Day 22

Today we went through all the businesses we've met with and wrote up individual reports for all of them. It was quite a bit of work, but it will be a nice record of what we have done and how we feel they can improve. We've only got a couple days left so we are hoping to meet with with most of these people one last time and get them set on the right course. This afternoon we actually met with a couple of ladies we worked with before and they were very appreciative of our suggestions. It is too bad we won't necessarily be here long enough to see how things turn out. I'm surprised at how willing people are to listen to us and try what we suggest. They really are hungry to succeed. It is just a very different business/economic culture.

We went to some guy's house today to research a couple business ideas for people in the future. One of them is to sell Popsicles and ice cream. This place is essentially a junk yard. He buys broken down appliances and such, fixes them, and sells them. We were looking into some of the freezers he has there for the ice cream business. It was nuts though. There is literally junk all over the place. There is no organization of anything and this is where the guy lives with his family. He isn't part of Cause for Hope so we weren't there to help him, but if he simply cleaned things up, organized his merchandise in categories and separated the stuff he was working on, he'd probably sell a lot more. They haven't quite figured out the concept of presenation yet.

We were supposed to present a class tonight about record keeping and some of the "best practices" that we have found here but only one guy showed up and he was an hour late. I guess it wasn't a high priority even though we had about 10 verbal commitments. All you can do is try.