra Manu, who was in charge of training agents for Health Keepers. Whit presented his updated PowerPoint show, which reflected the latest Burro figures of fifteen hundred clients served by eighty or ninety active agents in about two hundred locations. When he mentioned the challenge of finding good agents, Sandra nodded knowingly.
“We are learning that good agents make a huge difference,” said Whit. “Currently our average exchange rate is twenty to twenty-five days,” referring to the time it takes a client to use up a battery and exchange it for a fresh one. “We think it should be fourteen, and agents who are good at servicing clients typically achieve this.”
Whit finished, and Daniel narrated his own PowerPoint show. “We are an NGO but we believe in sustainability,” he began. “We distribute at a profit and plow the money back into the business. And our agents are profitable at their level. So we use private-sector business approaches.”
The company was founded in 2006 by a California nonprofit called Freedom from Hunger. Over the years, fifteen BYU business-school interns had come over to help design marketing plans and improve productivity. “But none came this year,” said Daniel. “It seems Burro took them all,” he added, laughing. Meanwhile, Freedom from Hunger decided to focus its efforts on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, so Health Keepers lost its U.S. funding. “But they generously let us keep this office space and all the local assets,” said Daniel, “so we reorganized into a local group. Just last week we received a grant from USAID to distribute condoms and birth control pills.”
Health Keepers’ products included many items Westerners would buy at a drugstore: diarrhea medicine, reading glasses, wound care, feminine hygiene products, toothpaste, anti-lice and anti-dandruff shampoo, moisturizers, and laundry soap. Other goods were more specific to the developing world, like insecticide-treated mosquito nets and water treatment tablets. The company also provided services like mosquito net re-treatment (the pesticide eventually wears off), optical screening, blood pressure testing, first aid, and national health plan subscription sign-ups.
Unlike Burro’s consignment model, Health Keepers agents needed to buy their products in advance. So an agent might buy a six-pack of razors for eighty pesewa, then sell them for one cedi, a little less than the going rate in shops.
Daniel said the company was at first reluctant to advance credit to agents, but they found that a cash-only policy discouraged agents from trying new items. “So now we offer a four-month product loan of one hundred cedis’ worth of stuff,” he said. “They must pay back twelve and a half cedis every two weeks, interest-free. Even with that, sometimes it is hard to get the money,” he added. “We have had to send the police to make the point.” His comment made me realize that Nkansah’s police-car gag in the gong-gong was a joke with a serious undertone.
Whit asked if the company had experienced any push-back from local pharmacies and chemist shops, which were often located in smaller towns, if not remote villages, and sold many of the same products. “Well, there are things they have which we cannot sell,” he said, “such as antibiotic ointments and ibuprofen.”
I found it odd that, in a country where scheduled narcotics can be obtained by asking the pharmacist politely, ibuprofen is strictly regulated. Only pharmacists and chemists (the difference is in level of training) can dispense it—the former in up to four-hundred-milligram doses, the latter limited to two-hundred-milligram pills.
“Sandra, I’m wondering how you find new agents,” said Whit.
“Often we find them through existing agents,” she said. “They make a small commission if they sign up a new agent.”
“And what about training?” Whit asked.
“We do training at our cluster meetings,” she said, explaining that clusters are groups of agents from several towns. They meet every two weeks to exchange money and get new products. “Training involves some role playing, drama, and discussion. It can be a challenge. Our best agents are typically older, at least in their thirties, because the young people have too high expectations.” She said the most profitable products, like antibiotic soaps, hand lotions, and feminine sanitary products, require a degree of salesmanship that is not always second nature.
“We would love to see how your training works,” said Whit. “I understand you have agents in Nkurakan.”
“Five or six,” said Sandra.
“And Mamfe?”
“Around twenty.”
“Nkurakan, Mamfe, that’s our sweet spot,” said Whit. “I’d love to see if we can encourage mutual sales in those towns. Also, we’re happy to try supplying your products to our people in other areas.”
“Clearly there are areas for collaboration,” Daniel said.
We left with Sandra agreeing to invite Burro to the next cluster meeting in Mamfe.
On the drive home we talked about ibuprofen. “Last week when Rose had a fever, I tried to find her some,” said Whit. “I went to the chemist and they had never heard of it. Finally I found some at a pharmacy; they call it profen. It was from India and it was candy-coated, in bubble packs. It was very cheap, like three cedis for maybe sixty pills. But it’s so hard to get. People in villages can just never get it unless they take a taxi or tro-tro into town. I’d like to partner with a pharmacy chain like Interpharma to sell Burro-branded ibuprofen up here. I’d say, ‘Look, you’re selling it, so it’s a pharmacy making the legal sale, but we’ll provide marketing and delivery.’ I mean, these poor farmers—they’re getting all these fucking ointments and balms and medicated soaps for backache, and they can’t get ibuprofen. I wish we could go into a village and say, ‘If your back hurts take two of these.’
“But the truth is I don’t have time to pursue all this stuff right now,” he went on. “First we’ve gotta get these resellers more productive. English is such a challenge. Guys like Jonas and George, in their forties, their English is good but not as good as Hayford’s, who’s sixty-four. There has been more emphasis in the schools on local languages, but most everyone will agree that the education system has declined; there’s definitely a decreasing curve of English fluency with the younger agents. Edward Mintah, this agent in Beware, great guy, hard worker, excellent salesman, twenty years old—tough to communicate with him in English.”
It was now long after sunset, and the narrow road with its unforgiving shoulder of an open concrete drain was getting hard to see. People in dark robes walked along the edge of the blacktop, their ghostly forms nearly invisible until close range; goats the color of coal darted back and forth. Sometimes oncoming drivers would dim their lights, sometime they wouldn’t; either way, with no streetlights or reflective road stripes, the beams of opposing traffic blotted out all reference to the highway long enough to swerve into any number of pedestrians and livestock. Just outside Koforidua, in the village of Okurase, the bobbing lens of a flashlight signaled a police roadblock. “Please open your boot,” said the officer. The trunk was full of groceries from Accra; he made us take them all out. One kilometer up the road, another cop at another roadblock inspected the groceries again. I thought Whit might lose it, but he kept cool.
We pulled into Whit’s garage and noticed the car was leaking oil. Inside the house, a fan had hit another lightbulb and showered Whit’s bed with glass.
I woke up at two o’clock, not to the usual noise of roosters but to the unmistakable clamor of what police delicately call a “domestic disturbance.” It was coming from Akosia’s blockhouse in the courtyard. I had lived in New York apartments long enough to recognize the difference between an argument and actual abuse, and this sounded more like the former, so I left it alone.
At five-thirty the next morning Akosia, at this point looking very pregnant, knocked on the back door. “Please,” she said to Whit, “will you talk to my husband?”
Victor had returned from his “travels” in the middle of the night—with a woman from Accra. Naturally, Akosia had protested the unwelcome guest; they argued. “Please tell him to go away.”
“I will talk to him,” said Whit.
“Thank you.” She looked down at the ground. “Please,” she said, “I need to go back to the hospital. Can you give me some money?”
“I will give you money this time because I want you to go to the hospital for your baby,” he said, digging into his pocket for a ten-cedi note. “But I am traveling to America next week, and I can’t take care of you. You need to find a way to get by.” It was the only time in Africa that I saw Whit break his own rule about handing out money to people who weren’t obviously handicapped. Outside, Victor was slinking out the gate with his girlfriend, who wore tight jeans and a big hairdo. Whit watched and shook his head: “What an asshole.”