Entrepreneurship

It's amazing how you can be somewhere for quite a while before you start to notice certain things about the place and the people who live there. I remember when I was living in Guinea and my parents wrote their first letter to me. Somewhere in there they asked, "What are the major industries?" I had just arrived and said that I didn't really know. I'd seen place where they made metal roofing and had also observed some people making bricks on the side of the road out of dirt or clay or whatever had been where the hole was that was next to them.

 

I hadn't really given a ton of thought to how people make their living here. It's easy to say that 90% of people here are unemployed (not an accurate statistic, just my estimation) - meaning that they aren't receiving a paycheck from an employer - but that's missing the big picture.

 

A few days ago I was getting a ride back from Solwezi on a paved road. This road, like many paved roads in Africa, has loads of potholes in it. There are small stretches of the road where the potholes have been patched by government construction crews, but at least half of the road remains severely pocked, doubling the amount of time it takes to get from Meheba to Solwezi.

 

Through the windshield I saw some children throwing dirt onto the road ahead. "What are they doing?" I wondered aloud, thinking that they were goofing around or playing or just trying to annoy drivers. The driver explained that they were patching up the holes. Near the far end of the "construction zone" they had lain a couple branches on the road. This was where the drivers were supposed to slow down and give them some money for their work. Our driver didn't even pretend to slow down for the branches, causing the first few children we passed to shout at the vehicle, but then as we passed the last worker, he tossed a few thousand Kwacha out the window.

 

As we shot off, I looked through the rear window and saw the last kid running back towards his coworkers with the bills crumpled in his fists, held high above his head.

 

I couldn't get over how cool it was that they were fixing up the road for drivers and actually making a little bit of money off of it. Most drivers probably make enough that it's well worth it for them to toss a couple bucks out the window even for a few hundred meters of flat road.

 

That got me thinking about all the other ways in which people make money in Meheba and in Africa in general. There are people who make stools out goat skin, people who make hats out of straw, people who make beer out of bananas, people who repair bicycles, people who buy things in Lusaka or on the border of Congo, transport them back and sell them for a small profit, people who rent out their stereos for special occasions, almost any way you can think of to make a little money.

 

It seems that poverty forced one to become entrepreneurial just to get by. Almost everyone here receives income by some means, and very few people go around begging, meaning that almost everyone essentially has his own business. I think that's pretty damn impressive.