Which is not to say they showered him with respect. “One Chinese man couldn’t believe it when I bought my own plane ticket,” Stocky recalled. “He wondered how I could afford it. They think we are slaves.”
Stocky had also worked in Egypt and Dubai. Besides a passport filled with entry stamps and visas, he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Ghanaian import business, which operated by its own strange logic. “The things I have seen you couldn’t believe,” he said. “People bring in used American cars and smash the bonnet to pay less duty,” he said. “Then they fix it here.”
Jah screamed and shook his hand, which was dripping blood. The kitten had taken a chunk out of his index finger.
Stocky glared at the cat. “Biting the hand that feeds you!” It looked up and purred.
“He didn’t mean to,” said Jah. “He thought my finger was food.”
So does the lion, I thought. Never much of a pet lover even back home, it was easy for me to avoid the village dogs and cats in Ghana. But Whit was always petting and holding these frail creatures, despite my nagging warnings.
The light flickered on and we tramped back into the studio. The Krobo voice guy (I never got his name) had to leave soon, so he went first into the booth with a script. As he started reciting his lines, Stocky directed from the computer terminal: “Shout!”
The guy started again, louder.
“Shout!”
Again, louder.
“Shout! Excitement!”
This went on for about twenty minutes, running through all the lines over and over. Stocky clearly got it, and knew how to drive his actors to perform. At one point all the guys started laughing at a joke we didn’t understand. “What’s so funny?” Whit asked.
The question made Stocky laugh even harder. “There is a word in Krobo, twε, which means ‘patience,’ or ‘have patience.’ But in Twi it sounds like the word for ‘vagina.’ In this context it would mean ‘Burro is the only vagina.’”
“Well I don’t think we can make that claim,” said Whit. “Seriously, is it okay?”
“It’s okay,” said Stocky.
“It won’t offend people?”
“No, it’s a different language,” he said. “It’s understood.” And he laughed again.
Out went the power, again. After an hour of sitting around, we decided to leave; Priscilla needed to catch a bus to Accra. Stocky and his crew promised to work through the night once the power came on.
Sure enough, he called Whit the next morning and told us to come up.
The cat was still eating. Jah had a bandage on his finger. We sat down in the studio and Stocky ran the audio files. Whit had brainstormed an idea for a signature Burro sound: two clicks, like a finger snap—the sound made when clicking a Burro battery into the D-sized adapter. The short pitch began with the click-click sound, which Stocky had enhanced, followed by the voice-over: “Hey!”
The rest, of course, was in Twi, or Ewe, or Krobo, over an instrumental music track of generic, bright-sounding Ghanaian pop music. The only English was at the very end: “Burro! Do More!” Click-click. And then it started all over again, in a constant loop.
Whit listened carefully, grinning. “Can you give it another, you know, split second to come down before the click-click?”
“Okay. So, Do More … click-click,” said Stocky.
“Yeah. It’s like the click-click is coming a little bit into the Do More, you know? So just a little cleaner break on the Do More. It’s awesome though, man, it’s great.”
Stocky adjusted the levels and beat measures, then replayed it.
Whit paused. “Play it one more time. It’s weird, it’s almost like there’s a little reverb on the Do More.”
“There is.”
“Yeah, and it sounds like the click-click is hitting the echo. Which might be okay.”
More adjustments followed.
“Yeah!” said Whit. “That’s good, huh?”
Jah came in. He was shivering with a fever. “I am going to the clinic,” he said, as a taxi pulled up outside. I wondered about that cat bite yesterday. Stocky’s girlfriend from Accra had come up, and she offered to take Jah to the clinic. We kept working.
“Who did the woman’s voice?” asked Whit, assuming it might have been Stocky’s friend.
“That’s me,” said Stocky.
“That’s you?”
“I pitched it,” he said—electronically manipulating the pitch to turn his own deep voice into a woman’s.
“I would never be able to tell,” said Whit. Stocky smiled.
