Monday Seminar

Yesterday I gave a seminar to a group who had a brick-making business, or at least they planned to. This group was pretty organized since they had a way to make bricks and they actually, amazingly, had already talked to people who would buy as many bricks as they could make. That there is a market is not unusual. That the group has actually identified it is rare. Brick-making is done by combining water and sand in molds and waiting for them to set, then burning them to seal/harden them. The group was worried that the rains would come and wash away all their work forming the bricks before they had a chance to seal them, so they wanted the capital to build a storage shed or to buy plastic sheets. It was pretty good because it gave us a specific topic and example to go through to show them about business planning and forecasting.

Normally though, our seminars start out with the basic concept of a business and move through basic bookkeeping, understanding profit, marketing, forecasting, and finally into loans and in particular writing a business plan to obtain financing (which is very simplistic by North American standards).

The coolest thing about yesterday's session though was afterwards the group sang us a song as a thank you. It was so cool. Emily, a newly arrived volunteer who was watching me got it on camera too. Today, she gave a seminar and one of the drivers borrowed her camera to take a picture and ended up deleting all the ones on her memory card. She lost it all including the song. What a bummer!!

The last two days have yielded spectacular sunsets. I have some great pictures but they take forever to upload from these slow internet cafes. One of the other volunteers saw one of my pictures and said exactly what I was thinking - "this is a paradise."

Then again, the generator is broken and we have had no power for 5 days and when I went to take a shower (cold), the well had run dry...