Day 8 through 12

Sorry it took me so long but I'm finally back

Day 8

Last Friday was Labor Day here in Guatemala, which means most businesses were closed. We stayed in and tried to get some work done in the office. It got pretty boring.

Day 9

Today President Donis, Tim and I visited El Lago de Atitlan (Lake Atitlan). We left around 8:30 am and it took about 2 hours to get there. It is a beautiful drive as you climb up the mountains toward the lake. As you get closer, you start to see more and more indigenous people. There are 12 pueblos around the lake that are inhabited by indigenous people. The people here in Guatemala, and most experts (from what I can tell from reading online) seem to think this lake is the location of the Waters of Mormon (see Mosiah 18). The lake is surrounded by 3 volcanoes.

We stopped at two lookout points to see the lake and take some pictures.

At each lookout point, kids and adults selling indigenous handmade items mobbed us. I am either a bleeding heart of a big sucker and they must have sensed it because I got the worst of it by far.
By the way, this is a full-grown woman with a baby in a sling on her back and no, I have not grown substantially since I left.

Anyway, we continued on to the lake. It is really pretty as you drive down. However, I was disappointed to see the trash and pollution in the water once you get closer. Based on Mazatenango and what I have seen here, I was not really surprised.

We sat down to eat lunch and the parade of saleswomen continued. These people are pros, especially a few little girls in particular. I was amazed at how well they sold and negotiated. (It is hard to negotiate with someone when they are selling beautiful handmade stuff for dirt-cheap and you feel bad for them). Anyway, I was the sucker again.

This girl was an amazing salesperson. After she sold me a bunch of things, she is getting all her stuff loaded back up. You would not have believed how much she could get packed onto herself. I bet she could not have been older than 11 or 12.

We then went around to some of the little stores and bought some cool stuff to take home. I won’t post any pictures because I want it to be a surprise for Candy and the kids. The lake totally had a Lake Tahoe feel to it for me. Climbing the mountain to get there reminded me of going up Mt. Rose and then dropping down into the lake. Even around it with the stores and a bunch of white hippies (go figure)! It was like the Latin version of Lake Tahoe, except for the trash in the water. Overall, it was a great experience.

Day 10 – Earthquake!

Ok, so today at church we felt a huge 6.1 earthquake….my first earthquake.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090503/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_guatemala_earthquake;_ylt=Ao430Q0t5sjX1HAQxM999pVvaA8F

Apparently it was really deep so it would have been a lot worse. But we were really close to the epicenter, we are guessing within 15 miles of it. It was crazy, first my chair was shaking, then the building was shaking, then I felt an extremely powerful force sort of ripple through the building from my left to right. I was kind of disoriented afterward for 5 to 10 minutes or so. It was powerful to say the least.

Day 11 – Work, another power outage (when we got home from shopping for a week’s worth of food, lasted about 2 hours), raining like crazy, and another power outage later in the evening…

Today I visited La Fidelina and La Blanca to see if they were willing to pass out surveys to their customers. I also spent about a half hour with La Blanca going through some breakeven analysis and a payback period on an electric knife that he was considering buying. So after the analysis, we figured out that he should not buy the electric knife. I figured it would take him an extra Q75K ($9.4K) in sales at his margins (about 11%) or at least 3 years in payback.

Tim went to see a guy who imports and sells toys. Since they decided not to give themselves a business name, we are calling them “store on the floor” because they just have toys strewn about on a tarp. We are working on some ideas for him.

I feel like the organization needs to do a better job training the people before they get their loan. I think they need to spend more time on business name and logo (some don’t have a business name, hardly anyone has a logo), the location, and especially in proving out the market.

Day 12 - I can't get any of the pictures from today to load...maybe tomorrow

We had a pretty busy day today. We stopped in and talked with Disory, worked on getting third party credit set-up for VIP, passed out the customer surveys to La Blanca and Fidelina, stopped by to make sure they were having customers fill out the surveys, stopped by a Photocopy shop (don’t remember the name…B&D Fotocopias?), and stopped by La Libertad pharmacy.

Today we met with Nehemias from Disory. We discussed the five forces with him and explained to him his competitive advantage. We encouraged him to raise his prices. He told us he decided to raise his prices last week and so far there has been no drop-off in sales.

As I mentioned, we also stopped by a photocopy shop. It is actually owned by the family of Leonel, the assistant to President Donis. I noticed that they had an entire glass case in the front. But instead of selling stuff in it, they just have their stuff tossed in there. I told them they should use that space to sell staplers, staples, pens, hole punches, etc. while they have a captive audience waiting for their copies. Obviously pretty basic stuff but could really boost their sales.

Other

• Earthquakes are really cool if there is not damage, injuries or deaths
• Sweating all day is fun for the whole family!
• You are not supposed to leave toothpicks in cake, they could hurt somebody
• Telepizza, despite the name, is good stuff
• There are flying ants landing on my neck and going down my shirt as I type this
• Tim Hart is really good at the air guitar
• Tim Hart is really smart…don’t believe me, just ask him
• Talking in someone on the phone in Spanish is hard