Rufaro Makamure

It's been about a month since I planted some seeds and there was nothing coming out. The one seed that came out was pecked on by a bird and it was so tiny I was surprised a bird saw the emerging plant. I did keep watering the seeds but I had inwardly given up. I saw a couple of the seeds that emerged today and I am glad I kept watering. I took a picture of these, I covered the ones that are out of the soil with some grass so that they won't be eaten by birds. It's a small win, but I needed it.

I need this to happen with Apo. I feel too much has been going on in his business and his personal life for so long and he is growing tired. I really need him to hold on a little bit longer. His business is very key to me, I need it. It's very rare to find someone who is so hard working and committed to making something work like he does. This is what builds a long lasting business, with the right skills he will make it. We have already started working on improving efficiency and we need to find how to make his business improve it's relationship with it's employees.  His business is a potential support system for my project. It will be difficult to handle if he gives up, all of my effort would have been in vain. I am crossing my fingers that our talk today will help and energize him.

Before I say what I want to say today, I have a confession to make. I failed to cut the banana tree which has a bunch that's already forming. It's such a huge difference when we have the bananas, we can dig into the bananas as much as we want and I could not give this up.

I have had highs and lows between today and yesterday. I was supposed to meet with mai Kumbi a week ago to talk about progress at the plot for the month. We couldn't because she was very busy with her flower business. As soon as she was done, she didn't wait for me to look for her, she came on her own. I was impressed with her and there is more than an honorable character she is building, our revenue increased by 62%, of course it is still very small figures that we are getting, but it is such a great improvement. I will get into more detail on this in following threads.

On the low side, Apo called me and told me he is having problems with the working roaster. It's exactly a month after putting the motor. I will visit him tomorrow to find out exactly what is happening. Things are not going as I wanted at all with this project. One of my indirect intentions was to help Apo's daughter. The demands of the business get in the way of her relationship with her father and I wanted to assess how their relationship is like when the project is running smoothly. She came back from school and her father has no one to help him now, meaning the business relies on the two of them for now. For this holiday it's not possible to have the peanut butter business running smoothly. I just hope we can figure something out by December, when she comes back for her last holiday this year.

One of our dogs is a very clever animal. I closed off the keyhole garden area with plastic and I made a door out of cardboard boxes. For weeks all I was worried about in this area were rats. A week ago, I started seeing evidence of a bigger animal's presence in the space. Pavers would be moved, some digging, deformed fences, the beetroot leaves would be flattened and I found an okra plant pulled out.

It couldn't be cat, we have had these walk along the durahall and if they ever jumped into my space, they wouldn't leave a trace. I checked the plastic that covered the garden there was no hole to let the dogs in. I was so confused. The strange thing was that when I would open the kitchen door to do random checks, one of our dog would always be sitted in a cage near the garden staring at me. He never used to spend time in the cage, unless he was asked to go in the cage. Yesterday morning, I opened the kitchen door and saw him just sneaking out of the garden area. He was going through the corner of the cardboard box door and he found a way of opening and closing it  without showing. I was in shock. He knows I do not want him in the garden, so every time he would hear me opening the kitchen door he would quickly get out of the garden and sit in the cage looking all innocent.

I will start with an update on our home. I can gladly say I am now so much cleaner than before. Household work on it's own takes up a chunk of my time, but I have to compete with standards that are around, where there is a stay in maid whose job is to clean the house from morning till evening. The happier my siblings are with how well I am taking care of their property the more time I get to experiment in this space.

My vision is to alleviate poverty, then right now my goal is to develop the capacity to earn a living for myself and those I influence. Any money I could make or that I was given in the last couple of years has been spent on food mostly and then bills. The food bill is what I am eyeing. There is space for growing food, but different things have been making this difficult. Water scarcity, rats, birds, slugs and ideal spots for growing the food. The keyhole garden has become a steadier place to plant things in. The fact that this time I seem to have won in fencing the kitchen waste area, there aren't as many rats. I fenced the spinach and it has been recovering from the damage by rats. I do not think I can do much on my slug problem, so I grow seeds in cut tissue roll cores and this on it's own is still a struggle as I am learning to grow my own seeds. Buying seedlings is expensive at the moment. My wins are increasing with time. Because we have been getting tomatoes from the plot, we have been feezing the tomatoes from the plant in the keyhole garden. There are no more tomatoes from the plot, so we are now eating the stored ones, meaning that we are still not buying tomatoes.

I keep filling containers with soil to expand my growing space. I have discovered the possibility of using the banana area. Right now, I have guava tree seedlings (if it all works trees will be pay back for my sister's support and hopefully it will give her some income in her old age. So far she has successfully planted banana trees and I am working on the guava trees for her.), pumpkin and potatoes growing there. Again surviving with food mostly from the house, will increase my siblings interest in what I am doing and I will reduce my dependency on them.

Of late, there has been a very bad flue that's making people really sick. Mai Kumbi and her family all had it. Kumbi, her son, could not eat and was throwing up on Sunday, but he is better now. The last thing we needed was people falling ill. It draws things back so much and we honestly cannot afford this where we are.

Then yesterday, Apo called to tell me that the boys he was working with left him. He now only has one person he is working with. The boys left him the day he needed to go to a relative's funeral and he had to cancel the trip because he had no one to leave at his work.

With the peanut butter business I had decided to step back a little and only offer any opinion when it is sort for, as a result I was now just a listening ear to Apo. The change was obvious and we had to talk about it. I had to communicate to him that I was not going to offer any help unless he asked for it because I felt like I was imposing myself where I was not needed.

