Welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs. It's the podcast where we celebrate the stories of successful entrepreneurs who've overcome challenges and setbacks, to build thriving businesses. And in this episode, we will be talking to Denise Carnihan, she is passionate about Africa and her business focuses on education, and sustainable tourism in East Africa. Her company's called Helping Hand Africa Tours. She takes guests on authentic, immersive African adventures where they experience the rich culture, magnificent wildlife, and of course, the breathtaking beauty of Africa, and then they return home with lifetime memories, new friendships, and more often than not a deep-seated yearning to return to Africa. Having been to some countries in Africa, I know exactly what that feeling is. Denise, a very warm welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs.
Thank you very much for having me. It's really nice to be here. Thank you.
Yeah, it's our pleasure. And it's very clear to me, and I think to anybody who will spend five minutes talking with you, that your business is very much led by your passion. Tell us how do you do it?
It's passion and passion drives, and I am very driven by my passion for Africa. My husband and I have a primary school over there that we established back in 2014. So we're very passionate about the school and our children at the school and the staff, we have a lot of friends, particularly in Kenya now, it's our second home. And I just love to talk about it and I just want to show everybody “my Africa”, that's what I call it, “my Africa.”
Tell us a little bit how it started because you're originally from New Zealand. How did you get connected to Africa? Where did that begin?
Ah well it's a long story so I'll try and keep it short. But it all started back in oh, gosh, it was the year of 2000 I think. My son was doing a project at school on family roots and we discovered at the time that my grandfather was actually half African and we never knew, he passed away well before my brothers and I were born. But on hearing that, my mother just kind of dropped the bombshell really and we had no idea and so that sent me on an enormous crusade. I went on a rampage, I guess, to try and find family, where we belonged, where did they come from, all of this stuff. And all my life since I was a little child I had this amazing thing about Africa and I always put it down to loving the wildlife, the people maybe fascinated me, completely different culture, I wasn't sure, and when we got that information the penny dropped and it just all made so much sense. So I went on this rampage and did find family in South Africa and connected with a second cousin and from there we just connected with that family there. And so my grandfather was half, he was a coloured and here we are, you know very white!
Anyway in 2009 my husband and I went to South Africa to meet the family and we spent three months travelling through Africa while we were there.I really wanted to go and see more of Africa. So that's what we did and we spent some time with the family in South Africa, it was absolutely amazing, I just felt so at home. And then we joined an overland trip and off we went, I think we travelled through nine countries and we ended up in Kenya. And for some reason, I think I probably know the reason, Kenya just grabbed me at the heartstrings and so I just fell in love with it there. So we got back to New Zealand and I'd already made plans to go back the following year and do some voluntary work. My husband Chris, who's just an absolute trooper because he just goes along with all my crazy ideas, he was very supportive of me going back to Kenya. He wasn't keen to go and work in an orphanage, he said, No, I've done my time with babies. So I went for three months and I really loved it and I just felt like I belonged there. And along the way I moved from the orphanage that I was volunteering at and moved into a teenage boy detention centre for naughty boys aged from about 11 to 19. I really loved it there, I just loved it, I loved the boys, I loved everything about it. And so I was obviously in communication with my husband every day and so when I told him I'd moved to the detention centre he was very keen to come over and do some work with the boys and a bit of mentoring and teaching them basic skills. So we went back the following year for another three months, I was very fortunate at the time where I worked, I had a very understanding, amazing boss who kept giving me three months off every year to follow my passion and my dream. So we went back to Kenya in 2011 now, and we were having coffee, Chris and I with a Kenyan friend who I had met at the detention centre, he was a teacher there because they had a couple of hours of schooling every day, and when he left I said to Chris, Wouldn't it be cool if we could build a little school in a slum in Kenya? In a slum somewhere, I had realised and seen the desperation for education in a developing country like Kenya where schooling is just key, and there just isn't enough schools. And so we had been given some money from friends and things to spend, donate here and donate there, so we pulled it all together and we built a little school. And it cost us about $3,000, New Zealand dollars and we had the school up and running in two months, we found a plot of land with our friend Ayub’s help, because we wanted him to run the school. And this is the naive part is that we thought, Well we'll build the score for say 50 children, and that can be our contribution to helping the underprivileged and it cost us about $150 a month to run the school with two teachers and very basic, very, extremely basic in a very poor slum area in Nairobi. So we built the school and on opening today there were 117 kids at eight o'clock in the morning! And so we quickly realised that the school was blowing out from our 50 that we had planned in our mind, and that these kids could not, they couldn't function properly in these cramped conditions. So we were heading off to Uganda to do some backpacking and before we left Kenya, I said to Ayub that when we got back to New Zealand we’d do some fundraising and send it over to build another lot of classrooms. So that's exactly what we did and we built another three classrooms. So now we had the new three classrooms and the two classrooms from the original building. I went back to Kenya to see how it was all going six months later, and we had 300 kids.
