Bob could not afford to pay wages now, so he could only go into business with someone else. There was no better choice than Li Laite, his old middle-school friend.
But Li Laite had his own concerns. As a poor student produced by East Africa's low-cost compulsory education, he had wasted most of his time at school, so he still hoped to find a stable job.
Li Laite had been assigned work as a furniture factory worker. It was not much better than Bob's job at the flax textile mill, but Li Laite considered himself fairly capable of enduring hardship and hard work. After all, in East African secondary education, students' physiques were all above the passing line. Though they could not compare with the child laborers in Europe who had been forced to work from a young age due to family circumstances and the like, they would not become bookworms unable to lift with their hands or carry on their shoulders.
This was actually easy enough to understand. East Africa's poor education system had low costs for developing physical education; it did not even require textbooks, nor did it need PE teachers of particularly high caliber. With fewer class hours, lax management, and ample sleep, most students were very healthy.
So Li Laite said, "I feel like I'm better suited to working at the furniture factory. After all, I don't have your hands-on skills. The furniture factory work may be a little more tiring, but it's stable. There's no need to blindly toss ourselves around."
Bob advised, "But there's little room for advancement too. Without connections, it's hard to rise above the crowd. Starting a business with me is different. We'd be our own bosses, free to allocate our time, and however much we earn would depend entirely on