Day 8 - Bye Tara and Jennia..... How Precious!!!!!

So very early this morning Tara and Jennia headed off to Accra to catch their flight back to the US. Tara will be starting an internship with Proctor & Gamble in Boston and Jennia will be working with Nestle in St. Louis. Good luck to the both of them. Hopefully Andrew and I don't get sick of each other over the next six weeks. Its only 10:00, but we are already thinking about going to bed!!!  Here's a photo that we took late last evening as a reminder of the first 4 interns of Burro Brand Ltd.

So there are a few more people in the office now. Whit's brother Max is here and will be staying for the next 3 weeks. Max is writing a book about Burro and the experience that Whit has had starting a business in Africa. Max has indicated that all of us interns will be in the book, but we will see when it is released in fall of 2011. In addition to Max, Debi and her son David will be here for the next several weeks. Debi is a consultant and has experience helping companies get their books in order and implementing their accounting / financial systems. Her son David just graduated from school and also has a background in accounting. 

So down below our building (a description of our living arrangements are coming shortly, I promise) there live a bunch of kids. They are always coming by, wanting to talk with the obronis.  Many times they will just walk in and start looking for us. Tara would always go out and talk with them, so it looks like Andrew or I will have to carry on that tradition. I brought a container of Laffy Taffy with me and will occasional gives the kids a piece of candy. So tonight Andrew and I were working late, when all of a sudden Precious walked in (see her picture below). She is 5 years old. She walked into the room where Andrew and I were and started talking with us. She likes to push the buttons on our computer and is really proud of the tooth that she just lost (hopefully you can see that in this picture). Anyways, as we went to take her outside, she started asking for some toffee (which is their word for the laffy taffy). So I took a handful of candy out to them and they really enjoyed that. There is another girl, Savana, who comes and talks to us a lot as well. She is 14 years old. She is very polite and will always greet us in a very lady like manner. For example, this evening she come up to us and said "Good evening" in a very lady like manner. Sarah, I know that you want lots of pictures of the African children so I will see what I can do.

So Andrew and I have been developing a list of projects that we can do for Burro to help them become more sustainable and financially viable. As mentioned before, the primary project that I will be working on is to help Burro prepare for a round of funding later this summer. I am currently helping them to develop their unit economics model so that they can better understand the financial viability of the Burro business model. As part of this financial model, Andrew and I will be helping to develop a compensation plan for the Burro resellers and agents (based on some recommendations from Tara and Jennia). Its been a great experience so far to work with Burro and help them develop and start to implement their strategy.