What else have I been up to? I’ve been teaching a business course to a group of young entrepreneurs. We’re studying basic business concepts and writing a business plan. In August we and twenty other groups under the tutelage of Peace Corps Small–Business Development volunteers will present our plans to a panel of judges chosen by Peace Corps and the winners of the competition will receive start-up funds for their businesses.
In April I and Fernando, a teacher at the public high school in Callanca, went to Lima to receive training in how to teach this course. Fernando is now teaching the course to 75 of his students at the high school and I’m teaching the course to a small group of older students from outside the high school. My group is deliberately small, four people, since one of the precepts of the course is that all participants should play an active role in operating the business. Fernando is fulfilling this requirement by dividing his classes into groups of five students. In July both Fernando and I will have finished business plans written by our students and we’ll offer the plans to a financial expert—an economist or an accountant—and that person will choose the better plan. That plan will be presented at the competition in August.
My group consists of Erick, a 23-year-old ex-soldier, currently unemployed but trying to keep busy by raising a few head of cattle; Jesús, 19 years old and a law student attending a university in Chiclayo; Gaby, 17 and—like many young women her age in Callanca—without work and with no money to fund a higher education; and Isabel, 18, from a family who runs one the “restaurantes campestres” here in Callanca.
Callanca, in spite of the fact that it’s only 15 minutes from Chiclayo, the capital of the departamento of Lambayeque, remains a very rural, agricultural community and so the kids chose wisely when they selected the theme for their business. They’re going to raise ducks.
This choice may sound odd to you but in Callanca and Lambayeque ducks are a hot commodity. That’s because Arroz con Pato (Duck with Rice) is the most popular dish in the Northern Peruvian cuisine. The country restaurants of Callanca serve up to 500 kilos of duck meat every week. That’s roughly 200 ducks. Someone has to raise all those ducks. We hope that that someone will be us.
Currently the restaurants are buying their ducks either from the Central Market in Chiclayo or from vendors from La Libertad, the departamento to the south of Lambayeque, who load up a Tico (a small Ford Fiesta–looking vehicle often used as a taxi here in Perú) or a combi (microbus) with as many ducks as it will hold and make visits to all the restaurants to sell to the owners. The reason that no one in Callanca is now providing this service seems to have to do with the initial investment involved. One would need at any one time around 600 ducks on hand in order to meet the weekly demand for 200 ducks from all the restaurants in town. Because the prize money for the contest in Lima in August will be 5,000 soles, we will have that initial capital to invest should we be one of the 3 or 4 winning groups in the competition.
As I teach this course I’m becoming a skilled PowerPoint presenter, something I’d have never expected to say of myself. I’m also learning a lot about how I probably should have run my business when I was designing books in the U.S. It turns out that I should have done a market study to find out if there was a demand for my service (there wasn’t). And I should have taken my competition into consideration and done some research in order to find out if there were already too many people providing the service (there were) and I should have carefully positioned my business in accordance with the four Ps of marketing, Product, Plaza, Price and Promotion, in order to assure that I was offering my service to the correct market segment. Instead I chose to offer a product that only a handful of people needed in a market far from New York, the hub of publishing activity, at a price that (though reasonable compared to New York prices) I was surprised that my customers were willing to pay and with no promotion whatsover except for a box of 500 business cards that lasted me for over twenty years. Yet somehow I managed to make a decent living for nearly three decades. At this point I choose to believe that it was in spite of my ignorance and not because of it that Charles Martin Graphics survived.
This time I and my group of students seem to be covering all these bases a lot more effectively than I alone ever did. We have a booming local market that no one else in town is taking advantage of, we can offer our product at the same price as our competitors, and we can promote our product by walking into any restaurant in Callanca and talking directly to the owner. On Mother’s Day over 9,000 people visited Callanca from Chiclayo and surrounding communities to treat their mothers to lunch in the country. That, my friend, is a shitload of ducks.
It’s a long haul from here to August. We’ll be studying business concepts until July and then writing our 35-page business plan until the beginning of August. The kids have chosen the name “Patos Callancanos, Tradición Peruana” for their business. “PCTP” makes a convenient nickname. The name seems like a good enough choice to me. And the important thing is that the students created it and chose it. It’s been difficult for me to let the students run the show. I of course feel like I could do everything better if I did it all myself—at least the marketing and promotion side of the business. I guess I spent too many years running a one-man show. So I’m learning along with the students, they by doing and I by not doing and by keeping my hands off.
Another project that’s keeping me busy is the Banco Comunitario “El Milagro” that my socio Gregoria Mechán and I started in April. This project makes me nervous. In Callanca dealing with money is always a dangerous undertaking. There’s not enough of it to go around and people behave unpredictably and uncharacteristically with sums of money, no matter how small, at stake.
The community bank consists of a group of 13 people, each of whom deposits from 5 soles to 15 soles a week in the bank. From these proceeds the bank offers one-month loans at an interest rate of 10% to participants in the bank. The bank has a fixed period of existence, in our case until December 1 so that the members can withdraw the funds to cover Christmas expenses. When the members liquidate the bank each member, based on the amount of his weekly deposit, will receive a percentage of the profits that have been generated by the repeated lending of the money. The idea is that all the money deposited in the bank should be lent continuously so as to earn as much interest and generate as much profit as possible.
