Mas informacion al fin...

I've been packing for hours and I thought I'd take a blogging break. The thing about me is there are a lot of things that I'm pretty indifferent on, but the stuff that I have opinions on--watch out. Because I'm pretty precise and pretty methodical. I've been studying my bookshelves looking at all of my books trying to decide, "Will I need that in Trujillo? Will I need that in Morristown?" After that, I looked at the junk in my bathroom: "What perfume should go to Trujillo? What perfume should go to Morristown?" It's sort of ridiculous. And I think I'm taking way more kitchen stuff to my internship than most people. I'm taking a food processor, a blender, a vegetable spiralizer, water bottles and smoothie cups, at least ten cookbooks...and the funny thing is my place is furnished, but people please. Is their blender a Blendtec (www.willitblend.com) and is their food processor a KitchenAid?

Tonight Heather and I had the opportunity to meet Jaime and Terry Figueroa. To be honest...I don't know if they own Eagle Condor, are major donors for Eagle Condor, fly like eagles and condors...whoever they are, they're major players and have been key contacts through the process. Jaime just got home from Peru today and he and Terry stopped by Provo on their way to Manti. They explained the project to us more and showed us pictures.

Basically, the 20 families who have recently received microcredit loans just became 40. Jaime explained that they would like for us to go visit every family/business, make an assessment on their business and do a write-up with suggestions. Some of these suggestions, we can obviously share with the families, but Jaime and Terry stressed that these people are in the most extreme poverty just starting a business and that they really do need baby steps to progress. So we'll share a few things and then next summer, a large expedition will go down and help with major improvements, probably in the way of physical changes (tiling baking areas) and training. So we're going to write up forty reports and share them with Eagle Condor and with two other interns from Eagle Condor.

One of the interns, Dan Ash, Heather and I met earlier this week. He and his friend (Clint?) are going down there a couple of days after us and they'll be primarily in Cuzco. Hopefully, we'll meet up with them to go to Machu Picchu. Because that's what Peru is about. It's just a big vacation for the four of us. Just kidding. But Dan and Clint are going to be doing documentation regarding some of the families and their businesses in the Cuzco area and then after Heather and I leave Trujillo, they'll come through and do more documentation of progress--picture taking, more reporting--so it will be really useful for them to have our write-ups.

Jaime and Terry also asked us to really try to help the people learn marketing, so we're going to create a training to teach basic marketing principles. As all BYU MBA students know, learning marketing is like drinking from a firehose, but...better than drinking from the Peruvian tap, from what we hear.

Jaime and Terry shared with us pictures of some of the families we're going to meet. It's really exciting. I know Heather and I are that much more pumped to go. They also told us where we're going to stay (in the office). We'll have a kitchen but no fridge yet, so we're going to be eating almost every meal out or at someone's house and we're going to have bunkbed and we should have internet in the house. Those are the exciting details so far. And we hear that Jaime and Terry have an "adopted" son down there who is single. Unfortunately for me, he's only 28, so he's too young, but Heather's gonna jump all over that.

It was really great to meet Jaime and Terry. The only sad part is that by the time we were done talking and I made it up to Darcie's graduation celebration...it was over. I was pretty sad. I'm leaving for four months and it would have been nice to hang out with my family for a little bit. Afterwards I called Tali Nay and vented about how no one but other MBA students really understand how relentlessly stressful our lives are because no one thinks we're cool enough to make shows like Grey's Anatomy and ER about us. Hmm, Darcie graduated in film, so I might have her help me remedy that. But the thing is MBA students are so busy there probably isn't anything interesting for the layfolk to watch. At least medical residents have time to date.

So...I better get back to sorting my lotions and my shoes and my sweaters. Right now I have 8 pairs of shoes laid out for Trujillo. I know it's wrong, but it's just so hard to choose.