Self-reliance, Bad Business with Potatoes, and Coffee

TYLER: I think the most important lesson I learned today was not only how important self-reliance is in the U.S. but in Tanzania as well. The day began with a lesson on the African political system, then a crash course session in Swahili on how to buy food in the market. Talk about being very nervous on how this process of communication was going to turn out. Well, Will had the experience firsthand with a bad business transaction while buying potatoes. Yusta (our coordinator here in Africa) only gave us 1000 shillings, which is roughly around a dollar, to go into the market to buy as many vegetables and fruits as we could. Will ended up getting taken for 1000 shillings worth of potatoes on the first buy plus owed a boy 100 shillings for a bag. This situation put Will in a bind so Liz and I joined up as a three person joint venture and paid the boy off for the plastic bag and then continued our food shopping spree. What a learning experience trying to use our just learned Swahili on buying food in the Tenguru market to actually caring this task out an hour later. As a whole we all came out pretty good. After lunch we made our way to a coffee farm owned by a man named Mtei. Talk about meeting a pretty powerful man. Just to give you a quick run down on this individual, he did a 4 year stint in the International Monetary Fund, worked for a long time as the Finance Minister for Tanzania, and now has farmed coffee for 28 years. This is where my economics background at the university came really into perspective. The way a crop is farmed and then transferred on to the market and then sold is completely a different world than what the U.S. farmer goes through. Now when I go come back to our side of the world and buy coffee at Starbucks, I can say that I saw firsthand where this coffee came from. Coffee is the number two most exported crop in the world and we took in the whole process from the seed to the market experience from Mtei and his Farm. Now after another days journey, (Editor's note: We are seven hours ahead of Georgia) I am finally going to relax with a night off...