Wow.
It quickly dawned on me how naive we were thinking that we were going to have 50 children and that was going to be it. These kids, this is how it was for children in the slum so desperately wanting to go to school and their families. Our school was set up for needy children to be the first educated in their families, so parents would do anything to get their children to go to school because to them, education was everything. And if their little child could have an education, it was going to impact on the whole family. So we had these other teachers that had appeared and they were literally volunteering their services at the school. We had no idea back in New Zealand that we had all these kids and all this staff that weren't even getting paid and it was terrible. So our children Hayley and Craig felt sorry for mum and dad because suddenly we had this project that was blowing up and so they set up a private sponsorship scheme amongst friends and family saying, for goodness sake, mum and dad need help, can you pay $10 a month into an account. So they did and that just snowballed and snowballed and we had, at one point we had 115 sponsors, so we had about $1,500 coming into the account every month which paid for the school, all the running of the school, the teachers salaries that we found, were volunteering, there was no way we were going to have that, and it was all working really well. And then in 2013, so two years after we founded the school Chris and I were over there and there were 400 kids and 12 staff, but that was okay, we literally had to put a massive stop to it and with threats that we were going to have to do all sorts of things to just curb the population explosion at the school. And sadly, in 2013 on that trip, we discovered that our trusted friend had been mismanaging the money, not our money, not our sponsorship money that we were sending, but he was charging the parents and caregivers a lot of money to have their children at our school. And that was not the case at all, that was not the plan, but he clearly saw an opportunity and I stumbled across all these receipt books and discovered what had happened.
Long story short, we tried to get him out of the school, it was very very difficult, our visa was running out and all sorts of things. The police were trying to get onto him, it was just a nightmare. We had one guy at the school who was teaching who was putting himself through university and so he was teaching at the school and he was a senior teacher, Tony. And he was the one person that we had, to trust, you know we had to leave Kenya, our visa had run out and we needed somebody to help us to try and get on top of this horrible situation. So Tony came on board, and we went back to New Zealand and he fought to get Ayub out of the school and I think eight months later he came to Chris and I and said, Unfortunately I think you're going to have to walk away. He said unless you want to come here and fight through our court system, he said, you're going to have to walk away because this guy ain't moving anywhere. He was just fully connected to the school and then what Tony had discovered was that this guy Ayub had had the school registration transferred into his own name. So we would have to go to Kenya, go through the courts, get everything cleared up, and so we took Tony’s advice and it was absolutely devastating. We'd got to know the families, the kids, we had a gorgeous little community going on there and it all just fell apart, so that was 2013. And I think we were really sad for quite some time and then I wasn't finished with this whole thing, I just wasn't, and I suggested to Chris that we start again with Tony. And I quietly talked to Tony and said, How about we start a new school? And he was very hesitant and said I need to think about it and then he came back to me and said, if we start a new school Dee, it has to be on my terms because I'm Kenyan and I know how things are run here, how they're supposed to be run. And all of what he was telling me was very similar to the way we run schools in New Zealand with a Board of Governors, Board of Trustees, whatever, everything's done perfectly. And so he agreed and I went to my husband and said, Tony and I are going to build another school, have I got you on board or what? He said, Okay.
