Pedro the consultant

I have begun doing some business advising with one of my counterpart teachers, Francis.  She is a seamstress and makes school uniforms and various articles of clothing for people in my town.  Even though Francis is in her final semester in undergraduate studies for marketing (she already holds a biology degree) she has not applied any of her knowledge to her own business.  Her enterprise uses zero marketing (not even a sign that says she’s a seamstress), accounting (she estimates her costs and prices) or planning (no steps to take in the future).  Although this is not surprising as it is the usual in Nicaragua, it seems silly not to use her new skills to help grow her business.  Therefore, I’ve started helping Francis put this knowledge in action.  Yesterday we discussed supply and demand for her products.  In general, Francis has more demand than she can handle since the business is comprised of only her and her aging mother.  So we came up with three potential solutions: increase production by hiring an employee or buying an industrial grade machine; or decrease demand by increasing her prices.  While this all seems fairly basic, it is difficult to make a decision about one’s business and measure the success of it without any sort of performance indicators.  Therefore, bring on the accounting!  We created statement of cash flows in Excel to monitor the income and expenses of Francis’ business overtime.  (For those of you who think financial statements are a different language, it is a spreadsheet that includes the date, description of transaction, starting balance, money entering or leaving and ending balance.)  I even made it fancy by including formulas to automatically do the mathematics so all she has to do is enter the numbers (are you proud mom??).

I’m going to meet with her next week to evaluate how she is spending her money and dig deeper into, yup you guessed it, fixed and variable costs!  How exciting!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Thursday and Friday were the local business plan competitions at my highschools!  That means I’ve spend the last couple weeks writing support letters, meeting with business and city officials and revising countless business plans.  Despite numerous last minute changes everything went great.  I raised almost $70 dollars and tons of school supplies for the winning teams.  In the competitions, 21 groups participated from 5 different highschools.  I’m sending 4 teams to the regional competition which will be October 30^th.  The winners’ business products were: a snow cone, a floor disinfectant, a perfume and a mayonnaise.  Nothing revolutionary but the perfume and disinfectant are good and stand a chance of making it to the national competition.

It would be a business plan competition without dancing!

The winning team, judges and I

A week from today is the business fundraising gala in Managua.  Can’t wait to ir de marcha with my fellow volunteers!

Michelle visits again x3!

Peter: Hola Michelle! Welcome to Nica part 4. The theme to this blog posting is random moments of awesomeness from the past week

Michelle: Saturday, after I arrived, we enjoyed a totally first-world day-date in Managua. We drank a bottle of wine and ate some great food at a fachenta tapas restaurant, and then we went and saw Ted in a movie theater (this time without bats!). We bought yet another bottle of wine at the fancy grocery store and drank it while catching up on first-world TV shows.

Michelle and I's table of food

Peter: Sunday night, Michelle and I adventured out (to the restaurant adjoined to our hotel) in Somoto.  For those of you not familiar with Nicaraguan culture, Sunday is Fun Day for the locals.  It’s the day to drink that cheap rum and forget about tomorrow’s workday.  Anywho, there was a lively crowd at the restaurant and, in particular, one drunk gentleman.  Said hombre went to the DJ and requested Gangnam Style (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, for shame) and proceeded to do a near perfect duplicate dance.  Impressive!

Peter: The following morning, we were on the bus and heard an interesting radio advertisement.  “Drink coffee and sleep with a woman for $80”….WHAT?!  Did I translate that correctly?  Afterwards, they went into the fine print.  Yes indeed, for only 80 American dollars, you can drink coffee with the beautiful woman of your choosing and take a nap with her (nothing more scandalous is permitted).  As a human being, I find this somewhat obscene and distasteful but the business volunteer charged with encouraging creative businesses wants to give them a “thanks for trying” high-five.

Michelle: The next day, we went to the Canyon de Somoto with an 18-year-old Nicaraguan guide. We hiked along the river, and then boated down it until we reached the canyon. We then ‘extreme hiked’ (Pete can vouch that yes, I was not only being outdoorsy, but extremely outdoorsy) up and down some boulders lining the river until we reached the actual canyon. Pete has visited multiple times, but I was incredibly impressed – maybe one of the prettiest things I have ever seen! The river is as little as 20 feet wide in some places, bordered on either side by massive, tall rock walls. We donned our life vests and swam upstream against the current until we reached a resting place (had to claw our way up a boulder against a very strong current to get there, though – ay! Luis Miguel kept laughing at our gringo-ness). Afterwards, we jumped back in the water and floated with the current downstream. The only thing missing was cans of Tona…

As a special note, I wore Pete’s gym shoes for this adventure. For those of you unaware, Pete has tiny, lady feet and I have mannish, clown feet, so we have practically the same size feet :P

Extreme hiking!

Peter/Michelle: Esteli (a biggish town within an hour of Pete’s site) just got a super-mega-nice grocery store. The past two nights, the same check-out girl has ringed up our purchases (each night, a bottle of Gato Negro red for a reasonable 145 C$...though we are only averaging one bottle per night, there was judgment in her eyes). Tonight, we added bread, cheese and salami, and persuaded the hotel staff to let us eat our grocery store food in the nice hotel dining room/restaurant.  The conversation went as follows:

Pedro:  “Pardon, we’re guests here.  Do you mind if we eat this food that we bought at the super market here in the restaurant?”

Confused Nica:  “So you want to eat your food in our restaurant without ordering anything?”

Pedro:  “That’s it, exactly”

Confused Nica:  “…(indignant face)…”

Pedro:  “Of course we’re willing to pay a corking fee.”

Confused Nica:  “Sounds good to me.”

Michelle: Tomorrow we’re heading south to the fancy all-inclusive resort (biggest pool in Latin America!). We’ll be too busy drinking rum and getting sunburned on the beach to write again – so adios for now!

Education System

Tim and Donna wanted to know how different a Central American education is from the education I received.  First let’s start with the classroom:

One of my nicer classrooms

As you can probably notice, there are no projectors, smart boards, overheads, or air conditioning.  In the course of a standard class (45 minutes scheduled but it’s always less) it can go from 90+ degrees to deafeningly loud from rain.  Only 2 of my 5 schools has internet and only one has a computer lab of 12 computers running Window XP.  My smallest class has 10 students and my largest is 42.

Class room materials are stark.  There are no textbooks for the students and in fact some teachers don’t have text books either.  Anytime anything needs to be photocopied, students or teachers need to pay.  Most recently, I witnessed students have to pay to take an exam.

Importance placed on education is low.  This stems from several sources.  First, many adults didn’t attend high school so they don’t care if their children do.  In fact, before the start of every school year it’s the teachers’ responsibility to visit every family in the city and register students for classes.  Additionally, teachers are poorly compensated.  Nicaraguan educators are the lowest paid in Latin America earning around $200/month.  Not to mention, the teachers lack the education and resources that American teachers have.  Only about half of my counterparts hold a college degree.  To make matters even more difficult, the Ministry of Education has decreed that we are not allowed to expel students.  This lack of consequences for misbehavior compounded with the shortage of opportunities for high school graduates creates a sense of complacency among both students and teachers.

Higher education is also quite different from my college experience.  With only the few public universities holding admission tests, college is available to anyone willing to pay.  Unfortunately, this is not always a wise investment since finding a career in one’s field of study is below 60%.

While all of these revelations are disheartening, don’t lose hope!  There are simple changes that can be implemented, such as classroom management, which I hope to do next year.  Also, all of these issues place more importance on the entrepreneurship course that I’m teaching.  If even a few of my hundreds of students can learn some business skills, it will provide an alternative to a life in the status quo.