Teaching Business 101 in Ecuador

After one year of working in El Barrio El Cisne with a small group of mothers, I was able to see a real impact I´d made on them first hand today.
As I climbed up the hill to the little store in the community, I saw the group of 5 mothers who are in my small business class sitting on the tree stump-benches waiting for me. As I went around shaking hands and saying buenas tardes to each mother, one mother goes ¨wow, sarita, way to be late.¨ I looked down at my watch, it was 5:01…. I was a full minute late. I couldn’t believe it. One year ago when I began doing weekly workshops in El Cisne I was lucky if one person showed up. I´d have to go door to door announcing the workshop and then tell them to come at 4pm so that by 5 pm maybe they would be showing up… of course on good Ecuadorian timely fashion. Now, one year later the mothers actually show up before the workshop begins and I don’t even have to go around and announce the activity, they actually remember for a whole week what day I´ll be there. It didn’t occur to me as anything out of the ordinary when it happened today, but now looking back, I´m kinda shocked. I mean that really is a huge change, I may be making a difference in the concept of time for these mothers if nothing else. I don’t know how many times I´ve told them in the USA if you are 10 minutes early you are technically right on time, and now they actually show up early! The funny part is I´ve started taken on more of the Ecuadorian concept of time, and well would normally come late to my own workshop knowing everyone else will be late, but for the first time in my Peace Corps service I´m on American time and so are the Ecuadorian mothers!! (Note on Ecuadorian time… the most popular phrase around is ya mismo, it means something like ¨almost right now¨… meaning anything from in 5 minutes to 2 hrs from now or maybe even tomorrow. Typically you have to plan any activity at least one hour before you plan on really starting to give that lead way as well.)
Today I had a great workshop with them. All the mothers in this class are members of the community bank in El Cisne, and I really wanted to get them thinking about income generation activities instead of just using the loans from the community bank to pay off more debt they can invest it in a simple activity, like selling tamales or a handicraft, and make some additional income. We´ve now had 4 workshops and they´ve learned how to do a market study, develop a ¨business plan,¨ distinguish yourself from competitors, and today accounting. And boy is accounting hard to teach in Spanish, trying to explain how to calculate interest, how to determine your profit, etc. is quite the task. I had the mothers divide up into three groups and each group was giving a mock business with some financial statements easily written out. They then had to make a simple bookkeeping list of the sales versus the expenses to figure out the net income. It was really confusing for each of them, but after going over it 6 times and really confusing myself and my Spanish in the process, we finally got there. Then, I threw a real curb ball at them. I gave each mom one of the accounting sheets but this time broken down for their personal finances, the homework for the week… they now have to figure out their monthly incomes and expenses. Just about every mother assured me that they would be in the negative range, since they spend more than they make. I think that can be said with most Ecuadorian households though. Everyone lives on small credit since expenses almost always outweigh the low incomes, and your monthly income may not even be stable since whether or not you get paid on time can be so flaky. Needless to say, back in business school I always wondered how I would one day be able to use all those formulas, math equations, and concepts, I´ve finally found a use! Only I put everything into the context of selling those tomales (like a corn based cake sold on the street) you´ve worked so hard to make, how you can make your tomales different than your competitors tomales, how can you lower the cost of your ingredients to make a better profit, how you can keep track of what you spend and make to know if you are profitable, how to have good customer service and hence gain over those clients in other communities, etc.