Lifeline

Monday, July 14, 2008

Cruising through Santa Cruz

My last year at Leiden University for a great part has been dedicated to SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) Leiden. With this organisation we try to set up development projects by exploiting opportunities through education and entrepreneurship for local people with little access to funds and information. We're especially active in Bolivia, because several of our team-members have strong connections with that country. Therefore we went on July 8th to Bolivia with a group of 13 people and a donation of Xplore, a Dutch organisation funded by the governement that promotes international development cooperation.
All our projects in Bolivia take place around Santa Cruz, so we took a plane and a taxi to backpacker's hostel Jodanga in that city. With free wireless internet and a swimming pool, it wasn't a bad place to stay. The first few days we prepared for the meetings, visits, evaluations, presentations and excursions to come. A few of our members had already gone to Bolivia a few times, so they arranged most of the program. One new potential project is the promotion of Fundempresa, an organisation like the Chamber of Commerce, among small entrepreneurs. To find out if people are already registered there or know that organisation, we took to the streets on thursday 10 july and interviewed a few dozen shopkeepers. It was great to see the different reactions, ranging from enthousiastic to unwilling and from unsympathetic to talkative. Some people were already registered, others didn't know the organisation and some didn't want to have anything to do with it.
The next day we went to Buena Vista, a small village where we stayed in a far-away accomodation next to the jungle. We had all the mosquitos, sounds, smells, plants, animals and views you would expect there. After getting out of Santa Cruz some parts next to the road already look like 'the wild', and when I saw the forest stretching out to the horizon I could understand people don't see any harm in burning down a little plot and grow some fruits or vegetables. And indeed, we could visit a coffee-plantation there and saw parts of burned-down forest and small papaya-orchards. After spending a night there we visited another potential project: a fish-farm where schoolchildren are taught how to grow and sell fish. We could participate in the first lesson of this course and see the ponds where the fish are grown. The man responsible for all this, Mr. Rojas, was very passionate about his undertaking and asked us if we could help him build the processing-area for the fish. That evening, we decided to support hum with €3000,-.
Today, august 13th, we went to another project. In La Libertad, a small community at about 45 minutes from Santa Cruz Mr. Reyes is teaching people how to organically grow their own vegetables and sell this to a shop for organic food. He is also growing medicinal-mushrooms and hopes to export these to Brasil and/or Japan in the next few months. While we were in La Libertad, we gave a presentation about basic entrepreneurial skills such as planning and accounting, which was very well recieved. It was nice to see how these people live and how enthousiastic they are about the idea of producing their own food in a sustainable way.

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