Peter in Honduras

To quickly reflect on my last post let me just say I was glad to see all the feedback and comments. I appreciated the anecdotes from your own lives and it’s good to have reinforced the notion that “this ain’t easy.”

And in truth, there have been positive developments! Xiomara and I organized a sales trip to Gracias, Lempira, a city two hours away. We sold L. 6000.00 worth of product there to 4 medium sized grocery stores, establishing good contacts, and an additional L 8000.00 on the way home passing through Santa Rosa! This second sale, although bigger, is not as important because it was an existing customer, but still, the liquidity is great.

However, I continue to be frustrated by forgotten promises and general apathy.

But life goes on, what can you do? At the very least, it’s interesting to observe behavior in other cultures. For example, my most recent frustration was with a newly formed financial cooperative in a little mountain town 20 minutes outside of San Marcos. The girl who is running the books asked for help on using some of the financial software, so they asked me to come out and take a look. Well, the first time we went, the key to the office did not come along, so we had a nice talk and set another date. That day nobody came to pick me up and the meeting was canceled. So finally, a week later I’m ready to go and the day before they come to tell me that the President of the coop has said that his written permission is needed before I can visit. The trip is canceled.

Now of course none of this really makes sense. If his written permission is required, why didn’t they just get it? Instead, they leave it up in the air whether we will follow up on this and nobody is sure what to do. Do they want me to wait a week and mention it again? Do I just wait and let them ask me again? Today, two days after the fact, my contact with them came by and we had an awkward “How are you? –Good. And you? –Good, how’s it going with you? – Good…” I take this to mean he’s waiting for me to ask about a follow up visit.

The other interesting aspect is the President’s denial of the visit. It’s important to realize that this cooperative has no paid employees and therefore there are no set schedule or office hours. So to even find the President on a given day would be hard. However, as President, he must make his presence felt and give his stamp of approval. Truly the fault is with us in not approaching him, kind of the tradition of giving credit where credit is certainly not due. This reminds me of advice my uncle John gave me before leaving of making sure you introduce yourself to the local jefe even if he’s completely unrelated to what you’re doing. He (or she) needs to know you’re working for him and not against him. Unfortunately I wasn’t even aware there was a president until he squashed my plans. As coach says: I need better situational awareness.

Lately another interest has been working with my friend Jorge on his coffee shop. He has a little corner of his mom’s huge store in San Marcos and has got himself an espresso machine and one of those break room automatic coffee machines (flavored coffees from a pre-made mix). So we’ve been decorating the place with all sorts of coffee paraphernalia. Uncle John’s favorite coffee blend, Caffe Umbria, is proudly displayed, although the bag is not full of Honduran coffee. I blew up a favorite photo (displayed below) in black and white and printed it on 16 pages of printer paper then assembled it into a huge poster and put a border on it. This hangs on the wall.

Jorge had a table built that is full of roasted and green coffee encased in the glass top. Really, I out to take some pictures of this. As for the business side, for my part I’ve created a basic program to track sales trends of different products so that we can see what sells best and what we need to eliminate. I’ll probably be coming to the states in the next few months to visit, so if you’re in Seattle, collect anything coffee related and I’ll haul it back to Honduras. Starbucks may also notice a disturbing trend of missing mugs…. Just kidding.