Trabajo

I am getting a little more adjusted, but life is definitely different without a car, without being able to be outside much past 9, watching everything that I eat very carefully, etc., etc.. But I am enjoying the difference and hope that it won't be too much longer until I am more accustomed to this lifestyle.

The work that I have been doing for the past few days, and will continue to do in the future is two main things. First, I am preparing about 12 hours of classes to instruct financial management of small businesses. The 12 hours is just part of a 90 course that people will attend that have some sort of technical skill that desire to start a small business. The course is for 18-30 year olds(church members) and will be funded by the perpetual education fund. This mainly has to do with cash flows and keeping track of inventory, sales, and break-even point type stuff to better understand how much the business has and then analyzing that information to better understand how to improve. So a lot of what I have learned so far at school is for corporations, being depreciation, time value of money, income taxes, statement of cash flow, amortization, etc., which doesn't apply to these small businesses very much. These classes are kind of difficult to prepare at this point because I do not have much to go off of and I want to make sure I am teaching things that are applicable and usable, not just principles that I have been taught that are good to know.

The second part is most mornings, like today, I left with one of the other workers (there are four in total here, Presidente Silva- the boss, Miguel- a hired worker, me and another intern from Lima) to advise and evaluate the small businesses. We visit them where they are and each business will be visited at least once a month. There are about 80 loans out right now to people that we are visiting, about 40 have taken loans and already paid their full amount and are now on their own. This by far was one of the best things so far, and I look forward to going and meeting more of these people. One has a sowing business in her front room, one a small selling cart for food, one a restaurant that has been very successful, one a store that cells cell phones and minutes, and so on. I instructed some of them how to keep a cash flow statement and that is something that none of them have done. Once they can do that though they will really be able to grow as a business to have more success, so I hope they apply what they said they would when we were there. These visits also help me better understand what I should prepare for the class instruction and what are the main difficulties.

The return rate for the loans so far here is about 60 percent, which is not that great when compared to other NGO's that claim return rates of up to 98 percent. Hopefully I will be able to have a better idea of what the difference is here. It may be that they loan only to members, or that the instruction at the beginning isn't enough, or that evaluations throughout are not sufficient enough.