A Close- up Look At People Who Matter : Printer Makes an Imprint on African Firm

The seal was broken, and the chemicals inside--costing at least $25, a lot of money to a print shop in Malawi--were diluted, worthless.

The production supervisor, merely shrugged. But that was not good enough, Sy Feerst told him.

“Go back and either you get your money back, or get a new gallon with an unbroken seal,” demanded Feerst, a Woodland Hills businessman who founded a printing business in 1976, which still exists in Canoga Park. “The next day, he came back with a smile on his face and a sealed container. I was so proud of him.”

Feerst, 65, is a volunteer executive with the International Executive Service Corps, an arm of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He spent six weeks in January and February in the city of Blantyre, in Malawi, a southeast African nation and one of the poorest countries on the globe.

P.Q. Stationery Supplies, behind an old warehouse and reached only by a rutted-out dirt road, was the company that Feerst had been assigned to advise on good business practices. In a country with high prices, short life expectancies, a staggering infant mortality rate and rampant corruption, Feerst and his wife, Gloria, were often surrounded by beggars.

Feerst did a double take the first time he saw locals scooping their daily meal--flying termites--out of the air.

The print shop had no business cards, a basic important marketing tool. The camera and plate burner were inadequate, and the shop did not even have a T-square, a vital tool used by printers to ensure that copy is straight.

But when the rains knocked out the phone, Feerst discovered his real problem.

“What happens now?” Feerst asked.

“Oh, it’ll get fixed,” he was told. But that was not good enough for him.

Summoning his “Type-A Californian” business skills, he used his hotel phone to daily harangue the phone company until it made the repair.

“This is a company that employs 18 people who are important to the local economy,” Feerst said, echoing his words to telephone officials and repeatedly driving his index finger into a table to show how he reinforces a point. “I want that sucker fixed.”

Two and a half weeks later, the phone was finally repaired, but two days later was out again. This time, Feerst stormed out of the building and caught a nearby telephone repair man.

“I said, ‘You tell your boss our phones are out again and Mr. Feerst is very angry,’ ” Feerst said. The phone was repaired that day. The point was not so much about getting phone service, but to show the Africans--most of whom were only one or two generations from life in the bush--how to be assertive and survive in the business world.

Which is why the production supervisor’s success in getting that bottle of chemicals was so important.

“Malawaians are going to have to learn to be assertive,” Feerst said. “But it’s a pity because they are so nice and sweet and gentle.”

Feerst describes himself as a “Peace Corps wannabe” who was envious of his son, Adam, when Adam got a Peace Corps assignment to Nepal in 1989-90.

He became a volunteer executive last year and his first assignment was to help a business in Moldova, one of the newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union. There, he found a monument to a pogrom, an officially sanctioned massacre of 55 Jews in 1903, which had prompted his own ancestors to flee the region for Palestine.

He has kept in touch with the friends he made in Moldova, just as he hopes to stay in touch with the Malawian company. He is curious to find out what long-lasting impact--if any--he has had. “I’m egotistical enough,” he said.

“If I got one Malawian to do this,” Feerst said, displaying his technique of driving his finger downward to emphasize a point, “and do it so it works, I figure I’ve done a significant thing.”

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