Just finished tech week. It was a blast! I went with a few of my Community Economic Development friends to San Francisco de Palmera, San Carlos Costa Rica. Don´t bother trying to find it on google earth. It´s small enough to not be on there. For those who know the geography of Costa Rica it´s about 4 hours north of San Jose by bus, one of which is down a gravel road.
Once there we met with Isa, one of the volunteers from Tico 24. They have been in site a year but Isa has only been in this site a few months due to a transfer. I was lucky enough to stay with the President of the local Empresa de Credito or EC.(Think of it as a bank for the poor or community bank) It was a special treat for me because I´ve been considering the posibility of working with or creating a similar EC when we get to our permanent site. If you have read ¨world without poverty¨ by Muhammed Yunis you get the idea. She´s a wonderful woman and a great local entrepreneur who has set up an American clothing store in the front of her house and funds a lot of the local businesses in the area. She has three boys in high school to boot and her husband works in another city.
Gabe and I taught Shirley, the treasurer of the EC how to use microsoft excel to do her book keeping. She had been using it for years but someone had set it up for her and not taught her how to use the equation functions so we showed her how she could use the program to auto update all cells when she creates an input. I thought she was going to kiss Gabe when she figured out how much time she would save. Gabe is going to be a rockstar in my opinion. Like most of the other volunteers he is young, in his early twenties but he already has fortune 500 experience and has pretty fluent Spanish. He can also run a 4 and a half minute mile.
We also conducted a DICE tool with another local business. We interviewed one of the local sodas (restaurants) using this business analysis tool. We were working with another volunteer James and the owners. James has 20 years experience with sales and when Gabe started into the questions James immediately picked up on their body language and could tell they were uncomfortable. I thought it was great that he pointed that out to Gabe and I and we settled down into a series of icebreaker questions.
I think the happiest moment of the week was working with a micro entrepreneur who had her own cake business. Two other volunteers, Chris, and Andrew and I guided her through the process of a SWOT analysis. She listed as one of her weaknesses 'fear' and we took it upon ourselves to explore the sources of that fear which led through failure, lack of money and lack of customers to the idea that more advertising would be advantageous for her business. We told her that fear is a normal part of starting a new business and that it is usually a good motivator to get entrepreneurs to adapt to their environment. Hopefully she takes that to heart and stays on the move.
Site assignments are next Friday! Wish us luck!
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