By David Schweidenback
Spring 2019 Newsletter
Do you feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders?
In October 2018 we planned to ship a container to Aid the Needy in Homa Bay, Kenya. On October 1st, the Kenyan legislature changed the import laws, effectively barring us from the country. The warehouse was full and it was imperative that we make that shipment to make room in the warehouse for the bicycles coming in.
Switching to plan B, I had two potential partners in Tanzania to whom we could send the shipment. The first, The Norbert and Friends Missions, was a very solid well-known NGO that I knew could do a good job. There was a second, smaller, younger organization called MATOLO which sent in the best proposal I have gotten in 28 years. As E.F. Schumacher notes in “Small is Beautiful”, sometimes smaller organizations are more creative and effective than larger organizations.
I decided to send the first container shipment for Tanzania to MATOLO and we shipped it out in early October, just in time to make room for the incoming bikes from our collections. The shipment arrived in Dar es Salaam in early January 2019. I was working with my contact there to get the container quickly out of customs because you only have a few days to empty the container or the shipping line starts charging you a daily fee called demurrage. Demurrage in Dar es Salaam is $120 per day!
By late February I was getting really nervous because the storage fees were building and it was going to be difficult for MATOLO to be able to pay those storage fees. Apparently in mid-February they just walked away. I wrote daily emails begging for an update and I finally realized by the beginning of March that the first group did not have the legal authority nor the finances to get the container out of customs.
In early March I started the process of changing the consignee to The Norbert and Friends Missions. Once a container has been delivered to port it is extremely difficult to change the consignee. It took most of the month of March and into early April to get the paperwork changed. At this point in March 2019 we had made over 395 shipments overseas and I had never needed to do this before. It was a very steep learning curve.
By mid April I was able to get the paperwork changed but by then the storage fees had added up to a sum much greater than the actual cost of shipping. It was getting to the point that we might have to abandon the shipment. There are two ways to think about abandoning a shipment. On one hand, it would be a great loss for our program partner to not receive the 479 bicycles and 119 sewing machines. On the other hand if the container is abandoned it is sold at public auction. The bicycles and sewing machines would still go to individuals, but to individuals we don’t know. So the cargo is not lost; it is only lost to our organization and our partner. Still it would be a bitter pill to tell the foundation that paid for the shipping that we “lost” the shipment. It is hard to lose a 40-foot container that weighs 11,000 pounds! It wasn’t really lost — we knew where it was, we just didn’t have the legal authority to get it.
The Norbert and Friends Missions and Pedals for Progress started petitioning the shipping line to give us a bit of a break. After all, this is a humanitarian aid shipment. Demurrage for shipping lines is like icing on the cake — a boost to their bottom line. It is pure profit. Weeks of negotiation went by as the cost of the storage went up by $120 per day. When the shipping line gave us their first invoice, it was a pretty shocking number. I fearfully went to a currency converter; they wanted more than $10,000. The initial shipping cost was $5000.
Abandon the container and look like a fool to our funders, come up with money that none of us had, or continue to negotiate. Norbert decided he was not going to give up and he kept hounding the shipping line to bring down the price to some reasonable cost. There were daily emails for weeks on end trying to convince the pertinent authorities that although we were liable for these expenses, we were trying to do something good for the benefit of the country. Our shipments really do increase the productivity of the population, which in itself improves the economy and therefore the country.
In the end the shipping line relented, I think in part because they just wanted to stop having to deal with Norbert and P4P on a daily basis. And the government also helped get some of the fees waived. So after four months of feeling like this school bus on the island of Dominica (where I took this picture on vacation), a tremendous weight has been lifted off Pedals for Progress and The Norbert and Friends Missions. It was expensive, but the container is out and will soon be delivered to the Arusha Valley in northern Tanzania. Our new partner, N&FF, is an extremely positive and capable organization. Norbert has proved himself under difficult conditions. I have been trying to get a container of bicycles into Tanzania for almost a decade. I have struggled to find a partner who can get the job done. We now have that partner. Our greatest thanks to Norbert Mbwiliza for his tireless efforts at securing these bicycles and sewing machines for the people of the Arusha Valley. The 8-month transit is over and I look forward to all the good reporting I’m sure we’ll get from northern Tanzania.