Hi all You highly appreciated readers of my posts and followers of my blog. Today I will share a quite entertaining experience with You, which I made last year when travelling in Africa and which started with a negative surprise and ended with great happiness for me.
My friends and colleagues Elisangela Santos(elisangela.santos, +55 11 99619 2808), Robert Lowin (robert.lowin@vulkan.com, +27 21 551 5194) and myself (klaus.hepp@vulkan.com, +55 11 975039323) were travelling for the first time in our live to Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during June last year, where we participated as exhibitors in the “DRC Mining Week Exhibition and Congress”. Elisangela is a member of our brazilian management team. She has a double function there as Sales Director for our marine division Vulkan Couplings (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/couplings) with responsiblity for our marine sales in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Bolivia. In her second function Elisangela is also the Marketing Director of our company Vulkan do Brasil (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/brazil). Robert is the Managing Director of our sister company Vulkan South Africa ( https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/drivetech/vulkan-companies/africa ), which has it`s head office in Cape Town and it`s sales, engineering, technical service and logistics center in Edenvale, Johannesburg.
The “DRC Mining Week” is a quite important public yearly event for the mining industry in the DRC and the whole Copperbelt region in the heart of Africa and has been attracting increasing interest during the last years for suppliers and service providers of the mining industry from allover the world incl. lots of South African, but also European, North American and Asian exhibitors and visitors.
We had decided to participate for the first time in this exhibition with an own booth as participants in the “German Pavilion”, which was organised by the Federal German Ministry for Economics Affairs and Energy (BMWi) in cooperation with the Association of the German Trade Fair Industry (AUMA), as well as the Federal German Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) and which was set up by the Messe Düsseldorf GmbH under the responsability of my great friend Markus Liedke as project manager.
Our intention was, to gain an overview of the mining market in the DRC and the Copperbelt and to – in analogy to our several other business development projects which we were carrying out at the same time in other African countries and regions – look up concrete opportunities for the commercialisation of our couplings, brakes and backstops for all types of typical industrial mechanical power transmission applications like f.e. in mining, power generation and many other industries more. And we were also interested, to make personal and professional contact with potential partners for the distribution of our products and respresentation of our brands over there.
Elisangela came from Sao Paulo to Lubumbashi with stop over in Paris and Robert and I travelled there from the DRC`s neighborhood country Zambia, where we had participated in another mining event during the week before in the capital Lusaka. But Robert and I needed to fly back from Lusaka to Johannesburg and then from there to Lubumbashi, which also worked nicely.
When Robert and I arrived in Lubumbashi and made our first impressive experience with the exceptionally bureaucratic and somehow totally strange local security and immigration control procederes there, it came out, that my suitcase did not have arrived together with us at Lubumbashi airport. It must have been lost during our stopover in Johannesburg in the early morning or having been put wrongly on a plane to an other destination in Africa. But there was no chance at all, to figure this out at Lubumbashi airport still.
Once arrived at our hotel in Lubumbashi, we contacted the airline and airport administration at Johannesburg, to find out what has happened to my missing suitcase, but this was also not successful. In fact, nobody had an idea, where my suitcase had been lost and to where it had gone. This created a quite strong headache for me, because we were planned to stay for a full week at Lubumbashi and I definitely needed my clothes and personal hygiene items and all other things which I had put into my suitcase. Especially my suit was a critical item. You cannot appear as a serious business man at an official public business event in great part of Africa for meeting with customers and other business partners representing a professional, international company without proper, formal dress, unless You don`t want to be taken serious.
Thus I was in deep shit and I had a quite big problem, but not the least idea, how to get this solved within the few hours, which remained still before sundown and the end of the day and beginning of the night. The hotel was far outside the – anyhow unknown for me – city of Lubumbashi and there were no shops at all for clothes and other travelling equipments at any overseeable distance. Out of my increasing frustration I came to the idea, to call my friend Rene Zarske, Project Manager Mining and Mineral Resources at the Center of Competence for Mining and Mineral Resources at the South African-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AHK Southern Africa, https://suedafrika.ahk.de/en/) and ask him for advice. I knew already, that Rene and the AHK Southern Africa participated also in the German Pavilion at the “DRC Mining Week” and that he and his colleagues were stationed in another hotel in Lubumbashi and I was aware, that he already knew this city quite well from his several previous visits. And it worked nicely. Renegave me immediately the address of an indian shop downtown Lubumbashi, where I should be able to buy all the clothes and other items, which I was so desperately looking for.
The shop owner was a very friendly and helpful indian man and he had really everything, which I was looking for, in his impressive sortiment of all kinds of articles. I bought a beautiful blue turkish suit, several shirts made in Thailand, first class indian underwear and socks and shoes, a belt and a tie made in China. A nice combination for an international traveller like me. That`s globalisation at it`s best ! The only problem was, that the trousers of the suit were much to long. I needed to find somebody very quickly who could fix this. Outside it started to get dark and all who have already made experience with travelling in Africa know, that there is almost a direct and very quick transition from bright day to dark night. My taxi driver, with whom my friend and South African colleague Robert and I had gone to the indian shop, tried some addresses of local tailors, which he knew, but none of them was functionning still, because now the night had come and all people closed their businesses down and went home. This was my next challenge. But I needed this suit with shortened trousers on the early next morning for my participation, together with Elisangela and Robert, in the oficial opening ceremony of the mining event with the speeches of several congolese ministers and many important mining industry representants. No way out. Finally our taxi driver found a place in the middle of nowhere, means in a densely populated typical african suburb district, where we could try to get my problem fixed.
A very friendly old gentleman, a real couturier, and his young helper attended us and started to do the necessary works on my trousers. This was happening in the middle of a room full with mounts of piled up textiles and clothes and on a at least thirty years old half broken but still half functionning electrical sewing machine. But suddenly one of the allover Africa so common and frequent power blackouts happened and all lights and also the wonderful sewing machine went down and nobody had an idea, how long this would continue. In the end Robert and I decided, to pay the friendly couturier and the helpful taxi driver in advance for the whole job and services and to trust our taxi driver, that he would pick my suit up again there at the couturier`s workshop hours later, after the return of electricity and with the shortened trousers, and to drop it for me at our hotel reception. Although I had initially had some doubts, this worked nicely. Both wonderful people did a fantastic job and I could perfectly play my role as respresentant of our company at the mining exhibition and congress as intended, now correctly dressed in my brandnew beautiful Turkish suit, Thai shirts, Indian underwear and socks and equipped with my wonderful new Chinese tie, belt and shoes.
On the pictur in the middle on the right side You can see me together with our taxi driver, the very skilled couturier and his young helper – and also the wonderful and miraculously still perfectly working sewing machine.
Our participation in the “DRC Mining Week” was a full success and – I still can`t believe it – my lost suitcase appeared again at the airport in Johannesburg, where the airline company had set it aside it, until I could pick it up again there during my stopover on the way back home to Sao Paulo.
Travelling means learning. I can firmly confirm this wise old saying.
On ocasion of one of my future posts I will share with You some insights about our exhibition booth and mining industry experiences at this really impressive event in Lubumbashi, Congo.
See You – hopefully – here in my blog again tomorrow.
