Written on
August 17th, 2011
By: Michael Milbank – Treasurer
Thunderbird prepares you for a number of things that you should encounter in the business world and in developing markets. However, nothing would have prepared me for the reception that we received in the villages of Bojonegoro!
Like a lot of Asian countries, Indonesia has an idiosyncratic fascination with fair skin. In the cities, almost every facial cosmetic product comes with an added “skin whitening agent.” This is something that I was aware of before we flew out from the USA, but what I did not fully appreciate was the extent to which we would be a minority within the villages and the attention that we would get as a result.
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Written on
August 17th, 2011
By: Michael Milbank – Treasurer
Sampurni is a mother of two and lives in the village of Katur, with her husband Mr. Puji. Their meager abode doubles up as a rudimentary shop and the production area for the family’s cassava chip making business. This is their sole source of income: three years ago they sold their land to a neighbor to help pay expenses. Now, every day is a struggle to make ends meet:-the average income from their business is just 35,000 IDR per day.
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Written on
August 17th, 2011
By: Michael Milbank – Treasurer
Shortly after the TEM Lab team completed its initial surveys, a film crew arrived in the area to shoot some footage for the Clinton Global Initiative. The team had been briefed about this before we left the US and Asraa and I had been assigned to assist them with logistics, to identify suitable candidates to be interviewed and to facilitate relations with all the other parties on the ground (village chiefs, NGOs, police, etc). The film crew also wanted to interview us about our experience in the villages, which was a dream come true for yours truly (I wanted to be an actor, but ended up going to business school) and an opportunity for Asraa to showcase her much fabled “good side” to the world. So, while the rest of the team started to analyze our data, Asraa and I headed back deep into the heart of Bojonegoro’s teak wood forest to help shoot enough footage to make up a 3 minute film. It turns out you need more than you might think…
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Written on
August 17th, 2011
By : Craig Elkin – Client Communications
In the third week, with primary interviews wrapped up and filming taking center stage, I was finally able to secure a translator and driver for a few days to begin my survey of the local area’s economy and any potential competitors for the cookstove and water purification technologies being distributed in the villages. While budget limitations forced the adventure to take place so late in the trip, some of the key takeaways still managed to help shape the outcome of our final presentation to our client. While sometimes appearing tangential to our project’s cookstove and water purifier focus, the market analysis has a deeper impact for some of our other stakeholders, notably in regards to the employment landscape of the area around the seven villages.
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Written on
August 13th, 2011
By : Emily Eckert – Team Lead
Over the past four weeks, we have been immersed 24/7 in the routine of interviews, data entry, analysis, etc. We finally decided that it was time for a break and to see some of this beautiful and amazing country. Most of our time has been split between the central and eastern regions of Java. On our arrival, we were able to spend a few days in East Java, so now we wanted to see more of Central Java. And what better place to go than the cultural capital of Java, Yogyakarta (pronounced Jogjakarta)!
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Written on
August 3rd, 2011
By: Asraa Rehman – Archivist and Lead Blogger
Since our time in Indonesia, we have all really taken to the country, the culture and its people. However, one particular member probably has taken to the culture in more than one way. He really enjoys eating new food, loves meeting new people, drinks the most Kopi (coffee) I have ever seen absorbed in a day, and always walks away with a new name.
This must have started with my habit of always calling people what their name is not. On our way over here to Indonesia, I was singing everyone’s name in rhymes. Nick got the name “Nickey Nick”. It sounded cute at first but I seriously think that Nickey Nick became the guy who would continue to get “Nicknames” for the remainder of this trip.
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Written on
August 1st, 2011
By: Michael Milbank – Treasurer
About a year ago, a good friend of mine tried to persuade me to buy a Brita water filter in Walmart. Apparently Glendale’s finest was not to her taste and she had been using one since the first week of Foundations. At the time, I was extremely resistant. I did not see any value in what was essentially a luxury item that, as far as I believed, made little to no difference to the taste or quality of the water. Whether it was my friend’s formidable powers of persuasion, or the fact that I just wanted to get out of Walmart as fast as possible, I do not know-but in the end I caved. To this day, the Brita filter sits in its box under the kitchen sink of whichever apartment I happen to be living in, unused, unloved and desperately awaiting the next yard sale.
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Written on
July 29th, 2011
By : Emily Eckert – Team Lead
It’s Week 3 and we’ve finished all of our interviews, videos, and product research. Now comes the best part . . . data entry and analysis! (To everyone who remembers DA classes at Thunderbird – no worries. No SPSS or Digital Tools was involved.) Even though we’ve just started the data entry process, we can already see some common trends among the responses.
Every evening, when we returned from long day in the villages, we would meet and compare notes. There is a very nice, little, glass room in the hotel restaurant that we take over for these meetings – and we are very grateful that the restaurant is open 24/7. During these debriefs, we go over the highlights of the interviews of that day and start bouncing ideas around about the analysis. Some of the information is quite number-driven, so that data will be processed later when we have time and a calculator that isn’t on our cell phones. But the more qualitative data is showing us that there is definite room for improvement.
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Written on
July 29th, 2011
By : Emily Eckert – Team Lead
So this post is a little late because the interviews have been finished for a few days and my next post is about some of our findings. But I thought it would be a good idea to fill you in on what our 2nd week in Indonesia looked like. Its long days and long nights and not as easy as we expected going in.
Each day went something like this:
6am – wake up, shower, eat breakfast (maybe)
7:30am – leave hotel (if car came on time), pick up Farabi facilitators, print surveys at Farabi because hotel ran out of paper and ink
9am – team 1 dropped off at first village, team 2 dropped off at second village
9:30am – 4:30pm – conduct interviews – 3 per day per team so 6 total each day
5pm – get picked up in villages and head back to hotel
6 – 7:30pm – team debrief, go over next day schedule
8pm – go into Cepu for dinner at the town square
9pm – 12am – work on survey format and analysis framework, academic deliverables, individual research projects, meeting with Farabi
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