A Day's Work in Peru

After several weeks of hard work in getting our projects off the ground, CMI seems to be finding its stride. We spent the past week testing and finalizing the impact assessments that we will be distributing to hundreds of PRISMA's clients over the course of the summer. We also successfully prepared and presented several charlas on business topics, in spite of delays caused by strikes last week. Now we are preparing for a visit from a Kiva.org representative this coming weekend, so we spent the day conducting interviews with PRISMA's clients to find some compelling stories for the folks at Kiva.

Inevitably, though, we were faced with still more challenges as we tried to get our work done. Last week it was a transportation strike that forced us to cancel our business training workshop, and today Puno's teachers went on strike and blockaded the mountain road leading out of the city. None of the combi vans that we usually ride to Juliaca were running this morning, but a few of the larger buses were willing to pass through the blockade. We tried to get on one of the available buses, but so did hundreds of other people trying to get to their jobs at the same time, so we were thwarted in that attempt.

We walked to Puno's other bus terminal and decided to hitch a ride on a bus bound for Arequipa, which passes through Juliaca on the way. Unfortunately we discovered when we arrived in the city that Juliaca's main bus terminal was closed, due to yet more protestors marching and flooding the streets. So we took a bicycle rickshaw several more miles to the city center, and then trekked the last half mile or so to the office -- arriving only two hours late!

When we finally arrived, however, we were rewarded with the chance to interview many of PRISMA's clients about their businesses. I spoke to a 20-year-old woman named Jenny who is studying accounting at the local university. To help pay for her education, she has spent the last four years making clothes -- hats, sweaters, and pants -- that she sells at the local market. She recently came to PRISMA to take out her first loan in order to expand her business. Specifically, Jenny said she wants to take classes about business topics and learn how to operate the large sewing machines so that she can produce more clothing to sell.

Jenny is very ambitious and also wants to use the additional earnings from her business to continue her studies. She currently takes classes mostly in the afternoons and works whenever she is not in school. She hopes to study law when she is finished with her accounting courses, and she very much wants to learn English. But she told me that good English programs in Juliaca are very difficult to come by -- students often must travel to schools in a different city in order to take quality English classes, which is very expensive.

Even all of the directors and staff at the PRISMAcxc v, office have begged us to teach them English during the short time that we are here, so it is clearly a skill in high demand! Perhaps an enterprising Peruvian could take out a loan from Prisma and use it to open an English academy in Juliaca....

Valerie