Accounting for Dummies

The difference between 6:00 am and 6:20 am in Arusha is quite literally, night and day. Though the sun doesn’t take celestial stage until about 6:35, as a morning jogger I know well her anticipatory glow that illuminates an otherwise dangerously rocky soil just 15 minutes prior. Despite the darkness, I set out early on my morning run on Friday, August 17th, trying to carve additional precious penultimate minutes into preparation for our Saturday HIV Testing Day.

Without an internet or cable connection to follow meteorological suggestions in the morning I face climactic unpredictability (though coming from new England I’m convinced I am only missing out on the placebo effects of a forecast). However the view of looming Mount Meru on morning runs around the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) compound on which our hostel is located allows me to make rudimentary wardrobe decisions. If Meru is covered in clouds I take a hoodie or shawl out with me, but if I can see her mountaintop wrinkles in the first rays of sunlight, I prepare for the heat. This morning, as I pause momentarily after an uphill sprint, the seemingly endless savannah in the cloudless distance is a clear indicator that today will be a hot one. I am not so much in awe as I am in anxiety at the depth to which I can make out far off baobab trees and herds of Hershey kiss hilltops. Although I am usually addicted to the limitlessness of a clear horizon, today the unrestricted access feels absolutely frightening.

First in as usual, I plop my self and my laptop in the hostel canteen and pour myself a chilled glass of Mama Irene’s freshly squeezed mango-ginger juice; the glass immediately begins to perspire in the morning heat. I reviewed my dress-rehearsal goals for the day – a series of double and triple checking commitments and logistics – and as I mop the condensation of my anticipation from my forehead, Bob strolls peacefully into the canteen.

Our Team – seven young wazungu volunteers - are the only guests at the SDA hostel, other than Bob, a Tasmanian (incidentally enough) member of the SDA church taking a break from his accounting responsibilities in Australia. Bob is offering his services to local small businesses for 4 weeks, pro bono, and he and I as the early risers of the hostel shared many breakfasts during our few overlapping weeks. On this unusually anxious day, I appreciate the calm he brings to the table, gently spreading peanut butter over toast as I slice up mangos into my Corn Flakes. Bob is sage yet not intimidating, and our young group has adopted him quickly and unconditionally as a father figure. We admire Bob’s curiosity of and respect for our work and hope to possess his confidence when we reach (as he says), “the 43rd anniversary of my 21st birthday”.

Reluctant to look away from my tasks, I nevertheless force myself - in preparation for a hopefully smooth transition back home – to fold up the Mac and ask him with genuine interest, “How was work yesterday?”

“Good”, he butters, “But they have such an odd costing philosophy here”, forehead crinkled.

With my small but thorough education in financial accounting, I muster my confidence and ask wholeheartedly, “Really? Why is that?”

Bob is thorough but not condescending. “Well, they set a certain profit margin. But like many businesses they realize with their overhead costs they can’t produce their product and still maintain that ideal profit margin. So they cut their overhead costs – rent a smaller place, cut a few salaries – in order to keep profits at the desired level.”

I know this is where I should be carrying the conversation, but he politely sees the need to continue on for us.

“And that’s wrong” he states, with an authority and judgment that I have yet to witness from this man of utmost cultural sensitivity.

You should know this; you should know this...loops through my brain as I look to Bob without conclusion. A patient and thoughtful witness to my struggle, Bob puts down his papaya for the brief lesson: “What you should do is just reduce your profit margin,” he states, plan and simple. I match his focus and release my grip on my glass, hands now folded in my lap, ears attentive. “As a company you have to be able to provide your product to the Tanzanian people, and by reducing your overhead, you are reducing your ability to provide that product, which is your first responsibility” His concept clinks away at my memory, and with three words of incredible clarity resonating a deafening truth, I catch his flow: “Profits are 2nd”

Reduce profits, build a foundation, strengthen your ability to provide, and eventually you will be able to increase your profit margin. Bob can sense my understanding and shifts his focus, now admiring this morning’s unique climactic clarity, as Mt. Meru poses perfectly in the window just behind my head. I turn, not offended by his distraction, to admire her as well, a few clouds whose underbellies are painted with a pastel spectrum of sunrise hovering by her feet, bowing to her majesty.

As I sensed, Bob’s distraction is actually fueling an extended metaphor. “ People my age, “ he assumes a critical tone, “We get old (he sneers at this word in disgust), and some say, ’I’m going to die eventually anyway, so why go through the extra trouble of taking good care of myself?’ But if you don’t take care of yourself, you deprive your children of a parent, your grandchildren of a grandparent.”

