Young entrepreneurs

'Tis the season for Somos Emprendedores, Somos Perú (we are entrepreneurs, we are Peru), the comprehensive course on writing your own business plan that every volunteer in the Community Economic Development program offers in their sites at the end of their first year. This means that my Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for the next couple months are occupied by teaching my ten or so jóvenes ages 16-24 about every aspect of starting and running your own business.

As my academic studies have never gone remotely near the realm of an MBA, a lot of the concepts I'm teaching I first formally learned during Peace Corps training last summer - from qualities of an entrepreneur, to feasibility studies, market valoration, client profiling, mission and vision, cost analysis, point of equilibrium, budget projections, customer service, operations plans, and environmental impact - in Somos, we cover it all. But, seeing as we're operating in rural Peru with youth who are new to the idea of business, we teach each topic in the most basic and most understandable way possible.

Peace Corps has developed a whole textbook/manual and curriculum for the Somos course (this is where I go to figure out, for example, how in the world you go about calculating the value of a market). However, having the outline of a lesson plan is not the same as being ready to teach a class - I always end up tweaking the official lesson to suit my own style of teaching, and the manual does not come with any pre-prepared materials. Consequently, on any given Monday or Wednesday afternoon, my desk typically looks like this:

The above explosion is what class prep looks like - powerpoint is never invited to the party. I write definitions and draw diagrams on butcher paper, make ridiculously bad drawings to help illustrate points, and create the props needed for the student-centered dinámicas (activities) that are the best part of every class. Without fail, preparing for the class takes equally as long or longer as does teaching the class itself. It makes me wonder how full-time teachers ever have enough time in their days!

I'm currently about a third of the way through the course, and it's been a lot of fun so far - the kids who come to class are really excited about starting their own businesses and it's clear they are getting a lot out of the course. Once we finish the class, the students will present their completed business plans, and I'll pick the best one to bring to Lima for the national SESP competition held at the U.S. Embassy. Each volunteer brings their best students, they all present their ideas to a panel of judges, and five or six will walk away with the seed money they need to actually start their businesses. The free trip to Lima and getting to visit the Embassy function as pretty cool consolation prizes :)

Hobbies

The Peace Corps lifestyle leaves ample time for hobbies: I think it's the combination of the volunteer's non-traditional work schedule with the exciting social scene of a rural Peruvian town where you are (almost) the only gringa. If you don't have a hobby, you might die of boredom before month two in site.

My Peace Corps hobbies include learning guitar, crocheting a variety of barely-useful items, running enough to contemplate training for a half marathon but never actually doing it, keeping this blog, hiking, and reading. Having the time to read for fun was something I actively looked forward to about Peace Corps, and the experience has not let me down. I read so much here, that I've realized I have a slight chance of being able to finish 100 books by the time I leave Peru. To make things more interesting, I've decided to make it a bit of a challenge/goal - check out the blog's new book nook if you want to track my progress. We'll see how close I get :)

Spanglish

Clever t-shirt (translation: that moment when you start to think in two languages at the same time)

I have serious struggles when I have to speak in 100% English. Luckily, almost anytime I'm speaking English in Peru, I'm talking to other volunteers. This means Spanglish is a totally normal means of communication, and it makes life so much easier! Whichever language's version of the word pops into your head first, that's the one you say - no filter necessary. When I'm talking to friends or family back home, it's not so easy; there's always a good number of two-second-extra long pauses while I try to figure out what word I'm looking for in English. Particularly when talking about work, there are Peace Corps-related words that I use in Spanish all the time, but that I never used in my day-to-day English life so I have to rummage deep in the back of my native vocabulary to find them.

Two Peru's

When you look at Peru compared to other Peace Corps countries, for example those in sub-Saharan Africa, my South American home definitely looks like the "posh corps." I mean, there are more than 30 Starbucks in this country - almost all are in Lima, but still, you can't exactly call Peru third-world. In fact, the World Bank has recently classified Peru as an "upper-middle-income economy." So what is Peace Corps doing here? We're here because, in reality, there are two Peru's: Lima, and non-Lima. And life doesn't look so rosy for the majority of Peruvians if you split the overall statistics down this key division and take a closer look. I came across this recent op-ed today, which does a nice job of summarizing why putting Peru in the "developed" category of countries would be a horrible mistake. Here's an excerpt:

"Peru is booming. Largely spared by the global financial crisis, its economy grew by 9.8% in 2008, 6.3% last year. Peru is an enviable fount of gold, silver, copper, fish, agriculture. Its capital is alive with foreign investment. Its cuisine is among the most celebrated in the world. Visit Lima, and you see a city abuzz with shops, restaurants, and a robust new middle class. Visit Cuzco or Machu Picchu, and you cannot help but note the five-star destinations.

"But look around more, and you see two Peru's: effervescent Lima, 9 and a half million strong, and the 20 million more who live outside it. While the poverty rate in Lima fell to 15.7% in 2011 from 44.8% in 2004, the rural Andes and Amazon languish in nearly feudal conditions. According to the World Bank, a citizen of Lima earns 21 times more than a resident of the outback, where the rural poverty rate is a staggering 54%. To make matters worse, it is a starkly racial problem: the poor are the dark-skinned indigenous, the rich, getting richer, are mostly white."

