Bright Lights, No City: An African Adventure on Bad Roads with a Brother and a Very Weird Business Plan by Max Alexander

Author:Max Alexander [Alexander, Max]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2012-07-16T14:00:00+00:00

2. Anything to Call Their Own

Jan was in many ways my opposite—one of those keenly scientific people for whom every problem in life was simple once you knew the equation—and we complemented each other. Logic was in essence her profession. She had majored in math, naturally, at Washington State University. “I loved math, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she told me one night. “I didn’t want to be an actuary. Then I took a three-hundred-level course in operations research, and I loved it.”

“Operations research?”

“Yeah. It’s like, okay, you have to visit twelve cities in one week to do business; what’s the most efficient way to do it? I loved it because it was applied math. After the three-hundred-level course, I had one more semester in my senior year. I purposely left myself one credit short of graduating so I could take the four-hundred-and five-hundred-level course classes in my second senior year, during which time I decided on graduate school.”

Which ended up being the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she earned a master’s in industrial engineering. Before joining Whit at Cranium, Jan had spent twelve years at a management consulting firm, earning a partnership. After Cranium she worked at Microsoft but longed for something more entrepreneurial, even adventurous. Rejoining Whit, she gave up a “safe” career in return for an equity stake in Burro and the chance to do something very different.

Jan loved the Ghanaians, but one significant aspect of Ghanaian culture failed to soften her: the country’s hyperventilating version of Christianity. Several evangelical churches operated within a few blocks of Burro, and they all had raucous services lasting late into the night on various staggered evenings. The meetings were characterized by mindlessly out-of-tune gospel singing accompanied by drums and brass amplified to distortion levels, alternating with hysterical sermons in Twi, delivered at jet-turbine decibels. These Nuremberg rallies often went on until long after midnight and were impervious to earplugs, prayer, or agnosticism. Suffice it to say the Christian soldiers weren’t winning many converts on our side of the road.

“An agent asked me to go to church today,” Jan said one night, raising her voice enough to be heard over the din of a particularly discordant hymn from across the street.

“And you agreed?” I asked.

“As if! When I said no, he said, ‘Don’t you believe in Christ?’ I said, ‘It doesn’t really matter to me.’ He said, ‘Then you will go to hell.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe in hell.’”

“Wow,” I said. “Now you’re definitely going to hell.”

“I told him, ‘You learned about hell from some white missionaries who came here two hundred years ago, and now you’re trying to tell it to me! Do you think all those thousands of generations of Africans before the missionaries are burning in hell?’”

“Score one for you,” I said, “but I do think religion has in many ways been a force for good here. It certainly gives people a sense of community, and the churches have encouraged democracy and social progress.

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