The last job was rendering all the recordings through a program that would “brighten” the playback by subtly shifting up all the frequencies. “It will give it a ‘wall of sound,’” explained Stocky. Almost fifty years after Phil Spector invented the concept in an analog New York City recording studio with a legion of African-American girl groups from the Bronx, a young African man was using a computer program to duplicate the effect in a mud-walled village hut in Ghana.
When it came time to pay, Stocky asked for two hundred and twenty cedis. “That’s not enough,” said Whit. He gave him three hundred cedis and a brief Business 101 lecture about pricing strategy and the value of services.
Driving home, Whit said, “That was amazing. I paid like two hundred and thirty dollars to make two commercials in three languages over three days.”
9. Pork Show
We threw a party at Whit’s house one Friday night. Actually we put on a pork show, as we called it, having bought a shoulder of pork from a guy along the side of the road, next to a hand-painted sign announcing PORK SHOW. This odd nomenclature was typical in Ghana, where the words sale and show can be interchangeable. Pork can be hard to find in Ghana, so in that sense any pork retail experience is something of a show. But our local pork merchant’s presentation fell somewhat short of spectacle. It was, in fact, nothing more than a large aluminum bowl filled with fly-covered chunks of pig, shaded with a banana leaf. Nevertheless it made a fine barbecue.
Everyone from Burro except Adam showed up; he begged off, claiming an engagement in Accra, although I suspected the evangelical voice in his head was dissuaded by the all-day preparations, which included strategic planning by Rose, Debi, and David on the variety and quantity of liquor to be offered. Still, that didn’t seem to put off the BYU interns, who turned out to be pretty good dancers. Considering that my brother’s sprawling home had approximately five pieces of furniture including both beds, there was plenty of room for dancing.
My clearest memory of the pork show was Rose dancing with a drinking glass perfectly balanced on her head, which may be the Ghanaian equivalent of wearing a lampshade. My second clearest memory was of Nkansah and James complimenting me on my barbecue, a new taste experience for them—until I told them it was pork. “Oh,” said Nkansah, setting down his fork politely. “We are Krobo; we do not eat pork.”
Late in the evening, while watching Rose and James dance in the dining room to a very loud techno-funk beat, I looked out past them and saw Akosia, the pregnant woman who lived in the hut in the backyard. She was outside, her elbows on the cement-block balustrade around the porch, watching the party through the open jalousie window.
“Akosia!” I said, waving to her.
But as soon as we made eye contact, she disappeared into the night like Cinderella.
10. Loafers in the Temple
The local Mormon meeting house was a few blocks from the Burro office. On a Sunday in late May, Justin, Andrew, and I were the only white people in the large congregation. We sat in straight-backed chairs. All the men wore white shirts and dark ties, except me, who never brought a tie or even a sport coat on any of my trips to Africa. I had put on a clean shirt and pressed slacks, but my sincerest nod to sartorial formality was a pair of pointed white leather African loafers I had bought a few days earlier. Although I meant well, in hindsight they were a poor choice for the service. I’m not sure why I bought them, other than thinking they looked cool. But as I sa
t in church clutching the Book of Mormon, I remembered that when I was a kid spending summers in Detroit we used to call similar footwear “pimp shoes.” So I was wearing pimp shoes in the Mormon church on a Sunday morning. Perhaps worse in the eyes of God, I was thinking about pimps in the Mormon church on a Sunday morning. If only it had been like Jonas’s church, where you had to take off your shoes at the door.
But it was nothing like that. There was no dancing, no drumming, no music at all except for one hymn sung a capella by the children in honor of their mothers. (It was Ghana’s Mother’s Day.) The service was in English. In his sermon, which constituted pretty much the whole event, the leader talked about the importance of learning English. “I have heard the Mormon service in Twi,” he said, “but it was not good for me.”
11. Ointments and Balms and Medicated Soaps
“Maxy, wake up.”
“Piss off.” I was already awake, a condition I had been trying to reverse since three A.M., when the roosters started crowing directly outside my open bedroom windows.
“C’mon. We gotta go,” said Whit.
