I’m used to wearing different hats. I’m a Christian and a hacker, and a husband and a father. No big deal. But lately, I’ve started realizing that one of my hats is very strange, and utterly consuming. Somehow, I ended up in the restaurant business. The path was straight and clear. The land and the staff and (some of) the money “fell into our laps”. It was a God Thing, pure and simple.
So I’m not questioning the path. It’s just that several times each day I scratch my head and marvel at the fact that I’m neck deep in the day-to-day struggles of opening a restaurant. I say “I” a lot, but it’s more than just me. Jen and I have both been working 16 hour days as we approach the opening. We’re ordering supplies, tweaking and typing recipes, typing up training manuals, managing the construction at the site, training kitchen, coffee and floor staff, conferring with our managers, trying to stretch every dollar eight miles (kilometers), and generally running around like crazy people.
Our staff, which now numbers somewhere around twenty people (!) has been working hard training and preparing in a world that’s completely foreign to them. The restaurant will be Western by every standard. The food will be excellent and consistent, the staff will be prompt and attentive and above all, the customer will be treated like royalty. It’s a completely new paradigm for them (our staff and the customers in Jinja).
And for now, we’re shelling out money hand over fist. By investing the money I make from gigs, we’re taking an enormous gamble, but we’re diving in head first because this thing can work. And if it does we won’t have to beg for money from our donors forever. We’ll have something sustainable that will fuel our work here for as long as we’re here… however long that will be.
I still wear my geek hat with pride, though. I spend an awful lot of time jamming on my laptop, but it’s different than it used to be. I’m working on training material for the center, laying out certificates, wrangling PDF’s for student handouts, doing logo design and layout for price lists and banners, working on marketing strategies for the center, creating custom training ISO’s, searching out new content and partners and every now and then I get to spend a few minutes teaching our staff Linux and Back Track and other sorts of tech goodness. I’m also working on the creation of a Jinja Linux User Group, as well as a Ugandan Information Security Group. I hacked a Ugandan government security system (with permission of course) and I’m really Jonesing for some fellow learned geeks to jam with here in Uganda. This has come into sharp relief for me especially after the Offensive Security and Pauldotcom podcasts. I miss the community something fierce.
So, yeah, it’s a funny new hat. But I’m not ready to get rid of my other ones just yet.