So 2014 on the 29th of September we opened Tamariki Education Centre, Tamariki as Maori for children and the school is coming up for nine years old, it is absolutely beautiful and it works like clockwork. We have just recently been able to purchase a plot of land so our school is now on its forever home and Tony does the most incredible job of running the school. And it's just beautiful and fortunately when we walked away from our first school and I had emailed all the sponsors and said, This is what we're doing, please don't send any more money, we're out, there's nothing more we can do to try and save the school, at least over half of them decided that they would keep their sponsorship going and they said, Gosh, Denise you’re bound to start up something else and sure enough, so all that sponsorship just built up in the bank account. And so when we did open, or when we were founding Tamariki we had a pool of money to fall back on to help start the school. So to this day we still have those sponsors and more, as I say, we did lose a lot but we are slowly gaining them again over the years and the school is now in it's forever place.
So from there, during my times in Africa, in Kenya over all those years, I would write amazing emails to family, friends and then Facebook posts and all sorts of things like that, and so all my family, all my friends were following eagerly and really got quite taken in by this whole experience and my description of my times in Kenya and the amazing experiences that I was having. When I got back to New Zealand and I had been documenting the story right back to when we met the family or prior to that meeting the family and this whole African journey, I wanted to create something for my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, my cousins, all the extended family. So I had been writing, it was never the plan to have it published, the book, but I was back here in New Zealand and in 2015, as fate would have it I met an African woman who lives in New Zealand and she had just had a book published independently. And I was with another friend and she said ‘Oh Denise is writing his her memoirs for her family’. And anyway the next minute, this African woman who's still a good friend of mine, she connected me with the publisher - I didn't know about it, I just arrived home one day and there was this message in my inbox connecting me with this guy, and he's in Brisbane here. And next thing my book was published and so I gave up my work, my job in the corporate world and decided to spend a year marketing and promoting my book, so that's what I did. I did it for about eight months and then I kind of got a little bit ‘Mmm I need something else’. And then one day I said to my husband, I think I’ll take a tour to Africa, a tour group to Kenya and show them my Africa, and I call it my Africa because that's what it feels like to me. And he said to me, That's great, I've been telling you that! I don't know anything about taking tours or tourism, anything at all. He said you don't need to, just create an itinerary of all the wonderful places that you go to, and put it out on your Facebook, so I did. And I just literally put a post up on Facebook, my private Facebook page saying, Hey, I'm thinking of taking a tour group, I'll take eight people max, if you're interested send me an email. The next morning I had 52 emails!
Wow! You’re kidding!
No, I’m not kidding. So I said to Chris, Oh they do want to come, people do want to come with me. So I set that up that weekend and I wrote out a beautiful itinerary, I picked a date, so this was August 2016, I thought February 2017 sounds OK, let's go then. So I sent an email back to all my 52 emails and I had the trip booked in 24 hours.
How many did you take?
8.
So you just took 8 out of the 52.
Small groups, no I’ve stuck to my small groups. So then they encouraged me to set another date for another one. So I set another date for June and that was also booked out in 24 hours. So then I thought, Oh, I'll do one in September so I did the same thing, and so I had a whole year, I had three trips for three weeks each, and I took eight people on each. And that's how it started out, it just literally snowballed from there, and I flew completely by the seat of my pants for that first year. I think the first trip there were a lot of things I knew straight away the things that I was going to change, and so probably by the end of that first year, the third trip, I had everything sorted. I had my connections, my people, I had my places, really, really super important to me was the whole community-based travel. I'm all about it, I'm passionate about it. So apart from one itinerary now, we don't stay in hotels, we stay in AirBnB, we stay in camps, we stay in private places, I employ private, local people, guides and transport, and that's how it started. And obviously every itinerary of mine includes a day at the school. So by taking groups to our school we built up the resources because anyone that comes on my trips or goes to a developing country always want to take donations, whether it's monetary or items, they want to take things. And so for our school, we had to buy another container for our school just to house all the donations like stationery, books, you name it, everything, sports equipment, rugby balls, soccer balls, we've got cricket, all sorts of things, and so we had to buy a container. I know, we have had some issues along the way with renting land. Land owners are very difficult to work with, they want the money, they want the rent coming in but they don't want you on their land and so as I say, we were fortunate enough to just be able to buy our own plot so we won't ever have that problem again. We saw this coming and in 2019 we decided to, we were still renting but the government were putting a road through our building, which was already on the property. When we set up Tamariki that was a vacant couple of buildings so we literally just walked in there. But they were moving in to put a little road in where the buildings were, so the buildings were being demolished, so we decided that we would build a container school so that it was portable. Because in our mind, our vision was that we would always have our own plot of land at some point so we needed a school that we could move. So we bought all these containers and turned it into, Tony actually turned it into the most beautiful school, two storey, there were eight classrooms, it had a lovely balcony around the top, a lovely stairwell, everything, and doors and windows and beautifully brightly coloured buildings and that's been the school. So when we moved, which was just at the beginning of this year, we started the move onto our new land, it was basically get the cranes and move school.
