Entrepreneurs: Building Self-Sustaining Projects

The Chinese have this great thought, give a man a fish, he eats a day, teach a man to fish, he can feed himself forever. So one of our goals is to help nurture self-sustaining projects and I'll give you an example. The first time I went to Esivalu and I sat with the teachers and I told them that I was going to come and help them build classrooms, one of the teachers immediately said, well what are you going to do for the orphans and I said, well, I'm going to help build the school for them. She said, well they're hungry. You can build a nice classroom, they're hungry, they can't learn. And I said, what are you going to do for the orphans. How can you sustain a project for those kids? So they did figure out a way to rent a piece of property that ... and these people are great farmers and they grew corn and the idea was from that corn they were going to feed the orphan kids lunch, so at least if they got a good lunch they would have nourishment and so the whole idea was to maybe take some of those corn and sell a little bit and then they can put in more corn and then just the whole thing and the children would raise the corn and that whole thing, it sounds great. And so when we went back and the first corn harvest was ... we helped them bring in the first corn harvest. It was wonderful and when I looked at it and me not being a farmer, I said, well, how long will this feed the children for and they said, oh about three weeks and the next corn harvest wasn't coming in for six months. And I said, wait a minute, how are you going to give from the end of the three weeks... you got to learn to ... and so it was like okay, Jim Nowak, we got to come and buy some more corn and you know, and so ... but they just didn't get it or they ... I don't know, they didn't want to get it. And so now we have another project going which is sort of going and sort of not going. Every kid in Kenya needs to come to school in a uniform. Now most of these kids come from families of five or six or seven kids and the parents are farmers, lot of the parents are dead and they don't have the money for uniforms. So they might for a dollar or 50 cents get them old school uniform from a different school and they wear that or they wear rags to school or whatever. So we bought a couple of sewing machines and we got some tailors and we said, teach the orphan kids to be tailors. Now they'll have a skill. They'll make their own uniforms, then they make other uniforms, they can sell to some of the other kids that got a few dollars and then we can actually start making uniforms for the school over there and the school over there and that money will sustain this whole thing. Well one of the machines broke down and they didn't want to pay somebody to fix it so that machine wasn't working and then the principal wouldn't give the tailors the money that they were supposed to have to teach the kids and so the lessons stopped and I mean the whole self-sustaining thing just sounded so great and then they started a chicken program. They got 12 chickens and then did the math. They have 12 chickens, each have 10 babies and then we have a 120 chickens and ... and you know, I gave them some upfront money to get the things started and then they wanted extra money for vaccinations which in a way I didn't think was very important. I guess a bunch of the chickens died, then you could vaccinate it and it was like ... you know, it's just like building a classroom is ... you know, now kids learning, that's the most self-sustaining thing we can do for them but there's other things that really will be nice. And so there are great projects that if they can be nurtured, if they can be created and duplicated and everything else, 'cause I know that some of those projects are working in other places in the developing world. I just haven't figured out the magic and yet you know what, I'm one guy that's there for about four months out of the year and just to make sure that the buildings get put up is a lot of work. And so the last time I was with the Esivalu teachers I said, I'm finished with the self-sustaining projects... forget it. I'm putting no more money in and they all pleaded oh no, no... just a couple more months. You know, and from what I've heard you know, when I go back I think most of the projects are on the face... they're falling on their face and yet I know they're all going to say, oh help us a little more and I don't know. Maybe that's another thing about leadership. Sometimes you got to be a bad guy and you can't please everybody all the time. You just can't... or you don't have a bottom line anymore and so I'm afraid when I go back this time, there are couple of people I need to talk to that are not going to get good news from me. You know, I'm not great at that. That's not a good part of my leadership ability but if I don't do it I'm not going to be a leader anymore.