Back on the Bandwagon

After two less-than stimulating days, we hit gold again today :) We began the morning with a meeting at China Fushun and had a nice interview there. Then we headed out to Jacaranda Gardens to meet with WanHo, a Chinese investment firm that is engaged with several different companies. We toured their massive facility and set up a meeting with the project manager for another day, since he was in a meeting.

Jacaranda Gardens is quite a ways out of the city and we knew that two other road construction firms were out that way. So we had our driver, Joe, ask for directions to one of them. We ended up at the site of a major road construction company (name withheld) where the guard told us it was very hard to get inside. But, we managed to get a meeting with one of the site managers who then directed us to the main headquarters. Success! Though it was not a complete interview, being cleared to the HQ is a major step as we've been attempting to contact this company since day one.

After that our driver extraordinaire attempted to find another fairly secretive construction company but we were not as lucky for that one. He is determined to find it for us, though, so perhaps we will go next week if he can do some digging of his own!

We visited a small-scale automobile garage which works very locally. It was interesting because we have not seen many Chinese companies set up in that way: catering almost exclusively to locals, no subtleties of Chinese in the name, mixed in with all the other local garages. We have focused mostly on the large corporations, as that is the original directive of our research. But the small private companies are very interesting as well, and it seems that no one really understands where they are and how many there are. A topic for further investigation (in a different project!)

Then, we hit jackpot with a meeting at Soluxe International (K) Ltd. They are a high-end hotel/restaurant/travel company that caters exclusively to wealthy Chinese clients. When we walked in Kyla exclaimed that it looked and felt like we were transported to Shanghai. The workers had Chinese-style uniforms and it was pristine. We had an interview with the managing director, who happened to be a friend of another person we interviewed at a different company. He was so engaging and interesting, our conversation lasted almost two hours! Kyla was questioned about her thoughts on how China has changed, and I was questioned about how Kenyans are reacting to foreign influences and about the change it is having on their culture. He was quite interested in Kenyan culture and is planning on spending some time in Maasai villages to gain more perspective on how development affects people here. Super interesting stuff!

Final excitement of the day, we received an email response from the Chinese Embassy (@gmail.com) with data and information about Kenya-Chinese relations. Yay!

Tomorrow we may be headed to Athi River, the EPZ zone that contains many Chinese manufacturing plants. The EPZ zones are special export zones where the land is owned by the Kenyan government. Our friend Riz from London has a cousin that works near there and has offered us a ride!