Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Another day in the life...


We began the day returning to Startimes Media to collect the form we left yesterday. Though it was partially filled out, the information was not as detailed as we'd hoped. We are going to try and get a meeting set up with the head of marketing next week once she returns from Kisumu. The office was super busy, as it was yesterday, so hopefully we will be able to connect with someone who can provide additional information. The energy within the office is very high, leading us to believe there is more under the surface.

After Startimes, we headed down into the Industrial Area in search of Sinohydro. We'd been told it was located near the Kenya Pipeline Company's (KPC) plaza so we started there. We discovered that China Petroleum Pipeline Co. (CPP) did work with KPC but Sinohydro was nowhere to be found. This company is proving to be quite elusive! Unfortunately, no one from CPP was in today, however all of the staff at KPC were extremely helpful and gave us several contacts at other Chinese firms. They even set up a meeting for us with the CPP headquarters in Westlands for tomorrow afternoon! For a moment we wished our research was on Kenyan oil because the staff was so jovial.

In the afternoon we has a meeting with Jimmy from COVEC. Again, he was very helpful in answering our questions and even put us in contact with one of his professors in China that is doing similar research. Also, he advised us that we should be asking the construction companies if they are DB, DBB, CM, BOT, or BT, referring to the type of projects they work on—design/build, design/bid/build, construction management, etc.. Since we are nerds and love acronyms, this realization sent us spiraling deeper into the websites of firms we already contacts to see if we could identify the projects :)

Today was slightly slower than yesterday but we are making progress, pole pole (slowly slowly). Tomorrow we have a meeting with China CAMCE Engineering Corp. and CPP. Yay!

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