Making A Living: The Art of Entrepreneurship

Yesterday one of my professors made an interesting comment during lecture. She said “People are moving to the cities because they believe they can earn a living even if it is selling water.”

The number of street vendors, small business owners, and machingas is something I’ve thought about before. Her statement returned me to those thoughts.

Everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, there is someone selling something. Through bus windows and on street corners, there are people making a living by selling things almost anything you can imagine. I can buy a variety of things fro the guy strolling though an intersection with a box of merchandise on his head. If I put my arm out of a dala dala window at any stendi or major intersection at least two men will come up offering to sell me bottled water. It’s such a foreign thought that these men support themselves by selling bottle of cold water that they buy on credit to passersby all day long. It is such a meager subsistence. What happens if he has a family? Probably all of the able bodied adults in the house work to make something. I can’t help but wonder what if he can afford to send his children to school. If he or anyone in his family get sick, treatment from conventional health care is more than likely out of the question.

I have to applaud their ingenuity of these vendors as well as their tenacity. Any place there is an opportunity to sell goods, someone is. They work day after day in the rain and tropical sun peddling their wares to earn a living. These individuals have to make money everyday or there is no food on the table tomorrow. Savings are slim if present.

I remember my first retail job. It was awful! Sears and I should have never met. It’s not that I wasn’t good at it, but I was so bored. It took more energy to work a five hour shift at Sears than an eleven hour day at my previous job that was mentally demanding. If I had to make ends meet for the rest of my life selling things, I could do it because that’s what I had to do. I would be miserable. My version of retail was far more tame than this pattern here. At Sears I had to run the till, fold some shirts and put up with old men asking whether I liked their boxer or brief selection more.
In Tanzania retail sales, in the form of petty vendors and traders, are a whole different extreme. It is a never-ending cycle of sell goods and buy more stock to sell to pay off the debt to buy more inventory. It seems to be an endless system where it is hard to get far enough ahead to leave the system for something else. I’m sure it’s possible but unless you have a really hot commodity then financial help from family or fiends may be necessary to buy your way out and move on. It seems certainly possible to make a living, but what standard of living is afforded? It seems unfair to criticize the system when I have no other foreseeable alternative to fix it. It’s too big off a mess for me. I’ll stick to health care issues. Economics are over my head!