English teaching dilemmas

Being the only three native English speakers in the Cajabamba area, and given that every Peruvian schoolchild is required to learn the language, Jess, Katy and I are constantly receiving requests to teach English. Sometimes it's adults who want us to offer an English class so they can practice. Sometimes it's parents wanting to give their child the extra advantage of some one-on-one tutoring sessions with the gringa - when we say no, they even offer to pay us, and after twenty minutes of explaining the concept of "volunteer," they go off still a little disappointed that we don't want to spend our afternoons teaching their seven year-old. And other times it's the local teachers or principals who trap you in their office and literally continue talking/pleading/convincing you to teach their English classes for them until you say some form of yes that is satisfying enough to them while still leaving you with a way to get out of it later - those times are the worst.

While teaching English is something I enjoy, in the right context, it's not one of Peace Corps' main goals. Nor, in my view, is it the most sustainable use of my time here. For these reasons, I have yet to teach English in any structured way in Cajabamba - this also gives me the advantage that I can continue to use the white lie "my program doesn't allow me to teach English" to help me deflect incoming requests to teach. However, the exception to this rule is working with the local English teachers.

This past Friday and Saturday, we three volunteers offered a two-day workshop open to all the teachers in charge of English at Cajabamba's elementary and high schools. If we help improve these educators' abilities to effectively teach English, we are impacting more students than we possibly could just by offering English classes ourselves - the sustainability factor goes up by about 100%.

The whole group with their certificates at the end of the workshop

It is an unfortunate fact that while English is a government-mandated part of the school curriculum, the teachers assigned to teach the subject are often woefully underprepared to do so. Among the twenty or so teachers that came to our workshop, I'd say that about three are really qualified to be teaching English. The most glaring deficiency is pronunciation: in rural Peruvian schools, the vicious cycle is that teachers with poor English abilities represent the students' only access point to the language, so all the mispronunciations in the teacher's repertoire are going to be passed on to the next generation.

But this problem is structural, and does not reflect a lack of goodwill or effort on the part of the teachers (at least, not usually). The group at our workshop were extremely excited to have face time with three real-live English speakers for two days. While they listened attentively to our suggestions for how to make classes more dynamic and guidelines on teaching methods (the stated main purpose of the workshop), they were equally interested to just sit and practice pronouncing basic vocabulary in a repeat-after-me call and response fashion.

Practicing the classic food vocab activity: pretending to order off a restaurant menu

The workshop left me with mixed feelings. On one side, I am now more aware of the reality of the low level of English instruction in Peruvian schools, and is a bit disheartening to realize the true extent of the problem. But on the other hand, the teachers are excited to have the opportunity to improve their English skills, which in turn will give the students a better learning experience. Their eager participation in the workshop and their interest in continuing to work with us over the course of the school year gives me hope that, step by step, the system can improve.

Food for thought

Reading Mark Bittman's most recent op-ed on the prevalence of processed food in the typical American grocery store and, consequently, diet, I was struck by what now seems like a very obvious fact about my life in Cajabamba: I eat almost zero processed food. Judging by the fact that I failed to consciously realize this until now, it's clear that I do this without much active effort on my part.

Once I started thinking about it, it wasn't hard to explain. Instead of shopping at a U.S. grocery store, I buy almost all my food at an open-air market where local producers bring their fruit/veggies/legumes/meat to sell every day.

The peas I eat are sold fresh, not in frozen plastic bags. The meat I buy is never packaged or processed in any way; it's simply butchered and placed for sale on the meat counter's slab of stone. I don't have to open a can in order to cook beans; here they come out of big brown sacks and I usually have to pick out some pebbles and wood chips before I throw them in the pot. Our honey doesn't have any additives, my host dad takes it out of the hives and brings it home in a plastic tupperware. The flour we use at my house is made from wheat brought in from the farm and ground at the mill a few blocks away. All the bread is fresh-baked, and the milk goes straight from the udder into the bucket that the milk lady then brings by our house - both of these are thus bought on a daily basis. Of course I'll buy the occasional bag of pasta or bar of corporate chocolate, but in truth Cajabamba's norm is just local, fresh food. Now that I think about it, that's pretty cool.

Bank bonanza

In the past week, I have facilitated the first savings rounds of three community banks, hooray! Seeing as it's been almost eight months since I started talking about community banks with potential counterparts in my site, I'm extremely excited that all the talking is finally coming to fruition.

A community bank is a group of people (most often women) who decide to save money together, and from the accumulated savings, give/take out small loans among themselves. Although it's quite a simple concept, it's a very powerful financial tool that is awesome because it a) gets people in the habit of saving (not common in Peru), and b) gives women access to small amounts of capital without the need of any formal guarantees. Confianza (trusted relationships) is the key to a successful community bank: if you know all the other ladies you're saving with, you know which door to knock on if a loan isn't returned on time.

So I've now got a group of 11 year-old boys saving S/. 1 each week in their homeroom class, a group of campo ladies who are community leaders with the local center against domestic violence saving S/. 10 each month, and a group of women who're part of a community service organization saving S/. 50 each month. These are tiny amounts by U.S. standards (S/. 50 is less than $20, and one sole equals about 39 cents), but for these ladies (and boys) it is a big deal to save this much on a regular basis, and it's fun to see how excited they get talking to each other about it.

While I am the one teaching these groups how the community banks work, each bank elects its own Administrative Committee, and the four members of the committee are the ones who manage the bank's operations. The President runs the meetings, the Secretary keeps the books, the Treasurer counts the money, and the Auditor makes sure nothing shady goes on under the table. At the end of each bank meeting, the cashbox stays in the Treasurer's house, and each of the other three committee members takes home a key to one of the three padlocks we put on the cashbox. Although partially symbolic, this reinforces the idea that the money belongs to all the members of the bank and can only be managed when everyone is present.

Unfortunately, since the first meetings are a little chaotic while everyone gets used to the process and gets organized, I forgot to take pictures of any of my banks. I'll try to work on that...