The school year is quickly wrapping up, in fact I have less than a month left, since my last day giving class this year will be the 8th of November. I have certainly had my ups and downs this year professionally. The course that I am giving is called “La Empresa Creativa”, or “The Creative Business”. The point of the class is to give high school students other options after high school, since most of them will not be going off to college. We are also trying to teach them to look at something differently and try to make it better, in the process giving them an opportunity to make money.
To say that this whole process has been a challenge is an understatement. To change a culture is next to impossible; it is like carving a marble statue with a Q-tip. One must take seriously the mantra “if you can make better one persons life…”, otherwise time seems to be wasted.
How the course works is that the students form groups, which will become their business partners and they spend time together developing the different aspects of their business such as the idea, organization, production, marketing, budgets, initial capital, etc. The culmination of this course is that Peace Corps has a series of competitions where the students compete against other schools. The final competition has prizes such as scholarships, internships and cash.
In trying not to downplay the circumstances that the other business volunteers are placed in, mine is certainly distinct. They are all working for public high schools that have set teachers and organization. They also have a set of obstacles that I am glad I do not have to contend with, such as enormous class size and office politics. My situation is different because the school I work with is not even a real school, but more so an after school program, run by a NGO (non governmental organization). The issues that I run into are attendance, homework being done and being taken seriously that this information is important.
My students have real school as well, so to have to do extra work for me, understandably, is not high on their priority list. I am not able to have actual grades, since they would not mean anything and carry no weight. I also get very little support from the people who are supposed to be “in charge” of these students. Suffice it to say I was a bit nervous when it came time to prepare for the competitions. I had a few groups tell me that they did not yet have a product, although I had not been privy to this as we were doing the business development of the product they told me they had. I spent about a month giving a crash course on all the information that I had covered prior. I had laid down the hammer in saying if they did not have things done by specific dates, they could not compete.
The day of the competition I was clearly nervous. I had invited judges as well as prominent people from the community to see the work done by the students. I had left it up to some of the people I work with to decorate and help with other aspects of the day. This was a huge leap of faith because I have not met too many people here who I can count on. I figured that they would not want to look bad either, so I crossed my fingers. The day went off without a hitch. It did last longer than I had anticipated, but then again everything takes longer here. Most of the groups really had their acts together and knew their material. The judges were impressed, as was I. Most of the groups had a different product that they had told me two weeks prior, but they had crammed to put together their business plan and prototypes. They actually learned how to do what I taught them to do, remarkable!
