Saturday has passed, and I remain at my computer in my Brooklyn apartment. A crisp fall breeze has blown out the city’s muggy summer stench and soon colored leaves will litter my back porch. And I will be here to enjoy the fall weather longer than I expected.

America’s current financial malaise has taken its toll on everyone, and it’s no surprise that a businessman like Duff has found himself with extra work. Indeed, Duff is struggling under the weight of a load of unforeseen business responsibilities, and they’ve left him without the time and energy to go to Liberia and carry out the plan.

Of course it would have been nice if we could have anticipated these setbacks a little earlier. Fred and I spent the weekend sending emails to all the connections we planned to meet when we hit the ground, explaining and apologizing for the delay. And then there’s the explanations I need to make to my friends after a rather debauched going away party…

That said, Duff is making the right decision. He has serious responsibilities here, and of course the success of the Foundation is contingent on the success of Duff’s businesses. To barrel ahead with our plan in Africa now would be an unnecessary risk. Our efforts would be compromised without Duff’s full energy, and we’d be wary of making any promises that we weren’t sure we could keep.

Whether our adventure is on hold for a few weeks or months remains to be seen. Though I’ve been advocating going to Liberia since day one, I believe that restraint is crucial now. The world will always welcome Duff. A little time may just have to go by before he achieves his goals.

Since we settled on the small headquarters as our first goal in Liberia, Duff hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what comes next—“How do we scale it up quickly?” And he keeps coming back to the idea that when our headquarters are done, we’ll move our molds to a hundred acre lot “an hour or two down the road” and build a massive, constantly expanding town.

Sounds exciting. But what I keep trying to make Duff understand is that it’s a total disavowal of the piecemeal plan we put forth in our website and literature. Starting in a pre-existing rural community, building organic bonds, and slowly introducing specialized jobs and then homes is a sound idea. But Duff is reverting to his original plan: throwing up buildings in the middle of nowhere, with no existing economy, and expecting people to move in and jobs to simply appear.

“If you can’t see how constant growth and rising property values can create jobs and wealth, then I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “I’m not scared about an economy.”

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Our line in the sand has officially blown away. In the midst of the confusion over whether or not we were actually visiting Ghana, our window of opportunity to get a Liberian visa in time to depart on September 25 closed. And the punch line is, we’re not going to Ghana. As it turns out, there won’t be any building project happening there for months. Duff is angry. Though he’s still approaching the situation with his usual chuckle and a let’s-make-the-best-of-this attitude, the frustration seeps through. He acted out his conversation with the overzealous builder on the phone, imitating the builder’s high-pitched, excited tone.

“‘Oh yeah yeah yeah, late this month we’re doing Ghana and then the first week of October we’re doing the other country.’ ‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘It’s really important that we book staff to participate in your training. Can we lock and load on this?’ ‘Oh yeah yeah yeah, no problem’ he said. ‘So are you telling me really for sure…’ He was a fucking dick is what I’m trying to say.”

Ah, there it is. And Duff’s annoyance with this company doesn’t end there. He’s still hoping to use them as a vendor for the Foundation’s buildings, but apparently it’s going to take an extra three weeks to get our supplies. Their cost estimator is on vacation.
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When my phone rang last night, I thought Duff was calling to tell me he’d bought our plane tickets. I really did. It was one week before we plan to leave, as logical a time to buy as any at this point. We’d actually had some discussion of specific flights the day before. Of course the simple flight from New York through Brussels to Monrovia, which had been cheap when I found it a week or two ago, had skyrocketed in price.

Our cheapest option, which to Duff’s credit was not his suggestion but our travel agent’s, was to fly into Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Then we’d drive 228 miles to Monrovia. As much as I love adventure, the idea of flying into an airport that probably doesn’t have rental cars and attempting to drive on roads that probably don’t exist from one war-torn state to another past two corrupt border patrols did not seem like the best way to kick off my first trip to western Africa. So I thought we had settled on a slightly more expensive flight that stopped in Accra, Ghana, where we’d get a flight on to Monrovia.

Turns out Duff does want to go to Ghana. But as of last night, he’s planning a slightly longer stay.
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If there’s one thing I never have trouble doing, it’s sleeping. So last night when I found myself tossing and turning, unable to fight off thoughts of our Liberia trip turning into a shambles, I figured something must be wrong. It wasn’t hard to put my finger on the problem: we’re utterly unprepared.

It didn’t really take nightmares to apprise me of this fact. A simple examination of the requirements for obtaining a visa did the job. I had assumed that, as in other countries I’ve traveled, I’d simply need to produce a passport, a photo, the processing fee, and a visa application at the Liberian consulate. Their website disagrees. In addition to these simple items, we also need, among other things:

-An official letter from a recognized physician stating that we are in good health and free from all communicable diseases. Duff and Fred have regular family doctors, who are willing to write the letter based on their records. The earliest I could get a physical appointment was this Thursday (a week before our departure) at a Lower East Side clinic. Of course, they can’t give me the letter until they get blood work back after three business days. That means Tuesday morning—two days before we leave. If I unexpectedly have, say, syphilis…well, no Liberia for me (I mean really unexpected, I swear).
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A few months ago, the former Afghan Minister of Finance visited the University of Guelph on a trip through Canada. Manish Raizada was there.

