Our First Day In Iringa

We are back in Iringa.  This year we will be spending only a month working here – rather than the two months we have spent other years.  This will mean we will make fewer visits, but with the nearly constant rain they have been having here there are many places we cannot get to anyway. 

There has been rain here every day for the past two months.  As a result, the crops are not looking too good.  Hopefully they will recover.   Roads are affected as well; they are really a mess.  Today we discovered that the road to Kivalamo is unpassable, the Tungamalinga Bridge has washed out, and even the road by Ipogolo is so bad that they have stopped hauling heavy loads.  We have been coming here now for 15 years and this is by far the wettest we have seen the Iringa region.  The people at the university tell us that you have to go back to 1975 to find another year like it!

We were met at the airport by Itiweni and our driver, Daniel, and spent Monday night in Dar.  Tuesday morning we made the 10 hour drive to Iringa.  

This morning when we got to the Peter J King Family Foundation Development building we were met by Peter Silayo.  Peter is our main field worker and a delight to see.  He is always happy, smiling, and very helpful.  After greeting Peter we started around the offices and were soon greeted by Jefa Duma, the Iringa Hope Joint SACCOS accountant, Nuru Lugala, the MFI accountant and office manager, and finally Itiweni.  Last to join the group was MFI Director, Enock Ugulumu.  Until recently Enock was the Dean of the school of Business, but Itiweni tells us that he is now one of “the biggest potatoes here.”  His new job title is Vice Chancellor of Resource Management.  He is in charge of hiring/firing, buildings, utilities, etc.  He tells us that his new job is much busier and less satisfying than his old job – but probably more important for the success of the University.

Following several minutes of ‘catching up’, we held our MFI business meeting.  We started the meeting with a review of where we are going and how we think we will get there.  This year the Iringa Hope operations in Tanzania are 100% managed by the Tanzanians.  The role of Iringa Hope USA is to advise and lend assistance where it is needed.  We went over cash flows, interest rates and terms, equity levels and reserves, etc.  We talked about last year’s fertilizer sales, what we will do this year, and how the AMCOS are coming along.

You may recall that the AMCOS we are starting are basically Farmer’s Coops.  They will help our members get quality inputs (fertilizer, seeds, etc.) in a timely fashion and will help them buy their crops.  Our first year’s sales of fertilizer made us the second largest customer in Iringa.  After looking things over we decided that we need to get much better terms from Yara this year or we will need to look elsewhere for a partner.

We have been talking with Pioneer about supplying seeds to our members this year.  It seems however that we may need to wait until next year to be able to do this.  Pioneer’s support chain in Iringa may not be up to this task.  On a positive note however, we are making good progress in finding some local markets for our members.

When we finished our meeting it was 3:30. We had worked from the morning until the mid afternoon without a break.  Everyone was hungry, thirsty and tired. We had lunch together at the campus dining area where we met many people we knew, so many friendly greetings were exchanged.

After lunch we went with our micro finance team to greet the Vice Chancellor.  Last year he arrived at the university shortly before we returned home.   As a result, we met him only briefly.  It was fun to have a chance today to become better acquainted. 

It was late afternoon before we were finished at the university – too late to get our SIM cards for our phones.  Tomorrow we are off to Kitapalimwa.  We are looking forward to starting our village visits. 

   We started our meeting mid morning and did not finish until 3:30 in the afternoon.

Our Director, Enock Ugulumu, is now the VCRM.  He had been studying crop marketing and was wondering if we might get into this sooner than we had planned.

Tom had lots of questions.  Although we are not making any of the operational decisions this year we are asking questions that hopefully will help set the direction and strategy.

As the MFI manager, Itiweni gave a review of how things were being handled at the MFI this year.

Jefa Duma looked over our 2016 calendar.  These are always a big hit.  Too bad they are so heavy that we have to limit the number we bring along.

We finally broke for lunch at 3:30.  It was a busy day.