Meanwhile the tours obviously came to a grinding halt in March 2020. I was still having booked out tours every year and so we leave on the first of July to go back, Chris is coming with me to run my first tour since 2019. And so it's a whole new world over there for us and particularly for the school, which has now moved on to its new land, we haven't even seen it, and some of our kids have left because they’ve grown up, they’ve moved on now. So that's where we're at.
I've introduced new itineraries into my tours and I now run about five different or six different tours, I've just got a women's tour coming out shortly just for women, which is going to be very, very exciting and fully immersive, learning all sorts of gorgeous things and supporting women's projects and things. So that’s it in a nutshell!
I have like a million questions but I just want to keep listening to you tell the stories because they're beautiful, how many kids are at your school now?
So we had up to 160 children and that was it, Tony had capped it at that. They start school at three years old in Kenya, full day, full days at school and they go to grade eight, or class eight and then move on to high school. Unfortunately while we were moving the school on to our new land, so the new plot of land is a wee way away, its a few kilometres away and so while Tony's been getting the new school set up, we're trying to get the funds together, the children have gone to other schools in the meantime and we're just hoping that they'll all come back, or most of them will. So at the moment he's got, I don't know how many, but we haven't got the full school roll back again yet. And as I say, some children have actually moved on now, because they've grown up and they'll be at high school, or some moved when COVID hit, some of the families moved back to the rural areas thinking it was safer to be back, and a lot of them haven't come back yet. So we're not quite sure how many we've got or how many are coming or how many won't be coming back, but we're in a new area so we'll get a whole lot of new kids as well. It's very basic but it works, it works beautifully.
I'd love you to help our audience understand how you're bringing this passion into business. You've told us what happened, it sounds like you just have lady luck on your shoulder and I'm certain it's not that, there's something about you, Denise, there's something about what you're doing that makes this possible. Do you have any ideas, the top three things that you recommend to someone who want to follow their passion into a business,
You just have to do it, you have to believe in yourself, you have to remove any barrier, because we are actually very capable of doing whatever we want to do. It's our mindset that stops us from doing things, I could easily have not done any of it.[d] In terms of the school, who in their right mind would have just created a school, we had never had that on our, and tourism as I said to you earlier, was never on my radar, I didn't know the first thing about it but I learned and I followed my passion, my intuition and I knew that I wanted people to see what I see and experience what I experience when I go to Africa every time I go. And I really wanted people, that to me is what travel is all about. We can all go on on tours and things and stay in hotels and resorts and things but that's not digging deep into a culture, it's not learning and experiencing a culture or the people that belong in that culture. And that is what my guests take away, all of them, from their tour experience. I mean, we've all grown up with preconceived ideas of Africa being scary and it's dark and what about the animals that are going to come and attack you in the middle of the night? And what about the people in this, the tribes and all of this. And it's really, that's what I love. Come with me and I'll show you, come with me and I'll show you what it's about. And that is where I get my drive from, showing people and how it changes their perception of Africa, and I've never had one person on any of my tours, who has not wanted to come back and is not planning to come back or wanting to get involved somehow, it just does something to people, and for me, offering my authentic experiences is just what changes people because they get to see the real thing. They make lifelong friends with local people, we get invited for Chai, it's someone's little tiny, two metre square house, it's their home, and we go and we do things like that. We're not bound by walls and pristine hotels and things like that.
It really makes me think it’s a humanity connection, very much human to human.
It is, it is. And I'm very driven by the whole, the passion and the love I have for the people and the place and like I say, the culture and everything, that's what drives me.
