What a week!

Hey everyone!

Its been a while I know, I´m sorry for the delay. Last week was crazy here. There was a strike inbetween Puno and Cuzco that prohibited us from getting the second session back to Puno to start work. Luckily they are ok and on their way! While Juliana and Jessie were in Cuzco with the other half of the team, the rest of us were still hard at work at PRISMA. We met with Michelle of Kiva.org and submitted PRISMA´s application to be a partner with them. The bulk of our work on this project was in providing pilot profiles of some of Prisma´s clients to Kiva and giving them the interviews we had conducted. Michelle was incredibly helpful and a lot of fun. We took her out to dinner in Puno after the meeting and had some pretty impressive pizzas. It was great to finally send off the work we had done on this project with Michelle and hear what she has to say about our application. From what I can tell, things look really good!

Other than Kiva, we finally got the excel program set up so that we can enter in all the data we are collecting in our surveys. This is all thanks to Chelsea of course. Me and Toby sat down at the computer last week and entered in the first wave of data we had collected. Chelsea made it as easy as possible for us and the time really flew by entering in all those surveys.

The charlas are still going strong, though last week we hit a small bump in the road. Either because of the strike going on or because PRISMA´s first week of every month is always slow, nobody showed up to our two classes. The Charla team was really bummed of course because it was a really exciting business chat, but we´re carrying it over to this week so more clients will be able to hear about it and come on time.

Friday was a sad day as we had to say goodbye to some of our first session members (Chelsea, Valerie, Emily, and Toby. We´ll miss you guys!). The PRISMA officers took us out for one last final lunch together at one of their client´s restaraunts and we had an amazing time! Lots of food, and tons of dancing. I couldn´t have come up with a better way to send that group off. But now its time to look forward to the new group we have coming in. I´m so excited to get started on showing them the ropes of everything we have accomplished last session. It´s a tallented bunch so I´m sure the next 5 weeks are going to be intense and productive!

Tyler