Simon-Jan Terpstra
“Sweet talking” is a term that one of the workers at our building site taught me. Many people in Mali are polite and will say that things are ready the next day. But what I have learned is that often when people make promises to me, I can expect it will ready one week after the day promised. It’s something that you’ve just got to accept. If you insist on the Dutch way of working, you run the risk of going totally crazy.
The fourth container with constructing materials arrived at the building site. It was at customs for almost three months. It took a lot of wrangling to get the container freed. It’s another issue with the way of working here.
Corruption too is something people tell me a lot about. People say you can see it on every corner of the street. This week our driver had an experience with it. He was stopped by a police office who accused him of using his telephone while driving. It wasn’t true, but he didn’t have much choice. He could either pay a high fine officially – or chose to pay the “unofficial” fine, which was about $2. It was very disappointing to have experienced this first hand.
These aren’t the only problems I have experience here. We are having many on the financial side part of the project. All payments have to be carried via a governmental institute. The person responsible is never in a hurry and many things that we are doing are delayed by him. It is really hard to push him to progress because he is well-connected to politically important people. Knowing this fact, we only can accept the situation. It’s more than a little frustrating that one person can have so much negative influence on a project.
But on the other hand, I know that we are doing good work here and there are a lot of people who are committed to seeing our project succeed!
For eight weeks starting in April 2007 Albert Heijn supermarket manager Simon-Jan Terpstra is working to help the management of a mango packaging factory in Bamako as part of a pilot project for Albert Heijn, which, if the results after favorable will continue in 2008.
This is the second time mangos from Mali will be exported to the Netherlands for Albert Heijn. Last year it was one container with 20,000 tons of mangoes. This year the plan is to export eight containers.
Simon-Jan started working for Ahold in 2005 as an Ahold management trainee. In his first year he was project manager in the Albert Heijn Supply Chain and the, in his second year, an assistant supermarket manager for Albert Heijn. Since November 2006 he has been a supermarket manager.
Next to his work for Albert Heijn, Simon-Jan volunteers for an organization called World Servants, which carries out building projects with hundreds of volunteers in several developing countries, helping to construct facilities such as schools, health clinics or homes with people from the local community.