So when COVID hit I think I went into almost a mini depression I feel, now looking back, I don't think I did, but I felt it, I just felt like how dare this happen? And what about my people over there? Who's looking after them? Nobody, it was a really difficult time. And so for me, it was not just about losing my business and my income, which obviously shut down overnight but I was worried about those people over there. What about our school? Our school closed down for 12 months. All the schools in Kenya close for 12 months. How are our children going to be learning? So it was all of that behind it and I honestly couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. And I couldn't visualise me starting up my tours again, how is it going to look like, what's it going to be like over there? And then, probably this time last year, or towards the second half of the year, I started to realise that yeah maybe if I just put one tour out for this year, and see how it goes and just do some toe dipping. And that trip sold out, but I still remained with the one tour for this year and we're doing Kenya and Tanzania. But for next year I've opened a whole lot of tours, well when I say a whole lot, just four at the stage and there'll be another couple and that will be it for next year. But I’ve realised that people are travelling again and I'm so excited about it. But that's the other thing, it's definitely an emotional thing and a passion and I get excited about it and talk about it and that's what drives me.
Talking about entrepreneurial stuff, so last year, I think I probably was a bit tired of sitting at home twiddling my thumbs and feeling a little bit sorry for myself, which I thought ‘Get over it’ and I designed and launched a range of swimwear. I'm not kidding, made from recycled ocean waste.
Wow! I love it! That's perfect.
It is. It is. And I got really excited about it and I went fully into it. I did the designing, I researched all this fabric that's made in Italy and it's made from fishing nets and plastic bottles and it’s beautiful. And then I found a manufacturer in Bali that I loved because it’s just too expensive to get made in New Zealand and away I went and I launched it in September last year or October, just after me realising that I could actually start taking my tours, that my tours might kick in again. And so I was on this kind of… I had my swimwear, I had my tours, my tours, my tours, my tours, my swimwear, it just went down and I just completely lost interest in it. So now I have this swimwear brand, which I'm in the process of I’m probably going to sell when I get back to New Zealand, as a startup or just get rid of, I just don't have the drive for it. I did, but my tours in Africa…
That's where your heart is, that's where your heart is, it's so obvious. I'm sure there's hopefully somebody who listens to this podcast… there's a business potentially for sale, if you love swimwear and you're passionate about the environment, here you go. But actually, there's a whole business of buying businesses, people do that as well.
Yeah. So also I realised and somebody, one of the women actually in one of my networking groups, she said to me one day, Denise you thrive on setting up businesses or setting things up, I go fully into it, like with the swimwear there was no stopping me, no stopping me whatsoever. But once I've set it up, and my tour was simmering in the background again, that was kind of..
I'm smiling because me and Vicki are like that too, the setting up, the building, that's the best part, it's the most exciting part! We love working with startups and people who are at that stage because it's so exciting and fun, launching and building and all that work and research is just, it's so energising, so I totally get it.
So with my tours it was all a learning process for the first probably, well it always is, isn't it with your business, you're always growing and evolving. But obviously I realised that the things that I'm passionate about and love doing like creating the itineraries that I create beautiful community-based itineraries, I love doing that part of it. I love hosting the tours, the behind the scenes stuff, not quite so. That's just the way it is.
What about risk? Let's just talk about what’s your risk mindset because what you're doing is you're going all in. There's no Plan B. So what if it doesn't work out?
Yes. Risk doesn't feature very highly in my whole space. I do what I can. I do have a risk management set up, but at the end of the day, it is a risk. And I guess I rely a lot on my people in Kenya, and Tanzania and Uganda. I've got amazing, amazing guides and people over the years who I collaborate with them, they have their own risk management policies, we get together and talk about that, about the risks for example, even COVID, that’s a risk. If somebody gets hurt, or something happens, but it's just part of travel as well, there's risk in everything that you do. And so I can honestly say that initially when I took my first tour, I thought about it and had my risk management policy in place, but it never occurred to me that something could go wrong. It never has, nothing has ever gone wrong but yeah, it doesn't stop me, it’s not a barrier for me.
But then a whole pandemic comes and then we learn all about risk that happens to the world.