I join him on this plane of purpose and explain, in an oddly confessional tone, that it’s the same struggle for a young woman. “I am so obsessed with achievements (and it’s my turn to sneer) that I put my personal health on hold. But if I’m not healthy, I won’t be able to pursue any goals.” My mouth claps away, the eternal ventriloquist’s trick of parental advice.

I look up and we lock eyes,

“It’s balance,” the accountant says to me.

“The hardest balance you will ever and always have to manage is between taking care of yourself and caring for other people…and projects“, he adds for me with a smile.

In silent gratitude I wonder if Bob can log these unofficial hours as pro bono accounting, and I gulp down a few more ounces before returning my empty glass to Mama.

* * *

The Testing Day Event was an enormous learning and experience and overall success: Our students created and performed hours of AIDS-themed dramas, songs, raps, and comedies to an audience of over a thousand with instructions on how and why to overcome stigma, get tested, be leaders against AIDS. Five hundred and thirty Arushans came to be voluntarily HIV-tested, the day staffed by a volunteer squad of 30 District employees who responded to the District Medical Officer’s call to serve. Sponsors followed through, providing uniforms, food and drinks, live music, and overwhelming support. Our partner and local NGO, Chawakua, led and conducted the Day’s events in Kiswahili, making the message accessible to the community, and were awarded a week later with an invitation (that they had previously been denied in March) to join the Planning Committee for the Arusha District rollout of the National Testing Campaign. My last few days in Tanzania were patched-together moments of dizzying speed and frustrating sloth – goodbyes were reluctant and painful, yet I could not wait to be home with my family, friends, and familiarities.

Magda helped our Team transition by compiling a ”Book of Niceness” for each of us volunteers, a yearbook of anonymous comments we had authored about each other arranged on self-designed pages of personal contact information. The last time I spoke with Bob, not realizing it would be the last, as I prefer goodbyes to be, he had wandered into dinner a bit later, missing Magda’s official presentation of the Books. Bob of course humored our requests to leave his mark on our pages, but having to jet out for an evening meeting and leaving early the next morning to spend our last few days in Dar and Zanzibar, I was unable to officially thank Bob for his signature. However after reading his words, I allowed them to shape the agenda of my last precious days in Tanzania…and my first precious days back in the States.

Touched down in Boston and I found myself uncharacteristically unbothered by inefficiency. Waiting at the baggage claim– and I emphasize, still with wonder, patiently – I skipped away, not concerned that my bag did not come in on my flight. I smiled and shrugged – “Hamana shida! No problem!”- and hopped gratefully into the Cumberland-bound VX-17 minivan, overwhelmed by the sibling energy Diana and Andrew always kick into my travel weary body.

Mom and Dad helped me move into the new abode on the lower east side, and reuniting with Matthew over my first legal beer in Brooklyn completed the circle of Otto reunion, which took unarguable precedence over a class I was scheduled to take later that night. I left dinner and bounded onto my precious F train headed back to campus, without a care of being late for class. I giggled at my obvious daladala-separation-anxiety, realizing that in an otherwise empty car I had seated myself in a corner seat snuggly between two strangers.

Eager to explore my new neighborhood, I resisted the urge to “Jambo!” every passerby on a Saturday morning run to the River, and instead smiled at the Chinese men fishing off the dock, the Park employees zipping by on golf carts, the babies waddling with parents on a weekend city stroll. I accomplished pieces of the Labor Day to dos but resisted the urge to rush around and fill the holiday weekend freebie hours with school-work, apartment-work, work-work. I gratefully accepted my Godfather’s invite to travel home with him to Boston, and enjoyed a car ride of conversation, a family dinner, and a Sunday of moving the siblings into their new Northeastern homes. I am trying hard to resist the urge of anxiety that follows the question of “What am I / could I be missing out on?” the question that keeps this blessed city, and perhaps this culture, on its toes. It has certainly motivated me, sometimes dangerously so, the past three years.

No Tanzanian has ever asked me “What could you be doing instead of this right now?” No child, no family member – essentially no person whose opinion I value highly over my own – has ever asked me this. The people who matter, they are not interested in what I am missing out on in order to be present. And I am tempted to think that everything I am missing out on is also of absolutely no interest to scholarship competition panelists, potential employers, or school advisors. So why have I been so obsessed?

I hope I will not need to refer back to my Book of Niceness to realize that it is far more important to be continually valuing “What am I doing?” and not “What am I missing?”

But I’m thankful for my accountant's reminder:

“Your capacity appears limitless. So many people will be affected by your energy. The roses need smelling also.” Bob S.