Oppy Submission – November 10th, 2009
Joseph Quaderer is a student in the Langone program. On September 14th he began a sabbatical in Kampala, Uganda where he’ll be working for Educate! a non-profit organization that teaches native Ugandans and refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Sudan the necessary skills to start and scale social enterprises - financially sustainable organizations that also address important social problems. While abroad he’ll be writing a bi-weekly column for the Oppy.
“Michael Jackson?” The taxi driver asked in a thick Lugandan accent.
I pulled the earphones out and looked at him.
“I’m sorry?”
He looked at my Ipod again and repeated his question.
“Michael Jackson?”
I nodded. He kept looking at my Ipod.
“Would you like to listen?” I asked.
He looked at me puzzled. I gave him one of the earpieces and he put in his ear. Almost instantly he transformed from an irate taxi driver that nearly killed a motorcyclist moments before to a giddy schoolchild laughing and singing along to “Will You Be There.”
I’ve never been a huge Michael Jackson fan. In fact I considered him downright creepy for most of his life. BUT, when I came to Africa I realized what an important figure he was – just in his ability to impact people across the globe, if nothing else. He was, and is, HUGE here.
Seeing the zeal and devotion people felt for Michael Jackson made me realize what a powerful mechanism music is for transcending boundaries and engaging people of vastly different demographic and geographic backgrounds.
We darted through the Ugandan air, thick as molasses with pollution. The taxi driver was still laughing and singing, ‘Carry me like you are my brother, love me like a mother, will you be there?”
As I sat next to him I thought about what other mediums are able to unite human beings like music. What else could bring together an American from New York City and an African from Uganda in the front seat of a taxi?
We turned off Ggaba road and began snaking through the labyrinth of bumpy dirt roads leading to Buziga, my town.
As I ruminated, my mind wandered back to the day I went to Aero Beach on the shores of Lake Victoria. Aero Beach was nicknamed Aero beach because of main attractions of the beach - two HUGE Air Uganda airplanes that apparently crash landed there several years ago (there is some argument over whether they crashed or were placed).
When we got to the beach there was a group of young Ugandans playing beach volleyball. They wore threadbare clothes and laughed and joked in Lugandan.
I sheepishly walked over.
“Can I play?”
They didn’t understand my query, but they invited me to play. For the next hour we all played beach volleyball – laughing, joking, patting each other reassuringly and taunting the other team all without understanding a lick of each other’s language. It made me realize how powerful sports are at bringing people together and allowing them to participate in humanistic endeavors like teamwork, competition and winning. In an instant I understood why events like the Olympics and the World Cup are so revered. It has a lot more to do than just sports.
At one point we came to a roadblock. Rather than wait for the congestion to clear, the impatient driver decided to drive over a HUGE rut running parallel to the road.
I started thinking some more about mediums that all humans understand and my mind drifted back to a conversation I had a few days prior with woman named Mercy. Mercy or the “yogurt lady of Buziga” as she’s affectionately called, is a local community businesswoman. She worked for Uganda telecom for 20 years, used all her savings to buy a row of shops, and now operates a small store and collects rent from the other tenants on the strip.
I asked her how she does background checks on prospective tenants.
“I don’t. It’s a gentleman’s agreement.” She said.
I asked her how she enforces contracts if people don’t pay.
“There is nothing I can do. If someone doesn’t pay I cant make them pay. If I do that, or if I kick them out the entire community will say I’m too strict and collude against me. This is the third world after all.”
I asked her how she financed her business. We talked about things like collateral and principal and interest. I introduced academic topics like moral hazard and adverse selection and Mercy understood everything and helped me understand how they applied in an essentially lawless business environment.
And before long we’d been talking about and using sophisticated business principles for an half hour! How is it possible that people with such vastly different backgrounds could talk about pseudo-abstract concepts? And it struck me – business, like music and sports has the ability to transcend boundaries. Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and sorghum traders in Hoima all need to understand the basics of capitalism to be successful.
And while their motivations to launch enterprises might be different (the Silicon valley entrepreneur for a ski house in Aspen and the sorghum trader for subsistence in Uganda) the basics of business remain the same.
What a wonderful gift that we, as MBA students, are learning a craft that can transcend all cultural boundaries and make an impact on the lives of so many vastly different groups of people! But unlike sports and music - there are no financial icons to speak of - no Michael Jacksons or Usain Bolts galvanizing entire countries. The financial world is more decentralized and the onus falls on our shoulders as the business specialists to spread the word and to help finance achieve its maximum social impact.
The taxi creeped over another crevasse and as we neared the end the wheel slipped, there was a loud creaking and the entire taxi slid to the left. We almost hit a man and woman on the side of the road. The driver cursed out loud. I thought he was mad because he’d broken an axel, or nearly killed the couple to our left.
I watched as he fished around on his lap for something. Finally he located the earpiece and put it back. Instantly his countenance transformed from angry to happy. He was upset because his headphone had been jarred out of his ear when the taxi slipped into the crevasse.
We kept driving along the backroads of Buziga listening to Jay Z’s “Forever Young” and smiling.
I can be reached at Joseph.Quaderer@gmail.com
Awesome Joe! We miss you!
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