Burro continued to grow, and to face new challenges. Two hundred of the final lanterns, with rubber gaskets around the battery compartment, arrived by DHL in December. Whit sent out a tweet on December 10: “Just confirmed in Accra hotel sink, the Burro Light keeps burning Super-Bright, even under water! Don’t try this at home kids, but yeah!” That initial shipment sold out in less than two weeks; twenty-eight hundred more arrived in January of 2011. Whit was also hiring more full-time Ghanaians.

The Kia got smashed again, twice. Nii was teaching James’s daughter how to drive—part of Rose’s ongoing initiatives to get everyone cross-trained and capable in every job—and she lost control and hit a brick wall. “A guy in Koforidua said he could fix it for forty cedis,” Whit told me over the phone, “but when I picked it up after the repairs, the whole engine was shaking. Turns out the crash actually sheared off the front engine mounts, which he hadn’t bothered to check.”

Then, on Christmas Eve—shortly after the car had been fixed properly in Accra—James smashed it even more, somehow creasing both sides while driving on a remote stretch of dirt road. Nobody fully bought into his explanations about why he was out driving the company car on Christmas Eve; his cash box was also missing fifty cedis that day. James had a wonderful spirit and worked hard, but he had issues. It didn’t seem like a happy ending was in store, and I felt bad for him. Meanwhile, I decided that if I ever returned to Ghana I would not ride in that cursed car.

Nothing came easy. It seemed like every day Whit had to push back against the standard way of doing things. One day he got a call from his new clearing agent, who was paid to get the batteries, lamps, and other products through customs in Accra. He’d come recommended by a neighbor of Whit’s, who happened to be an official with the federal Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS). The agent’s first task was clearing the shipment of six thousand new batteries, which finally arrived in December. “The day they arrived he called me,” said Whit, “and he said, ‘Here’s the deal. I can get them out today for five hundred cedis.’

“I said, ‘You mean on top of everything else?’ Because the duty and the VAT were supposed to be about two thousand cedis.

“He said, ‘No, that’s the total. Five hundred.’

“I said, ‘Do I get proper clearance docs?’

“He said, ‘No, it’s a favor.’

“A favor!” Whit repeated to me. “And he said if I don’t do it, the customs officer is saying the batteries have the wrong code and will be subject to twenty percent duty instead of ten percent, which is what they should be as rechargeables.”

“Some favor.”

“Yeah, he was making it pretty clear that the expedited way to get stuff through is to pay off somebody.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, as soon as you start doing that, they’ve got you in their pocket. They know you’ll pay the bribes, and you’re compromised. So I said to him, ‘You know, I really appreciate the favor but it’s very important for my business to make sure everything is properly cleared.’ He said then I’d have to come down and talk to the officer because he’s insisting on twenty percent duty. I’m like fuck. I know those batteries should only cost ten percent duty. I can’t make this business work on twenty percent.

“So I drive down and meet the head of CEPS at the DHL terminal. He was a smart guy who had obviously done his homework. He was telling me dry cells are subject to twenty percent duty and that only secondary-cell accumulators pay ten percent. He said he was even gonna forward this to the collections department and have them re-collect for all my previous batteries. So I’m really pushing back. I told him these are secondary-cell accumulators because they’re rechargeable. But he was saying no, secondary-cell accumulators are wet-cell car batteries. I said, ‘Sir, I’m in the battery business, and I can assure you that the definition of secondary cell is “rechargeable.”’

“He said, ‘Where did you get that information?’

“I said, ‘Sir, I can look on any of about fifty thousand websites.’

“He said, ‘Show me.’

“So I went on my smart phone, and I’m googling right there. And to his credit, he was pretty cool. He’s looking at the ingredients, the chemical composition. I just sat there quietly for about fifteen minutes and let him come to his own conclusion. I knew I had to give him enough room to save face. Finally he backed down.

“Then just as I was leaving he said, ‘What about lithium cell phone batteries? Should they be classified as secondary?’

“I said, ‘Well sir, I won’t tell the importers, but yes.’ When I came back to pick up the lanterns, I gave him one. We’re good friends now.”

Burro’s march to profitability continues steadily if more slowly than Whit had hoped. Less than nine months after the introduction of the first Burro battery-powered devices in October 2010, total monthly revenue more than tripled, and battery exchange revenue doubled. Non-battery sales passed battery sales in monthly revenue in May 2011. Burro is sourcing more battery-powered devices for introduction in the coming months and years and is also conducting trials with health and agricultural products and services.

As I observed in late 2010, the company is getting more efficient at picking good agents; by mid-2011, it was adding twenty new resellers every month. Even with the currently limited catalog of products, many Burro resellers are already performing at levels that will drive the company beyond profitability and on to very attractive rates of investment return. Whit expects many more agents will hit those numbers with an expanded catalog and increased marketing.

Challenges remain. Poor-performing batteries continue to occasionally elude Burro’s rapid-testing protocols, but the problems have diminished, and Whit is working to source more robust and efficient charging and test equipment.

Meanwhile, electrification of some original Burro villages is great news for Burro clients but has also highlighted the vulnerability of the flagship battery offering as Ghana marches forward. Whit believes the Burro brand potential is bigger than any single product, however. Trust in the brand is high, and Burro is capitalizing on that to encourrage clients to save with Burrro on layaway for more substantial investments, such as water pumps and improved seeds.

