Just to recap, we’re trying desperately to get copies of the French edition of Dov’s book to Niger in time for meetings with potential partners the first week of February.  After running a marathon for the last 2 years to translate, layout and print the French edition, we are feet away from the finish line!

It’s now 9 am in Tel Aviv on Monday, January 26th and 10 copies of Prospérité Agricole en Afrique Sèche are sitting at the publisher’s front desk.  FedEx informs us that if the books are picked up in Tel Aviv Monday afternoon, they will arrive in New Jersey Wednesday morning just in time to take on our flight leaving the next day.  What could be easier, right?  WRONG!

For FedEx to pick up the package at the publisher’s office we need to prepare a label in advance.  But we don’t have a FedEx account and after hours talking with the FedEx Help Desk and online at the FedEx website it’s becoming clear we won’t be able to create one.  We ask the publisher if he has a FedEx account and can prepare the label on his end.  After all, he must ship books all over the world.  We don’t quite understand his answer to the question, but he makes it clear his business is book publishing, not international shipping.  (With 20/20 hindsight we expect this was the voice of experience talking.)  

Another day goes by.  It’s now Tuesday, January 27th and we’re running out of time to ship the books to the US.  So, we move to Plan B – ship them directly to Africa.  You may think this should have been our obvious choice from the start, but shipping to Africa is never as easy as it sounds.  DHL is the best choice for shipping to Niger, so we begin working with them.  We call the DHL Help Desk in the US and ask how to arrange for the delivery.  We learn it’s a simple matter once we have a DHL account and an international importing license.  This should only take 3-5 business days to set up!

We then call DHL Israel and ask if there isn’t a way to create a shipping label without an account and license.  “No problem,” they say.  “You just need to use the DHL Israel website: DHL.co.il”.   We immediately log onto the local system and start inputting the pick-up and delivery information.  All is going really well until we get to the payment screen.  We input our credit card information, but the system won’t accept it.  There’s an option to use PayPal but the system won’t accept that either.  Could be a problem with using an international rather than Israeli credit card.  Or it could be that the system has no intention of shipping to Niger.

In hopes that it’s the former, we call our friend Joanne Moore noontime Eastern time/ 8 pm Tel Aviv time.  As you may recall, Joanne is the newest member of the EPN Board and just happens to live in Tel Aviv.  We explain the situation and Joanne immediately agrees to help.  So we send her all the pickup and delivery information.  “It should only take 10 minutes to enter it on the website and print out a label,” I say, still not fully grasping what we’re up against.

At 7 am Wednesday morning EST, I see an email from Joanne in my inbox.  She has spent several frustrating hours at the website and with 4 different people from the DHL Help Desk and still cannot generate a shipping label.  She is pretty sure the sad truth is that we need to put the books on a slow boat to the US where we’ll pick them up after we return from Africa and put them on a slow boat to Niger.  But she has written a blistering online complaint to the Director of DHL Israel saying it’s a sad commentary that they can’t find a way to pick up a package at Point A in Tel Aviv and deliver it to Point B in Niger.  It’s supposed to be their core competency after all.

Well, that did the trick!  Barely 15 minutes after sending the complaint letter, Joanne receives the shipping documents and forwards them to the publisher.  DHL shows up at the publisher’s office that afternoon and on Friday morning we receive these photos from our partner in Niger.  Books delivered!!