Attendance at the weekly meetings has been a problem. Members would rather send their deposit with a friend or drop it off during the week at their convenience at the house where we’re holding the weekly meetings. But by doing so the members aren’t benefitting from the presntations on saving and borrowing practices that Gregorio and I are offering. Plus they’re not present to approve loans nor to ask for loans. All of which could lead to long-term problems for the bank. Due to attendance problems the offering of the first loans was delayed from week three until week five of the bank and of the 460 soles available to be lent only 300 soles in loans have been requested.
The concept of the community banks is a solid one. The credit available allows, say, an artisan to borrow money to buy materials to create products for an artisans’ fair. Ideally, the artisan then sells the artesanía at the fair and with the profits pays back the loan and interest. All of the funding for the bank comes from the depositors and all of the profits from the bank are shared by the depositors. No outside funding is necessary and the availability of small loans helps out the poorest segment of the population of the community, a group that would otherwise have no access to credit since the amount of money they’re borrowing isn’t large enough to interest an institutional bank. The community-bank idea was initiated and first carried out—with much success—by Peace Corps, Ecuador.
I’ll let you know how it works out in Peace Corps, Callanca.
I also helped stage a free medical campaign in Callanca on May 15. At the April training in Lima for participants in the Business Plan Competition I met a member of a Rotary Club International chapter from Huamachuco, La Libertad. He told me that Rotary Club sponsors campaigns offering free medical attention to deserving communities in Perú. He offered to contact the president of the Rotary Club chapter in Chiclayo and suggest that Rotary bring doctors to Callanca.
In late April I received a call from Esperanza, the president of Rotary Club Chiclayo Primavera. I met with her in Chiclayo and we planned the campaign, which was to feature an opthalmologist, a dentist, a general practitioner, a pediatrician and an obstetrition. Again, my socio Gregorio Mechán offered to help me with the project. Until January 1 Gregorio was Regidor (City Councilman) from Callanca in the Municipalidad de Monsefú. But his party was defeated in the elections in November so now he’s got time on his hands.
Gregorio and I found a location suitable for the doctors, publicized the event with papelotes (Peruvian PowerPoint) and supervised on the day of the event. The doctors brought medications from Chiclayo and an assortment of frames for eyeglasses. They donated the medications and frames. Patients who required glasses paid 20 soles (7 dollars) for the lenses. The campaign was successful but there were the usual number of prolems that one faces anytime one organizes an event in Perú. The general practitioner didn’t show up. Esperanza had told me that the opthalmologist would not offer treatment to patients suffering from cataracts or opaque vision, conditions common in Callanca because the majority of households cook with wood and the resulting smoke can cause vision problems. However, the opthalmologist did in fact offer to see these patients in Chiclayo and provide free care. But we’d already lost the opportunity to publicize this fact and invite individuals suffering from these vision problems to the event. The obstetritian forgot his blood-pressure gauge. We’d offered a free lunch of arroz con pato to the eleven people that Esperanza had said would be coming to Callanca with the medical team but when lunchtime arrived family and friends of the eleven people showed up in droves and we ended up having to pay for lunch for 25 people.
A hundred and fifty people turned out to take advantage of the free medical service. With 11 specialists at their disposition, these residents of Callanca, at least for a day, enjoyed a far more impressive patient-provider ratio than even the wealthiest communites in the U.S. It was fun while it lasted.
The dentist made the most enduring impression upon me. His patients sat in a white plastic chair while the dental assistant held the patient’s head still and the dentist shot the patient full of what must’ve been 100 cc’s of novacaine. The dentist waited a full 45 seconds for the novocaine to take effect and then dove in with a pair of pliers to perform the extraction. Extracion seemed to be the only service he was offering. I didn’t see any tools or materials that led me to believe that fillings were an option. To appreciate the spectacle you really needed to have been there to hear the sounds coming from the patients’ mouths—grunts and groans accompanied by the squeaking of the pliers and the crunching of bone. When it was all over the patients spit blood into a bucket and dentist handed them a prescription for painkillers, which I hope they filled as soon as possible.
At least it was free.
Besides all of the above, I’ve been up to my usual with the artisans, the restaurants, the medical post, the farmers and what (with luck) may one day become the Tourist Information Center of Callanca. I’ve designed an arch for the entrance to Callanca from the Panamericana; I’m helping a volunteer from Germany translate the menus of all the restaurants into English and German; I’m designing a brochure to promote tourism in Callanca; I’m preparing the artisans for a fair in Lima in July; I hawked the cuisine of Callanca at a Food Fair in Chiclayo last weekend and restaurants from Callanca won two third-place prizes and one second-place in their categories. In February, I and three girls from Callanca attended a three-day Peace Corps–sponsored camp for girls, Camp ALMA. A total of 100 girls attended the camp, all accompanied by Peace Corps volunteers from their communities. In March, Peace Corps celebrated its 50th anniversary and all the volunteers in Lambayeque invited members of our communities to a celbration in Chiclayo. One hundred and fifty people showed up for the ceremony, including the mayor of Chiclayo and the Governor of Lambayeque.
So after 11 months in Perú some of the work is beginning to pay off. And in case you were wondering what a Tico looks like, here’s a picture of one and of some of the 9,000 people who visited Callanca on Mother’s Day.
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