Whit essentially lives in Ghana, with brief visits home during the summer and around the holidays. He meets his family for vacations in Europe (alas no more cheap flights through Libya), and both of his kids have been back and forth to visit him in Koforidua. Shelly occasionally stops by on her travels for the Gates Foundation. With Burro growing rapidly, Whit can’t yet envision the day when he can spend less time coaxing a green truck through red mud, and more time in Seattle sipping lattes. Burro has taught all of us that while there is a business to be made serving the world’s poor, it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s not for people who wither in the heat, worship Wi-Fi, and like their food cooked just so. It’s not for me, in short—but I admire my crazy kid brother for making it his.

Burro has already inspired other entrepreneurs. Justin and Andrew, the BYU interns, returned to Ghana in January of 2011 to explore alternatives for launching their own initiative—a franchise business to help rural Ghanaians design, implement, and maintain sustainable fish farms. Their company, called Tilapiana, won two business plan competitions at BYU. They are currently seeking funding to implement the program.

Jonas, still one of Burro’s top resellers, the Farmer of the Year in his district and my host for a memorable village stay, ran for district assembly but was narrowly defeated. I called him from Maine and said I thought that someday he would be president of Ghana. His extra income from Burro has allowed him to take more risks on his farm, such as growing rice. In February 2011, his sixteen-year-old son, who rode his bike down dirt roads to school every day, died of an undetermined illness.

Whit has not yet heard from Akosia.

Rose became a good driver. Burro’s vehicles continue to take a beating; in early 2011, the Tata needed a new engine after just 85,000 kilometers. Whit bought a motorcycle and now gets from Koforidua to central Accra in half the former time of two and a half hours. If it rains, he gets very wet.

Kevin, Whit’s first employee, whose wife and child had been killed in a tro-tro accident, married an Ashanti woman, and they are planning to start a new family. He is working for an event management company in Koforidua. Adam was let go after Jan and Debi Nordstrom hired Modupe Dzorka, a Nigerian-born woman with many more years’ experience as an accountant. In 2011, Adam was hired as comptroller of an NGO in another West African country. James was fired shortly after the Christmas Eve accident; he now drives for another local company. His daughter still works for Burro. Nkansah is running a taxi business, among other enterprises, but has still made no effort to repay his debt to Burro. Rose, Modupe, and Nii are Burro’s top Ghanaian managers and, with the rest of the team, are able to run Burro’s pilot branch autonomously. Charlie is still Burro’s business partner, and still runs a very busy contracting firm.

Patrick, the boy with the snotty nose in the courtyard, died. Nobody seemed to know how or why; neighbors told Jan that Patrick had complained of feeling cold and was taken to the hospital. He died in the car on the way. “I realize the only picture I have of him is a grainy, cropped-from-a-group photo a year and a half old,” Jan wrote in her blog. “Is his existence already a memory as life in Ghana goes on?”

My own memories, much more than news reports of regime change in Ivory Coast or revolutions in North Africa, confirmed daily the existence of a continent that seemed increasingly far away as I settled back into life at home. I started missing my friends in Ghana, which I had expected, and then missing Africa itself, which I had not. And of course I missed my brother. Our time together there had been a sort of second act to a childhood abbreviated when our parents divorced and Whit moved west with our mother. Who could have predicted it would take place so much farther east than west?

Separation, of course, has been the story of Africa since slavery. On the plane home from Accra one time, I sat next to an older Ghanaian woman and her American grandson, five years old. She explained that the boy was going back to his mother in Las Vegas after a visit to Ghana. He was totally American; he did not speak Twi, and he had a portable DVD player on which he watched a movie about Ninja Turtles. At some point in the ten-hour flight to New York, the battery died in his DVD player. He pulled a cell phone out of his knapsack and started playing Pac-Man video games, but he couldn’t get it to work right; I tried to help, but I couldn’t figure it out either. Frustrated and bored, the boy fell into a tantrum—crying and paddling the seat with his legs. When his grandmother told him to stop, he hit her.

In Ghana, where children show unerring respect for elders, hitting your grandmother would be scandalous. But the woman seemed resigned to the fact that her flesh-and-blood grandson was no longer African.

And yet, oddly, I had come to feel more African myself—spending less time worrying about what might happen next (to me, to my kids, to health-care reform) and more time embracing the unknown, as Ghanaians have learned to do over generations. We filed off the plane and through immigration, collected our bags in a chaotic African-style tussle around the carousel before pushing through customs and into the harsh corridors of Kennedy, perhaps the most unwelcoming portal in the world. This national embarrassment, perpetually under improvement yet never improving, always shocks me by its arrogance and lazy indifference—as if its master planners have never been to another airport (like Ghana’s excellent Kotoka), and don’t care to bother. As I waded into the swift current of the terminal, the relaxed, warm tones of Twi from my fellow passengers—the voices that had held me for more than two years in Ghana—became diluted by the disciplined cadences of Eurasian tongues, the languages spoken by people with definite plans. The French, the German, the Italian, the Russian, the Japanese, even my own English—they all sounded oddly foreign to me, and as disorienting as Terminal Three. Soon the Ghanaians disappeared into the crowd, and then Africa was gone.