He brought up the motors and how we had differing thoughts on whether to buy them or not. He wanted to buy nuts because he had enough labor. Now the labor he relied on is gone, the motor that's working is making things easier.  On the other hand everything about buying and installing of motors was on him. Without me saying anything, he knew that if I could have things my way we should have bought a brand new motor. His business cannot afford this, and it means the business would not have seen this growth, but because of him, an idea came into life. In other words he was saying it is normal to see things differently and we both have very different strengths which tend to grow the business. I was so happy to hear him say this.

Today I will put down clearly what exactly I am doing and how all the dots connect. Things are so unpredictable it is so easy to mix things up and lose the goal of what it is I am working to build.

Again I am home alone. Some man who grew up in my neighborhood just came today in the evening to see me. Apart from polite greetings when we bump into each other, we don't talk. I didn't even go to open the gate, when I asked him from the door what he wanted, he wasn't clear and I  was open with him that it was dark and I couldn't open the gate to let him. What made me uneasy is how he asked who I was with, and today is when my sister left. It's as if he knows I am alone. He was not happy. Maybe I am being paranoid, but he has NEVER visited, why start today and in the evening. I am shaking in my boots.

Peanut butter is now available for our customers, whenever they request for it. This is a positive change that we are seeing.

The last thing I did was to send Apo a video and when I called him about the video, his answer was, I do not want to go back to school and this was before he even looked at the video. Hmm...I am not sure of how to feel exactly. I know what I want from all this effort it's a potential opportunity for both sustenance and fulfillment of my purpose. I have talked about the sustenance part in my earlier posts. As for my purpose;

Apo's project is at a level that has so much influence as compared to mine and it is also ready for some of the opportunities in the present time. From an angle of poverty reduction, if he works on his system, he will shift from so much movement, with very little production to a fully productive business and if he grows in profit, because of the relationship we are creating he has a higher chance of paying attention to my proposal with regards to how employees are paid. Without knowing, some of the salaries were continued from the colonial way of running things, where they had nothing to do with covering the employee's decent living costs. If he makes a sensible profit, he will benefit if he revisits this area. If he pays his employees well, he will reduce labor turnover and increase commitment. In my books he will be one owner added to our community who would have improved people's lives. Being a part of this development is what I was enjoying.

After his response I got to thinking about how much time I am putting into this and I am not paid for any of what I am doing (not that I am asking for this, but it crossed my mind). I decided to take a step back. When he called me he was telling me how the people he is working with are not working and their excuse is they have to watch the roaster when it is being run by the motor, so that it doesn't burn. I am now torn. Why is he calling me, it's his business, is kind of what I got from his response. The other side of me knows that I might not have an answer, but sharing takes away some load and who knows what change we can help to bring.
I don't know what to do.

For the time that I worked with Apo, I have since realised that we more often than not set ourselves to fail and it was difficult to put a finger at what the problem has been. It's not even just with Apo, but with all my projects. Two days back, I stumbled upon something that was differentiating strategy and planning and, I got my answer. Planning leaves no room for any external elements and my environment is filled with these. Between Apo and myself, I was worse, because he has so much experience.

I got to searching for the answer especially now because of an incident that happened. Apo needed to return some money which he had promised to have raised in the past month and he couldn't. I expected this because the motors took time that especially I, had not anticipated so I did ask for this money but I knew there was no way he could have raised all of it. When I did remind him of the loan to hear how much he could return he straight away threw me under the bus. I knew I had a large part to play in him not raising enough money because I pushed him to put motors. I felt his business was stuck at one level and unless he did something different he was going to be stuck at the same position until the business crumbled. What disappointed me was how quick the conversation turned to finger pointing. I already had his back, but for him to not raise a single cent towards returning the capital and blame it entirely on me was a little harsh. He was processing as he was working on the motors so he was selling some peanut butter and the time when he got the chance to go and buy peanuts, he still had peanuts to process, there was no time when he run out if peanuts. This is why I felt I did slow things down a great deal but there needed to be some accountability from his part that I still feel lacked.

Instead of going silent or being mad about this, I decided to understand how I felt and when I did get it, I called him and we communicated. I was in the same position as him where it was about being right and wrong, until I understood that if we change our approach and start including uncertainties and external elements, we will be more understanding, and for the times that we would have failed in our strategies, we can both be responsible and accountable  for it.

I sent him the link to the video for us to start talking around this topic. I hope we can get to discussing this, so that we grow together from this perspective.

One of the motors already had a fan and the second one had a fan added onto it. This second motor had brakes and these were removed because there was a need for more power than is available to use it with it's brakes. It is now turning the drum but the speed is extremely slow and it's still being worked on. So there is still only one motor working.

Apo's trip this time, required him to travel 270km to a township called gawa. From Gweru town, he passes through a town called Kwekwe which is 60km from Gweru and then to Gokwe, which is 160km from Kwekwe and then to Gawa township which is 40km from Kwekwe. From there, he heard that nuts were found about 10-15km away from where he was and he walked this distance. When he did find the nuts he looked for a car to move the nuts to the township, the car guy did not turn up, so he then found someone with a donkey driven cart who brought the nuts to a certain point, I am not sure if the cart traveled 15km + 40km or just the 15km, but he ended up leaving the nuts 55km away from where he bought them.

Apo went to buy nuts and he had to go to remote rural places, because where he usually buys nuts, there weren't any or they were pricey. It was hard for him to get transport for the nuts back to the center where he could then look for transport back to Gweru. He eventually managed to get the nuts to the center, but became it took him more day than he had planned, he had to rent a room for storing the nuts as he traveled back to manage the team he left back home. Once he has raised money for rentals, he will go back to look for transport to get his nuts back home.
His business has so many growth opportunities.