This is one of my personal stories. It’s a true one, as all my writings are. And it relates to an adventure that I had back in the late 1990’s when I lived in Massachusetts. And at that time, I was able to buy a farm (in Zambia, Africa), staff it, and set it in motion using the pitiful amount of money that I collected and saved from my “day job” as an engineer.
This is the story of that adventure.
Some background
At that time in my life, I was living with a girlfriend in Wrentham, Massachusetts. She was African-African. Meaning, of course, that she was not a hyphenated African-American woman, but a real, honest to goodness traditional (and lovely) African woman.
She was a traditional, conservative, family-oriented girl, and we both “hit it off” and got together great! In short order, don’t you know. We were living together.
She was a lovely woman, and both of my parents absolutely LOVED her. She was kind, sweet, intelligent, and practical. She also had a “rocking” body. She had the most beautiful eyes and lips that I have ever experienced, and her skin was so soft… as were other parts of her magnificence.
And she could cook. OMG! Could she cook!!!!
I have never tasted steak the way she made the steaks. They were absolutely amazing.
And she treated me like a king, too. Formal sit down meals, and she would dress up just to be at home. Multiple healthy dishes. Real meats, with breads, cooked fresh vegetables, and desserts. Almost every day.
Saturdays were the day of house cleaning, and she kept our place spotless. My God!
We lived in a little cabin on Lake Pearl. It was rumored to have once been the home of Helen Keller. But I don’t know this for sure.
It was a rural and rustic location. It greatly resembled a scene from the movie “On Golden Pond”, and my many cats loved that environment. And you all should know, that Massachusetts is very, very beautiful.
We lived outside the town, and it was a little cul-de-sac that ended on a hillside bluff that overlooked the lake. It was tucked away and secluded. It was very woodsy.
We had a wood burning stove, an open kitchen, a little bedroom, and a great view of the lake. It was one of the most memorable places that I have ever lived, and to this day, when I remember those days, they are filled with the fondest memories. I consider those days… my “salad days”.
How it came about
We were eating in a diner, as we tended to do when we were washing our clothes in the local laundromat. The diner was down the road in Plainville, it was named “Don’s Diner” and my regular meal at the time was country fried steak and eggs.
The meal was something like this. And I would eat it with a nice cup of coffee. (My girlfriend really hated my habit of standing up to leave, and then (while standing) take a final sip of coffee. She thought it wasn’t gentlemanly.)
And of course, the food… well, it was delicious.
At the time, we were talking about (one of her) older sisters back in Zambia. Her (sister’s) son had just graduated from an agricultural college and was looking for work. He got great grades and had a real “nack” for farming and animal husbandry.
So we go on chatting away, and somehow the idea materialized that we could set up an egg farm. Her family had some land growing fallow, and he had the knowledge, and her other relatives had connections and all told, it looked promising. He could raise chickens and sell the eggs to the supermarkets and small stores in and around Lusaka, Zambia.
What was involved.
At that time, the United States dollar could buy a lot in Zambia. 1 USD was equal to about 6000 Zambian Kwacha. Today the value is around 20.
For a handful of dollars you could buy a bunch of apartments, buildings and land, and labor rates were insanely low.
So what I did was invested around $20,000 USD. (In gradual installments over time.) And ended up buying some land, hiring people to build some basic buildings and structures and allowing the relatives to set everything up. In this role, I was the financial partner, while my girlfriends’ family handled operations and marketing.
And that’s the way life is.
When you see an opportunity, you take it with the resources you have, and give it all that you can. You try to be realistic, and hopeful, but you realize that many things can go wrong.
Getting it set up.
When you go into these kinds of ventures, you either commit fully or you walk away from it. You cannot be timid. You must commit.
As they say…
Consider a plate of ham and eggs. The Chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.
And so, I did my part, and provided the funding and watched the budget.
The entire system came together rather quickly and about 8 to 9 months later, we had a fully functional chicken egg farm (not for meat), we produced eggs and sold them. We had customers and some were large chain supermarkets.
Now, of course, the profit was small, and miniscule, however we plowed the profits back into the enterprise, and the operation grew and grew again.
And collapse.
Then something happened.
After about two years of operations…
No word or reports from our budding, young operations director. All was quiet, and we didn’t know what was going on.
One full month passed by.
When the family went over to investigate, they found the farm abandoned and the chickens starting to die off, and everything locked up and abandoned.
What we discovered, was that our young operations manager was pocketing the profits, taking the investment moneys and pocketing all the profits and running up enormous bills.
Then he skipped town and went to South Africa.
!!!
We tried to hunt him down. We tried to resolve things, and tried to keep the venture alone, but without him, and his skill set and everything else, we were forced to abandon the entire project.
We gave up hunting for him, and wrote the entire project off as a big failure and a lesson learned.
Lessons learned.
The big thing, and the big lesson, is that you really are taking a risk when you put a young person in charge of your operations without vetting them. And the employment of a relative is perhaps a compounding mistake that can make things go from bad to worse.
I hate to say this, but it is true. Many, but not all, young people seem to believe that there is an endless stream of opportunities ahead of them in life, and that they can jump from one to the other without consequence.
If they are in the right place at the right time, they do not appreciate the great nugget of opportunity that they have so early on in their life. They seem to believe that it is just one of a long series of gold nuggets.
Us older folk realize the truth.
Maybe other opportunities came his way, but chances are that they didn’t. He had one great break early on, and like a typical 20-year-old, blew it all on the belief that bigger and greater things were in his future.
Like a shooting star, he shined bright and then dimmed into obscurity.
For me, I learned a lot.
Seriously I did.
And in the decades that followed, the many lessons continued. Many were quite painful. Almost all were financial failures, but I did end up meeting interesting people, going to strange new lands and experiencing life in broad brush strokes.
But, you know what? I have no regrets.
For, you must understand…
… I actually owned a farm in Africa.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Happiness section here…