“Go where?”
“Accra.”
“Fuck.” Another day of traffic in Accra, another conference room. Whit had an appointment with the people who ran Health Keepers, the agent-model NGO that Tara, the BYU intern, had mentioned in her presentation. It was one of those companies operating in that “weird nexus” (to use Whit’s phrase) of charity and for-profit. And it had a network of agents, some around Koforidua, selling useful products that did not directly compete with Burro but certainly complemented Burro’s brand. All in all, it made sense to get to know them. I crawled out of bed like it was a foxhole and grabbed a shirt.
A combination of bad directions and an obscure location made us late for our meeting at Health Keepers. When we finally arrived, executive director Daniel Mensah greeted us warmly. A large man with thick glasses, he seemed genuinely eager to hear about Burro. We sat around a conference table and were joined by Sandra Manu, who was in charge of training agents for Health Keepers. Whit presented his updated PowerPoint show, which reflected the latest Burro figures of fifteen hundred clients served by eighty or ninety active agents in about two hundred locations. When he mentioned the challenge of finding good agents, Sandra nodded knowingly.
“We are learning that good agents make a huge difference,” said Whit. “Currently our average exchange rate is twenty to twenty-five days,” referring to the time it takes a client to use up a battery and exchange it for a fresh one. “We think it should be fourteen, and agents who are good at servicing clients typically achieve this.”
Whit finished, and Daniel narrated his own PowerPoint show. “We are an NGO but we believe in sustainability,” he began. “We distribute at a profit and plow the money back into the business. And our agents are profitable at their level. So we use private-sector business approaches.”
The company was founded in 2006 by a California nonprofit called Freedom from Hunger. Over the years, fifteen BYU business-school interns had come over to help design marketing plans and improve productivity. “But none came this year,” said Daniel. “It seems Burro took them all,” he added, laughing. Meanwhile, Freedom from Hunger decided to focus its efforts on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, so Health Keepers lost its U.S. funding. “But they generously let us keep this office space and all the local assets,” said Daniel, “so we reorganized into a local group. Just last week we received a grant from USAID to distribute condoms and birth control pills.”
Health Keepers’ products included many items Westerners would buy at a drugstore: diarrhea medicine, reading glasses, wound care, feminine hygiene products, toothpaste, anti-lice and anti-dandruff shampoo, moisturizers, and laundry soap. Other goods were more specific to the developing world, like insecticide-treated mosquito nets and water treatment tablets. The company also provided services like mosquito net re-treatment (the pesticide eventually wears off), optical screening, blood pressure testing, first aid, and national health plan subscription sign-ups.
Unlike Burro’s consignment model, Health Keepers agents needed to buy their products in advance. So an agent might buy a six-pack of razors for eighty pesewa, then sell them for one cedi, a little less than the going rate in shops.
Daniel said the company was at first reluctant to advance credit to agents, but they found that a cash-only policy discouraged agents from trying new items. “So now we offer a four-month product loan of one hundred cedis’ worth of stuff,” he said. “They must pay back twelve and a half cedis every two weeks, interest-free. Even with that, sometimes it is hard to get the money,” he added. “We have had to send the police to make the point.” His comment made me realize that Nkansah’s police-car gag in the gong-gong was a joke with a serious undertone.
Whit asked if the company had experienced any push-back from local pharmacies and chemist shops, which were often located in smaller towns, if not remote villages, and sold many of the same products. “Well, there are things they have which we cannot sell,” he said, “such as antibiotic ointments and ibuprofen.”
I found it odd that, in a country where scheduled narcotics can be obtained by asking the pharmacist politely, ibuprofen is strictly regulated. Only pharmacists and chemists (the difference is in level of training) can dispense it—the former in up to four-hundred-milligram doses, the latter limited to two-hundred-milligram pills.
“Sandra, I’m wondering how you find new agents,” said Whit.
“Often we find them through existing agents,” she said. “They make a small commission if they sign up a new agent.”
“And what about training?” Whit asked.
