Fifteen

Issue date: 10/11/06 Section: Student Life

Shopping in Medina market in Accra

Howard and I were eating dinner in Jazztone when the music was interrupted by the electricity shortage, which we were both used to. It would have been a perfect candle lit dinner for Howard and Emily, his fiancée, had she not caught malaria. In the darkness and silence, a consultant to-be and an ex-investment banker's conversation became more engaged in Accra, the capital of Ghana in West Africa.

"I don't think I worked as hard at Sloan as I did in Ghana. Everyday in Temale, if I just push myself a bit harder, the impact will carry further." As Howard unfolded his challenges with Safe Household Water, a water and sanitation project started by an MIT professor, I firmed my decision not to hedge myself in New York or Hong Kong for the summer. While fighting malaria mosquitoes and taking cold bucket showers, Howard had his mission in mind and enjoyed living closer with the locals. Nonetheless, many things kept him awake: The rural communities could not afford the water filtering system his NGO hoped to provide while the official beneficiaries were the rich banks and international NGOs. How could he encourage more real jobs among Ghanaians while International NGOs with much higher salary levels were perceived as a golden career option in many Ghanaian's minds? The path less traveled brought the two Sloanies together and took some African dreams away late into the night.

The favorite Ghanaian handshakes kept me awake and wiped off my frowns. I chose my summer internship in Africa and in financial services because my expertise in banking allowed me to make a strong contribution in a short time frame. While I felt frustrated with the many manual processes, such as filling trade orders on white boards in the Ghana Stock Exchange, my heart was closer to the community every time our palms touched and fingers clicked. At the Databank Accra office, I shook hands with Ghanaian colleagues dozens of times a day. Late Monday nights, I offered my Ghanaian handshakes before my best friend, Paa Nii, walked into live studio interviews for TV3.

Early Tuesday mornings, we each showed up with our bright smiles, palm touching and finger clicking with everybody else. We belonged to the Friday night office club, enjoying each other's accompany through MSN when electricity was off and computers ran on a back-up generator. The nights with less sleep were the ones with much concordance.

With Paa Nii as a role model, I learned the best way to deal with the bank's challenges - participation, patience, and persistence. Having lost much sleep over the strategies of the 13 subsidiaries' operations in four West African countries, I set my mind on building capacity for the bank. From simple things like running an Excel workshop and demonstrating portfolio optimization models, to evaluating HR performance measurement, I found myself spending more time with my colleagues during the day while working on my strategy report late at night. My colleagues thought I wanted to build a new Wall Street career in West Africa deal making with ministers and members of the Ghana Club 100 (equivalent of the Fortune 500). I smiled again because I knew that I was pushing my own limits into the heart of the African challenges, as my colleagues did for themselves. Those sleepless nights were definitely more real than dancing with the elephants in the Mole National Park.

Almost on the verge of being a workaholic, I managed to take a half day off to visit my KSG classmate Makoto, who volunteered for Children Better Way in Budaburam, the Liberia refugee camp in Ghana. Surprisingly, the camp looked quite similar to some Accra communities, with 40,000 Liberians living peacefully in packaged houses since 1991. As he and I walked down the dirt road with our nose filled with the smell of diesel, Makoto confessed that he wanted to run away in his first week in Budaburam. Before KSG, not only did he work for the ministry in Tokyo, Makoto was a world traveler who had backpacked by himself in India and Tibet. Therefore, lack of running water or electricity was not the real reason. It was the bareness of history, content, and intellectual curiosity in the frozen hourglass.

I saw many exciting post-conflict national rebuilding projects in Monrovia, capital of Liberia that Liberians in Budaburam never saw, not even thinking about going back to their home country. As I contemplated while walking by the soccer field, Makoto was all of a sudden surrounded and cheered on by a team of teenage soccer players. Makoto was their hero!

The Ghanaian life tastes like fufu, a local dish made of plantains and cassava - plain and fulfilling. I raised the rod pounding in rhythm while my partner rolled the dough smiling. Our sweat went together into the fufu and gave it a special taste.

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