Making Plans

This week our focus was on planning our remaining classes, teaching, and scheduling a time to visit each project before we leave -- we've been very busy! Time has flown by and we only have two work weeks left! We're determined to pack in as much as we can to these last weeks, and a big part of that is helping our students compile their rough draft business plan.

We're compiling business plans by giving homework that specifically outlines details they will need for their complete plan. We then collect and review their homework, and place it in a folder for each individual project. By the time we leave, they will have information on the history of their business or business idea, the market they are entering, their competition, their goals for growth, and their differentiation plans. We're really excited because these folders will help the next interns understand each project and hopefully allow them to jump right into teaching and working with each idea! Many of the ideas great and we want to help DanPer's workers accurately and successfully capture their idea on paper.

Another important task we have before we leave is to visit each project and write a summary of how they are currently doing. This summary will help the coming interns get acquainted with our current projects and their successes and difficulties. We visited five businesses this week, and each of them are looking great! We're working with the receipts for a few of these projects to help them understand more clearly their income and expenses.

One issue we're working to resolve is having workers in the field bring their "socio" or partner. Because the program is offered to workers at DanPer, both in the factory and in the fields, the participants are required to have a partner to help them manage the business. DanPer doesn't want to lose it's best workers when they become entrepreneurs, but it still wants to help them take the initiative to better their lives. Partners are a very important part of the program and we need them to be at every class, because their input and learning are just as vital as the workers.

Not all of our workers in the fields have partners that are coming each lesson, and this is something we've been working on. We're trying to impress upon them that if they don't take the structure of the program seriously, it may be hard for their business plan to be approved without anyone available to run their business! We'll keep working on this until we leave, and we already had some new faces in our Friday class, so we are optimistic they'll all find partners.

Overall, we're very excited to see business plans coming together!! As our time here gets shorter we've made a list of things to do and people we need to see before we leave Trujillo. We love being here, and we're going to pack these next two weeks with everything we want to accomplish!

Works in Progress

This week was a busy week for us. Our classes are in full session and we are teaching in two different places four times a week. It has been great for us and we are loving it so far. We are still in the early stages of the classes and we are getting to know the people better, but we are already seeing several people who have great ideas for projects and who are very willing to work hard in order to receive a loan further on so they can start their projects.
                     
  Monday and Thursday are the days we have decided to teach in the main Danper plant here in Trujillo. We have a group of about 60 people who signed up for the class, but usually about 40 or so show up. This group is great and they are very participative and there are several of them who have great ideas for businesses. They have completed Phase One of the teaching material and they have already turned in 2 homework assignments which are helping us the determine how to teach them and how we can custom make our classes in order to teach them what they really need to know.

 Tuesdays and Fridays are dedicated to teaching in Compositan, which also involves a lot of traveling. We first take a taxi to a certain part of town where we them get on a bus that takes us to a neighboring town about an hour away called Viru. From Viru we have a special transportation van that takes us another 25 minutes through a few little towns but eventually gets to where we give our classes. We teach in an auditorium made out of wood beams and tarps, it may not sound like a lot but it gets the job done. We borrow a projector and have 2 bed sheets tied together to make a screen for it to project onto. In Compositan we have only had one class with about 20 people. The people are very quiet which makes it hard to know if they are understanding, but none the less we are still happy and excited to advance with them and their projects as well. We may have to teach at a different pace with this group, but we are sure it will all turn out fine.

  A little side note, this week our house got fumigated once again because the bugs that were biting me got passed on to Katrina as well, so to stop them finally we had the whole apartment sprayed on Friday afternoon. Katrina and I got to spend our weekend in a hotel here in Trujillo and enjoy a much needed mini vacation. We are both back in the apartment now and I am no longer sleeping on the couch. Now we wait and see if the bugs come back, lets hope they don't!

Our First Classes!

This week was excellent! We finally got everything in order and to the point where we could start our classes and that is exactly what we did. We were able to spend a few days at DanPer notifying all of the workers that had been chosen and getting them passes so that their family members could enter into the plant. It was a pretty stressful situation because we had to locate over 30 workers, but it was all worth it on Thursday night.

Thursday night we had our Opening class where we congratulated all of the workers that were accepted and we were able to explain a few of the basics of the program and what we were going to expect from them. Elena did most of the explaining, but Katrina and I got our chance to talk and introduce ourselves, as well as a Alejandro and Javier who are two important leaders in DanPer.

We had about 50 people there, so not all of the workers showed up, but we were happy with the outcome and we are excited to finally get things moving. We will have our first teaching class tonight where we will go over the basics of loaning and our policy of what we expect from them and how the loans will function.

The class preparation took up most of our week, but we were still able to keep up with a few of our business. Rudth is still pricing a few things and getting things figured out to the point that we can start getting her some money. She is working super hard to cut cost and find ways that she can provide us with collateral. She is great and a super hard worker so we know she can do it and we help in all that we can.

This Friday was a holiday so we didn't have to work! We took it easy most of the day but were lucky enough to get invited to a Halloween party with a couple of American church members where we ate sugar cookies and played some fun games. It was for sure the highlight of our long weekend.

 

Reassesments

   This week we were all sorts of excited to get started up with our classes, we already have the list of the people who have been accepted so all we needed to do was set a time and place and we were good to go. Unfortunately, there has been a few problems with some of our past loan recipients that have caused another set back. Elena, our supervisor, and the leaders at DanPer have all been looking at recent occurrences and have decided that now would be a good time to reassess our loan policy and rewrite a few of our rules and guidelines. This really is a smart thing to do because there we a couple things that really did need to be changed, so after several meeting this week we have somewhat come to a conclusion as to what the changes will be and what our new requirements will be and how exactly our loaning process will be.

   We were able to go talk with a few of our projects this week, one of which was Bertha. Bertha has had her internet business up and running for a little more than a month now and is already seeing the fruits of it! Her sales were great and she kept her costs very low. We were able to sit down with her and decide her payment plan as well and she will be making her first payment here within the next couple of days. Bertha and her family are extremely excited and we are very proud of her as well and the great effort she is making to make here business successful.

   Our first class presentation is all ready and we are ready to teach! this Wednesday should be our first class and we are super excited for it! we cant wait to finally do what we were sent here to do which is teach. We have been set back a little bit but we are going to make the most out of our time and teach all we can in the time we have.

   We had a fun weekend as well. We visited a place we had heard about called the Laguna of Conache. After about an hour on two different busses we were able to arrive to this really cool little secluded body of water where the sun was beaming and we could take it easy. We ate a delicious water side meal and finished it off with some sandboarding on a nearby dune! It was a really neat experience for both of us.