Off to the Andes: FBT part 2

Monday morning we began our Business Simulation. The idea was to teach the students everything they needed to know about starting a business from Monday-Wednesday. At the end of the day on Wednesday they would go to the “Peace Corps Bank” and get a loan, then head off to start their own business. And at the end of the day they had to pay back their loan and talk about the successes/failures of their businesses.

My classroom ended up having about 20 students all around the ages of 18-20. The students were all really nice and friendly but unfortunately very bad behaved. Everyone was talking at the same time, people wouldn’t pay attention, and the classroom smelled bad! The class was well educated in computation, and math and the letters B.O. but somehow they missed out on the lessons about taking showers and raising your hand if you want to talk. I’m sorry, is that not culturally sensitive? I’m sorry but it’s hard to be sensitive when you have to hold your breath to sit down next to someone.

One of my group members (Greg) was responsible for preparing the presentation on quality control. For those of you who know me, know that I can't pay attention to things for the life of me. So as he was giving his little talk I was in my usual la la land and then all of a suddened i thought I caught the words "un lugar para todas las cosas, y una cosas para todos los lugares". I instantly perked up and could help but laugh my head off. Greg was teaching the class 5S in Spanish! All the IEs out there and everybody at Gore better know why this is so funny to me. I was the "5S Plant Champion" at Gore before I left, and now here I was watching my Peruvian business class learn about it as a form of quality control. Ahhhhh.... Sean Healey, if you are reading this, I hope you are proud. :) (Here's a photo of all the 5Ss, I hope you like it)



Anyway, we worked though all of our lessons and games with the students and finally it was time to start their businesses. We had them break up into about 4 groups per class and had them brainstorm ideas. At first we were really frustrated because all of the groups wanted to make food. We tried to explain that not all groups could sell food because only so many people would come to the market to buy food. Well, as we should have known, they knew the market they would be selling to better than we did.

They went off to bank and got loans from the PC and then started their businesses. Three of my groups decided to sell food and the final group decided to put on a BINGO night. The three food groups made their products and sold them through out the evening and next morning. For the most part they all ended up breaking even or making a few soles (Peruvian currency). The BINGO group on the other hand was extremely successful. They sold over 200 Bingo cards and had a huge turn out of people for their event. They ended up making about 180 soles profit and to put things in perspective, my host parents only make ~10 soles per day at their jobs. Nice work kids!