More Happenings...

Wow what a busy week. This week was the first full week of our bakery’s operation. It has been a lot of work smoothing out the production and working on ways to improve efficiency. We have the most crucial element of a micro enterprise though, which is a market. The demand has continued to be sky high and our humble bakery is struggling to keep up. Here is a rundown of what we sold this week:

Monday: 120 bread
Tuesday: 150 bread
Wednesday: 100 Bread, 6 cakes, 40 empanadas (a cheese filled pastry)
Thursday: 100 Bread, 6 cakes, 100 cookies
Friday: 200 Bread, 6 cakes, 40 empanadas

So you can see that the demand has steadily increased, we are clearly limited by the amount we are able to produce. Also, I sold all of this in less than 15 minutes everyday, with several unhappy people who did not get to me quickly enough.

Making the bread is a lot of work and the mamas are waking up at 3:30 in the morning to have the bread ready by 7:30. Their work is truly amazing. To make good bread, it requires a lot of work by hand so that the bread will rise properly. They are very skilled at this work and the bread comes out perfectly every time. We are looking to purchase another oven in order to increase out ability to produce more baked goods. The demand is highest for the bread, but this is the most time consuming and least profit generating item we make. We are trying to balance our bread production with our other more profitable products. It will probably be another week until I have devised an efficient plan of ordering, production, and transport of the bread. I am currently taking the bread and baked good to the Institute on my bike (6km each way) early in the morning (sometimes making two trips). This is obviously not a sustainable practice and I am working to devise an alternative means of transportation. The other thing I am working on is an ordering procedure for the students and professors of the Institute. This would streamline our production and prevent me from having to personally sell the bread at the Institute everyday. Ideally, the production and selling process would involve as few people as possible would become a fixture at the Institute. I hope to have the micro enterprise sustainable without any of my help in two to three weeks. The sky seems to be the limit with this bread business and I am very optimistic that it will prove to be a profitable experience for the children of the Villa.

Another project I have been working on is getting the kids an opportunity to go to mass every Sunday. The first few weeks I was here, I accompanied a group of about twenty kids to mass at the local parish. This involves a 30+ minutes walk to the church which is huge and always full. It is very hard for 20 7-13 year olds to sit through a mass when they are standing up in the back of a very large sanctuary. This experience became quite frustrating after a few times, and I have been trying to come up with a better way for the kids to have a chance to celebrate mass each week. The solution came when I was reflecting on the large number of priests we have studying at the Institute. There are about 20-30 from all over the world year round at the Institute. These priests have no one in the city to celebrate mass for every Sunday, and at the Villa we do not have a priest to celebrate mass for the kids. This is the perfect match for the priests to practice saying the mass in Spanish (which they all will have to do in their respective missions after their language study anyway) and for all of the kids to have a much more convenient opportunity to participate. A 30+ minute walk to a crowded church at 8:00 Sunday morning does not seem like the best way to encourage the kids to attend the service. I am excited about the new plan and have posted a sign up sheet in the Institute. I have commitments for the next two Sundays and expect there to be a high demand for the opportunity as well.

The third project I have been working on is the compost pile. I have planned the construction of the pile with the Gardener, German. We will be digging and constructing this week. Also I have been writing instructions for the collection of compost in each of the eight houses. This project will help to reduce garbage in the Villa and provide a source of fertilizer for our garden here. I am also hoping that it will help educate the kids about the environment. Cochabamba has an incredible problem with waste disposal and the entire neighborhood is littered with garbage. By directly involving the kids in this project, I hope to help instill in them a sense of environmental responsibility. We will see how it goes.

That’s about is for now. Classes continue to be challenging, but I am really enjoying them. There is hardly ever a free moment, except sometimes on the weekends.
If you are interested in reading more about some of my time here, check out my posting on NashvilleCyclist.com.

Thanks for reading,
Gray
grayskinner@hotmail.com