In Your FACE Bro!

It was hard to leave our friends in Kenya, but we had more business to attend to in South Africa. We arrived Wednesday the 15th, and have been in Pretoria for about a week and a half now.

We are staying at a guesthouse owned by a local South African in Pretoria North. It’s a five minute walk to CRM’s property, called Pangani, and much of our time is split between these two places. Evenings and mornings are pretty cold here this time of year, and the houses are not heated, so at night we each have to fill a rubber container covered in fleece with boiling water put them in our beds to keep them warm.

During our time here, we are working with two of EI’s established businesses. The first part of the week we helped a tiny bakery called Wholesome Bakery in the Soshanguve township. It is run by four people: Emily the manager, and three bakers, Esther, Danny, and Zakes. We took turns waking up at 5:30am to go help with the morning bread deliveries, which helped us get a feel for how the bakery operates and what we needed to work on.

We broke up into teams to address different areas of need in the bakery: Amanda and Katharina sorted out the accounting issues, Juli and Dwight refurbished the inventory and production systems, and Connor, Jason, and Ryan developed a marketing strategy. To develop our strategy, we printed out maps of several blocks in Soshanguve from Google Maps, then drove through the blocks looking for snack stands, called “tuck shops.” Whenever we found a tuck shop we plotted it on the map, then we would go talk to the owner about where they buy their bread and how much they pay for it. Our goal was to figure out what areas in the township are most in need of a free delivery service, because owners of tuck shops in blocks that are far away from major grocery stores often have to walk or take a taxi to a grocery store every morning to get bread. We visited over 30 tuck shops in four different blocks of Soshanguve, and found that many of the owners were interested in our offer. We printed flyers with our logo, price and contact info to leave with each tuck shop, and have already returned to deliver bread to several of the shops we visited.

Yesterday and today we were introduced to EI’s recently-approved auto rebuild business in Pretoria. It is owned and operated by a joyful, godly man named Christo and his wife Petro. We visited Christo’s shop yesterday to see the kind of work he does, and it was amazing to see how perfectly he can restore a car that was once completely demolished. Today we went with him to a place in downtown Pretoria where he buys the wrecked cars that he rebuilds and sells. He told us what to look for in a “good” wrecked car, as well as how the auctioning process worked.

That’s all for now, more to come soon!