Kareena's Missions

The evenings as a student missionary are always busy, but it’s in the little moments where I find so much joy. At least 2 to 3 times a week I go to an expat house. My favorite times, are when I am the only SM. Don’t get me wrong I love when everyone is there, but when it’s just you, you can almost pretend you are a part of the family. Last week, after Monday game night, I went up to the Hardings. We just hung out. Alica came home and we had spring rolls and avocado toast for dinner. (If you haven’t tried that combination you should!) Then we just talked about our days. A beautiful moment that meant the world to me.  There are some mornings I sleep in, due to having to schedule a 1am meeting with people in the States and I'll have to stay up late. Those mornings are my favorite.  Everyone in the house is waking up and we all sit around the living room/kitchen/dining room and talk; about our days, what we look forward to, what we are dreading. We laugh together about the absurd thi

  The Monetary Journey to the USA  In January, Akuna’s business coach, Jonathan, let me know about an amazing opportunity at Southern called Hyve Creators. It was set to be early March and focused around a pitch competition called the "Lions Den." There would be investors judging Shark Tank style and he thought Akuna should pitch, plus there were a lot of people there that we could connect with. I jumped on the opportunity for two reasons, first of all, the connections and who would pass up a chance to visit the States!  I immediately texted the president and vice president of Enactus ready to pitch my idea. My proposition was that they would pay for half and I would fundraise/cover the other half, an equal investment. Well… that call did not go as I had expected. I got rejected pretty hard. The president had his mind made up that it made no sense for me to go when Akuna in the states could represent… My argument was that they would not have the depth of understanding in ord

  The factory looked like the house right before aSuper Bowl party, that my parents have hosted for many years... Empty. Clean. Waiting. The floor, not spotless but swept. Normally messy tables were cleared and the corners full of things organized neatly. The air feels like anticipation. That’s what it felt like before the Zambia Revenue Authority came to the factory... or was supposed to come.  The past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on applying to the ZRA to obtain a Country of Origin Certificate for our 7 types of soap. I thought it would be easy. Just submit a letter and get the certificate… but no. It involves a letter, invoices from all materials required including factory overhead, customs clearances for anything imported, documentation of production, and a cost analysis for every single soap.  We first applied for it in the middle of December. The hardest part of it all was collecting the invoices and clearances because, there has been no system for storing the invoices

Akuna has been struggling with supply chain issues and we finally thought we had it solved 2 weeks ago. We had palm and soybean oil and were so excited to finally start producing soap! However, the first batch we made turned out too soft. It could be broken up into what felt like Kinetic sand — that isn’t soap. So we tried another couple of molds… it worked well enough (by the way…. well enough is never a good sign). We forged ahead and tried again, we made another 2 batches. Both batches failed in the same strange sort of way. Originally, we thought it might be the lye, so we changed what lye we were using. Then we wondered if it was the oil… after multiple experiments, each eliminating different variables, we found it was the palm oil.  Now, it was my job to get a hold of the “Oil Guy” as we have him listed in our WhatsApp and get him to agree to do a refund/replacement. It was a lot of back and forth. “You gave us bad oil, the moisture content was too high,” I said. He would reply i