Lots and lots of lovely, wonderful people over there who look after us beautifully, I’ve never, ever ever, in all the times that I've gone and been in Africa, whether it be with a tour group or my life before then, and I was in Africa for three months every year. Never once have I encountered anything that made me scared or nervous, nothing ever, ever. I only ever had beautiful experiences and very well looked after, the people are beautiful, they very much look after us.
When you make those good local connections too, you will be looked after, they'll tell you to stay out of that area, you know what I mean? And that's the type of thing that people miss when they're just going as a tourist and they're staying at the hotel and they're maybe taking a tour or something, they miss that whole connection with real people who, when you build a connection and trust, makes all the difference. But that's the difference between travelling and being a tourist right? Being a traveller is a very different experience.
Exactly right. And what you said about when you have connections, and I have really strong connection, so does Chris my husband, over there and you're right, people, they look after us. We have an adopted son over there, who's an adult and he is incredibly protective as well, and not just as a person but everything about my business. He'll make sure he goes to the nth degree to make sure that this is right, that's right, that he goes and checks out all the AirBnB houses that I'm checking, researching online for where we're staying, or the camps, the safari camps, he will go and check them all out and ask all the questions. We have a lot of help. Couldn't do it on my own, no, but lucky I've got beautiful people over there, local people.
We can see that you’re a collaborator.
Yeah, definitely a collaborator. And I'm planning this year on collaborating with my tours to get some different collaborations going.
That's a superpower you have, that definitely is a superpower being someone who can make collaborations happen. So of course, we're called Resilient Entrepreneurs, we have to ask you, what does resilience means to you? We talked a lot about the resilience you've had to have over your incredible story but what does it mean to you, the word resilience.
It just means that I have this ability to be able to just get through challenges and I'll just make it happen. There's always challenges in businesses and you just have to be resilient and get through them and work through them and do what you have to do, or what you think you have to do to get through those challenges and come out the other end, otherwise, we will fail, our businesses would have.. we wouldn't last. I wouldn't have lasted in my business. I had to be resilient to do what I'm doing, I had to be resilient. And it comes down to risk as well, that you got to be resilient so that you're able to handle risk and things that might happen. With my business there was no doubt that I was going to restart my business and just power on through. And I think that's what it's about. Yeah, I just that's all part of that whole connection of emotion and passionate thing, and I think resilience comes into that for this business for me.
Totally different with my swimwear perhaps, I might not have been so resilient with different aspects of the business but I just feel like I'm bulletproof, in a way, for myself, I'm not talking about in terms of leading people on my tours, but just in terms of the business side of it. Things crop up all the time and you just have to find a way and learn whatever works and move on to the next thing.
I guess that's because your why is so strong, your why, your reason for doing it, your reason for being, you want it so badly that nothing will get in your way. Yet for the swimwear, it didn't happen that way because you didn't want it as badly.
Exactly.
And it's absolutely okay to let a business go. Another thing I think entrepreneurs they feel like they're a failure if they don't go all the way through with a business or if it doesn't work out, or their passion changes or something happens, but it's okay to make that - that's just another business decision. It's just a decision you make so that you can then go on to do the thing that is your passion. That is what your heart is leading you to do.
Denise, you are such an incredible inspiration, thank you so much for joining us. Your story is incredible. I could listen to you tell stories, I want to come over for dinner and have a nice bottle of wine and just listen to you tell your stories because I'm sure you've got 1000s of them. And I would like to go on record to say, I'm going to come on one of your tours, I don't know how, I'm in Bermuda but it's gonna happen. I want to take my kids, I've always wanted to take my kids to Africa and I don't know when or where but I think I know we're going to meet in person one day, and I'm really, really, really, really looking forward to that day.
I do have a family itinerary just in case.
I saw, I checked out your website, we'll put it in the show notes so people can have a poke and see for themselves, and it sounds absolutely magical and an incredible experience. And I too like to travel that way. I want my children travelling that way and I hope more people will travel that way, where you do go make connections, really live in the culture, understand it, feel the passion for it because that's when we connect with humanity and make an impact.
And thank you so much for giving me the opportunity. I love telling the story. Shout it from the rooftops and, that's another passion of mine, is sharing it.
Thank you Denise.
Thank you.