“We do training at our cluster meetings,” she said, explaining that clusters are groups of agents from several towns. They meet every two weeks to exchange money and get new products. “Training involves some role playing, drama, and discussion. It can be a challenge. Our best agents are typically older, at least in their thirties, because the young people have too high expectations.” She said the most profitable products, like antibiotic soaps, hand lotions, and feminine sanitary products, require a degree of salesmanship that is not always second nature.
“We would love to see how your training works,” said Whit. “I understand you have agents in Nkurakan.”
“Five or six,” said Sandra.
“And Mamfe?”
“Around twenty.”
“Nkurakan, Mamfe, that’s our sweet spot,” said Whit. “I’d love to see if we can encourage mutual sales in those towns. Also, we’re happy to try supplying your products to our people in other areas.”
“Clearly there are areas for collaboration,” Daniel said.
We left with Sandra agreeing to invite Burro to the next cluster meeting in Mamfe.
On the drive home we talked about ibuprofen. “Last week when Rose had a fever, I tried to find her some,” said Whit. “I went to the chemist and they had never heard of it. Finally I found some at a pharmacy; they call it profen. It was from India and it was candy-coated, in bubble packs. It was very cheap, like three cedis for maybe sixty pills. But it’s so hard to get. People in villages can just never get it unless they take a taxi or tro-tro into town. I’d like to partner with a pharmacy chain like Interpharma to sell Burro-branded ibuprofen up here. I’d say, ‘Look, you’re selling it, so it’s a pharmacy making the legal sale, but we’ll provide marketing and delivery.’ I mean, these poor farmers—they’re getting all these fucking ointments and balms and medicated soaps for backache, and they can’t get ibuprofen. I wish we could go into a village and say, ‘If your back hurts take two of these.’
“But the truth is I don’t have time to pursue all this stuff right now,” he went on. “First we’ve gotta get these resellers more productive. English is such a challenge. Guys like Jonas and George, in their forties, their English is good but not as good as Hayford’s, who’s sixty-four. There has been more emphasis in the schools on local languages, but most everyone wil
l agree that the education system has declined; there’s definitely a decreasing curve of English fluency with the younger agents. Edward Mintah, this agent in Beware, great guy, hard worker, excellent salesman, twenty years old—tough to communicate with him in English.”
It was now long after sunset, and the narrow road with its unforgiving shoulder of an open concrete drain was getting hard to see. People in dark robes walked along the edge of the blacktop, their ghostly forms nearly invisible until close range; goats the color of coal darted back and forth. Sometimes oncoming drivers would dim their lights, sometime they wouldn’t; either way, with no streetlights or reflective road stripes, the beams of opposing traffic blotted out all reference to the highway long enough to swerve into any number of pedestrians and livestock. Just outside Koforidua, in the village of Okurase, the bobbing lens of a flashlight signaled a police roadblock. “Please open your boot,” said the officer. The trunk was full of groceries from Accra; he made us take them all out. One kilometer up the road, another cop at another roadblock inspected the groceries again. I thought Whit might lose it, but he kept cool.
We pulled into Whit’s garage and noticed the car was leaking oil. Inside the house, a fan had hit another lightbulb and showered Whit’s bed with glass.
I woke up at two o’clock, not to the usual noise of roosters but to the unmistakable clamor of what police delicately call a “domestic disturbance.” It was coming from Akosia’s blockhouse in the courtyard. I had lived in New York apartments long enough to recognize the difference between an argument and actual abuse, and this sounded more like the former, so I left it alone.
At five-thirty the next morning Akosia, at this point looking very pregnant, knocked on the back door. “Please,” she said to Whit, “will you talk to my husband?”
Victor had returned from his “travels” in the middle of the night—with a woman from Accra. Naturally, Akosia had protested the unwelcome guest; they argued. “Please tell him to go away.”
“I will talk to him,” said Whit.
“Thank you.” She looked down at the ground. “Please,” she said, “I need to go back to the hospital. Can you give me some money?”
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