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From our friends over at StrictlyFitteds.com
This piece was written by Oakland resident, and entrepreneur, Novella Carpenter, who seems to be new to hood economics. Its about a lady who has come up with a rather creative way of financing her "upstart." Makeda is using her skills to make it day-by-day, but is in a program to expand her enterprise into a legitimate food business. Check it out.In the morning, when I'm out watering the garden, Makeda flashes by. Her shoes are half-tied, and her long red dreadlocks flop along with her jogging pace. "Hold the bus, hold the bus," she demands. When this tactic actually works, I'm astonished. The bus idles and she climbs aboard.
"Morning, Novella," she calls over her shoulder, and then she's gone.
Makeda Botswana Redfern moved into the yellow warehouse that serves as an art gallery at the end of our block in Oakland about a year ago. As I gradually got to know her, I discovered that she has a special skill: hustling.
"People don't like B.S.," she said, seated at my kitchen table on a recent afternoon, "A hustle doesn't have to be structured over dominance, over cheating someone out of something. I look at my sammich hustle as a fair exchange, like bartering."
[Sammich?? Wonder why she decides to write it like this?]
Her sammich hustle goes like this: Makeda slow cooks pork until it is fork tender, with a special barbecue sauce. She puts all of the fixings together in a cooler, and keeps the pork warm in a rice cooker. Then Makeda hits bars in downtown Oakland. Customers watch her put together the sandwich -- "so they know it's fresh" -- and it comes with an order of brown rice salad with cabbage. For vegetarians, Makeda makes a spinach tofu tart.
"Everyone deserves to eat," she said, "That's my philosophy. I even have a sliding scale for homeless people, sometimes I give them a half for free."
I'm intimate with Makeda's business dealings because about once a week for the past few months, Makeda has been approaching me for what I like to think of as a micro-loan. Twenty dollars is all she wants. The first time she asked, I figured I would never see the money again. But she's my neighbor, and on this block we tend to help each other. So I handed her my last bill and made a note in my head to get some more money from the ATM. The next morning, Makeda handed me a rumpled $20 bill.
After the third time I loaned her money (always $20), she promptly returned it, but this time she included a little plastic bottle of barbecue sauce.
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