“Something he said that really struck me was that the world is investing all this money in the military in Afghanistan. And really what we need most is an agricultural college in Afghanistan. You have all these people and the reason they’re angry and uprising is they don’t have anything else to do. There’s nothing to grow except opium poppy.”

Nicholas Kristof made a similar point in his New York Times editorial column two months ago [link]. In it he lauds Greg Mortensen, a Montanan who began a grass roots initiative to build schools in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan and created enormous good will for his foundation and for America, a small buffer against the extremism elsewhere in the country.

“Each Tomahawk missile that the United States fires in Afghanistan costs at least $500,000,” Kristof points out. “That’s enough for local aid groups to build more than 20 schools, and in the long run those schools probably do more to destroy the Taliban.”
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Three years is a long time. Three years ago, for instance, my biggest responsibility was running the social activities committee of my college dorm. So it was a bit jarring to me when I scrolled through Manish Raizada’s proposed timeline for the Sustainable Agriculture Kit program and found that the first kits won’t be in our hands until month 36. And if I was surprised, I couldn’t help but worry: What will Duff do?

Sure enough, as Duff, Fred, and I waited for Manish to join a conference call later that afternoon, Duff laid it out there: “I think my biggest challenge is going to be to try and understand why it’s going to take so long.” But he wasn’t the jabbering hurricane he can be when he’s riled up. His tone was measured and inquisitive, and it signaled to me the profound depth of Duff’s respect for Manish. So Fred and I prepared to sit back and listen as the two elders talked it out.

Duff’s impatience wasn’t completely at bay; he was ready with a hot batch of his trademark hypothetical questions:

“Let’s say there’s one region, anywhere in Africa, where the good seeds already exist. Could we get SAKs going right away there?”

“Let’s say we just buy 300 motorcycles and have 300 reasonably trained people driving all over Africa. Could that make it go faster?”

“Let’s just say, as an intellectual exercise, that some jillionaire expat wants to get agriculture going fast, and he wanted to spend $300,000 a month doing it, and he spent tons of money on human resources and training farmers…could that make it go faster?”
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“I’m so sorry,” Duff lamented over a vigorous handshake, “I look like a total slob.” He was dressed in his standard cargo shorts and a tight button-up khaki shirt. Jose Julu, the handshake recipient, looked considerably more dapper with a seersucker suit draped over his long frame, a maroon dress shirt, and a striped tie. But I wasn’t one to judge—south of my dress shirt I was also sporting shorts and flip-flops to combat the mid-80 degree heat.

Luckily Jose was not offended, nor was his friend, Abu Sillah, a Muslim who wore traditional African garb and was fasting for Ramadan. Neither Jose nor Abu touch alcohol, so Tir na Nog, an Irish pub near Penn Station, was an odd meeting place. But we weren’t there to drink anyway (shocking, I know). We had a full menu of questions for our Liberian advisors.

Today’s special was the 5 acre parcel of land that Jose had offered us for our headquarters/demonstration site/“living museum.” Would it be suitable for all of the Foundation’s purposes?
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I couldn’t wait any longer. Duff was stuck in traffic, and the piping hot breakfast sandwich on the sideboard had my name on it, right below the “bacon + cheese” scrawled in black sharpie on the white deli paper. I unwrapped it lovingly and let the salty symphony of breakfast goodness fill my mouth.

We were meeting at Fred’s family’s apartment in Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood that was home to factories and occasional machine gun fire when Fred’s parents moved in 25 years ago. As in so many places in Brooklyn, on Fred’s street industry and gang warfare have since been replaced by pleasant condos and apartments, for better or worse.

I had just enough time to finish my protein high when Duff rang the buzzer and came bounding up the two flights of stairs (on 3 hours of sleep). Our task for the morning was simple: plan just what exactly we’ll do when we touch down in Liberia on September 25. We’d discussed the general idea of building a demonstration site, but we had no details on what this site would look like. And we needed an idea pretty damn quick—we had a meeting with Jose Julu, the Liberian American entrepreneur who has offered us five acres of land near Monrovia, at two o’clock that same afternoon.
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Duff’s plan may be outlandish in its ambition, but today I stumbled upon a project that is equally surprising, if not for its ambition than for its…uniqueness.

Sweet Dreams is a burgeoning development project headed by Alexis and Jennie, the co-owners of Brooklyn’s Blue Marble Ice Cream, and their friend Odile, a Rwandan writer and artist. Together, they plan to use the power of ice cream to soothe the suffering of Huye, Rwanda, a town still devastated by the effects of the country’s genocidal civil war in the 1990s. “Milk is one resource Rwandans have in plentiful supply, yet most have never tasted ice cream,” say Alexis and Jennie. “By boosting its demands, diversifying its applications, and using it as a basis for employment, we are hoping to support Huye’s economy in a responsible, sustainable way.” Read the rest of this entry »