Finding success by serving others
Walmart’s foes are at it again this holiday season, looking to disparage the company with misinformation and publicity stunts that harm the workers the organization claims to help.
Familiar claims about low wages, not enough hours and poor working conditions are largely baseless, but that doesn’t stop the organization called Our Walmart from trotting out current and former workers with tales of woe about going hungry and relying on government assistance programs to eke out a meager existence. Surely Walmart can afford to pay more, the group claims, because it’s the most profitable corporation in the world (shareholders wish) and the Walton family is rich. To draw attention to the perceived plight of its members, the group resorted to a new low this season by organizing a series of fasting events in the belief that going without solid food for a few days would prompt Walmart to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The absurdity of this effort and the sense of entitlement of protesters really hit home after meeting an interesting young Walmart employee named Sery Kone. He joined Walmart earlier this year as a staff auditor after earning a finance degree, while attending Brigham Young University in Hawaii. If Kone sounds like someone from a privileged background, nothing could be further from the truth.
Kone was a child slave in Africa (you read that correctly) from the age of 5 until he turned 11, and escaped from forced labor on a cocoa farm in the Ivory Coast. How someone goes from squalor, hunger and regular beatings to auditing the finances of the world’s largest company is an amazing story of survival, overcoming hardship, discovering faith, serving others and embracing the principles of free enterprise as a way to make a difference in the world.
The few paragraphs available here can’t do Kone’s story justice, but here’s the condensed version. After his parents divorced, Kone’s father dumped him in a rural African village where he was taken in by a woman who provided shelter and meager nourishment, so long as Kone journeyed miles each day with no shoes to work on the cocoa farm. If he didn’t go to work, he was beaten. If he rested when he wasn’t supposed to, he was beaten. He was never paid.
Around the age of eight, after he and a younger child were beaten more severely than normal, Kone said he realized the situation wasn’t right. When the woman in the village died a few years later, Kone ran away to a neighboring village and jumped on a bus headed for the sprawling coastal city of Abidjan. He was 11 years old and running away to a city of 5 million people, intent on reuniting with his mother. With no money to pay the bus fare, the driver denied him passage until a stranger ponied up the fare so the rest of the passengers could get underway.
Once in Abidjan, Kone lived on the streets for weeks until finding an orphanage that provided shelter, but nothing else. Soon, he found a way to make money by carrying women’s bags in the market until a random encounter on the streets reunited Kone with an uncle, who informed him his mother was dead.
The uncle was a teacher, so Kone began attending school, but the death of his mother and six years of forced labor had made him an angry teenager. The key turning point in his life came when he met a preacher with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Kone became a Mormon, soon began doing well in school and said he realized he had potential and could dream big. Before those big dreams could be realized, Kone went to the Congo at the age of 19 to perform two years of service as required by the Mormon faith. While there, he saw even worse poverty and child slavery than in his home country.
When he returned to the Ivory Coast, Kone sought admittance to BYU, and with the help of another stranger and the money he saved, he was finally accepted after his application was rejected three times. Within a week of arriving on the BYU Hawaii campus, another turning point happened when Kone discovered Enactus, or Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), as the entrepreneurial organization was known at the time. He eventually became president of the BYU-Hawaii chapter and led a team that developed an innovative program to break the cycle of forced child labor in his home country. Kone’s team developed a program to inspire women to become entrepreneurs through micro-financing, and taught cocoa farmers to pollinate crops through beekeeping to increase their production and income so they wouldn’t be as dependent on the labor of young children who could then go to schools.
Kone’s team was named the Enactus United States National Champion at an event earlier this year in St. Louis. That put Kone on Walmart’s radar because the retailer is a major and longtime supporter of the organization and is involved in judging at the national Enactus event where teams from around the country compete. Kone had several interviews with Walmart representatives and then he and his team gave a presentation at Walmart’s Saturday morning meeting held the day after the retailer’s annual shareholders’ meeting.
After Enactus chairman and CEO Alvin Rohrs mentioned Kone was a recent graduate, Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon made it clear Kone was someone the company needed to hire. And why not? What company wouldn’t want to hire an individual as talented and selfless as Kone, who, unlike those protesting Walmart, doesn’t believe the world owes him anything, knows what it means to experience true hunger and continues to find ways to make a difference in the lives of others.