Thursday, November 1, 2012
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
APOLOGIES FOR THE BAD START
Ok, wow, I know I completely dropped the ball on this blog, but a new job assignment with a tight deadline took precedence. Anyway, to make up for that, every chance I get will be a little mini-blog, and to start will be that "10 Commandments of Doing Business in the 3rd World" thing I´ve been intending, just one at a time. "Thou Shalt" #1 coming soon.
Again, apologies. Keep shambling.
raw
Again, apologies. Keep shambling.
raw
Thursday, February 4, 2010
ZOMBINOMICS: Small Business Management in Developing Economies
...OR, How to Support Your Family of Four in the 3rd World and Love It!
After moving to Paraguay, I took up employment as an ESL instructor (that´s English as a Second Language to you acronym fans out there) at a local language center. As the ONLY NATIVE SPEAKER ON STAFF, I was frequently asked about doing business with the US, and soon found myself specialized in Business English. When the institute imploded due to the mismanagement of its owners, I was faced with two choices: work for another language school, or work for myself.
And thus, Business English Services was born.
To summarize briefly, it´s full service English language services for businesses here in Paraguay. I still teach English, but now I also do "culture-coaching" and corporate/internal translations, and, if the gods are generous, by midyear, I´ll be doing official/government translation as well.
I did this mostly because I discovered what I thought was a small hole in the local market for language instruction, namely, a need for professional English, that went beyond ordering in a restaurant, talking about sports and vacations, and understanding a movie without subtitles. To talk in the lingua franca of global business.
The hole turned out a little bigger, and more complicated than I thought. I am learning, because I, like most other US Americans, grew up with the luxury of choice, and freedom to choose. These are NEW and FOREIGN concepts in the developing world, and as such, are seen as dangerous waters for these people to navigate.
Paraguay, to give some frame of reference, was for many years dominated by the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and after, by his political party. Critical industries were protected with an iron grip, banks were destroyed, and when the country found itself too far in debt, it simply printed the money it needed to pay it off, and devalued its currency in the process.
In 2008, the elections here were held, and a former Catholic bishop was elected president. Fernando Lugo is a socialist liberal that was perceived as the shining new hope (in contrast to the corrupt 60-year stranglehold of the controlling party. After six decades of the Reds, we had a Blue president.
Who, for the last year and a half, has proved to be as bad, if not worse than what was had before.
One of the reasons for this, lies in the fact that this is a culture who was brainwashed NOT to choose or think freely. To illustrate this, imagine this situation in your mind...
For years since you were a child, you went to the supermarket with your list of groceries: milk, bread, coffee, sugar, ham, cheese, mayonaise, Coke. No problem; you only had ONE milk (from the national dairy cooperative), ONE choice for bread (although delicious because it was baked fresh right there), ONE brand of coffee, and so on, ... and Coke, because, well everyone has Coke, thank you Douglas Ivester you genius you...
And so it goes until one day, you go to the store, and you have SIX brands of milk, in whole and skim, because the cooperatives split into regions, TWELVE different breads in white, wheat, seeded, unseeded, because all the bakers want to have their bread sold at the central supermarket, SEVEN brands of coffee because of a new free trade agreement that loosened up the coffee imports, and...Coke. Coke Light. Coke Zero. Sprite. Fanta, in orange and grape. Plus one local guy created a soda/juice hybrid.
I imagine you would be shellshocked by all this instant free choice.
This is how an oppressed, uneducated populace views choice, whether shopping for groceries, or electing a president.
If you want to oppress your country, you must control how ideas are communicated. The most obvious way to do this is to control the media. Even after the recent changing of the presidential guard, this still happens here, forcing you to read between the lines in your local news.
The more insidious fashion is to diminish education. Diminish its content, its quality, and its importance in the local mind of the culture.
First, diminish the content. Here in Paraguay, for years, a child only was impelled to finish up to the 6th grade. Beyond that was voluntary, and was focused on trades, industrial and agricultural. The arts were local only. For example, under Stroessner, lots of Guaranias (a Paraguayan polka sung in guarani, the 2nd official language here), but rock and roll was almost nonexistent. Put another way: Part of my advance course is a focused conversation on art. I use mostly Picasso´s Guernica, because I get the best responses. I still had one student ask me who Picasso was. And she was a doctor.
Next, diminish the quality. Last year, all the public school teachers had to retake the Qualification Exam required by the State. A kind of minimum skills test. 87% failed. A few in the outlying parts of the rural areas were functionally illiterate. Many "country schoolhouses" consist of desks under a shady tree. And most schools make it the parent´s responsibility to provide school materials and textbooks. We send my oldest to a private Catholic school, and even we had to buy his texts. But at least we know he´s using them, and learning. Here, education really is "you get what you pay for".
Finally, diminish its importance. The attitude here is that school is not as important as work. So it should come as no surprise the number of kids selling fruit, cleaning windshields, clearing trash, helping mama y papa in the family store, instead of going to school.
An uneducated populace is a docile one, and won´t make no trouble.
So part of my job is actually to fill in the gaps that their education and experience did not provide. Many of my students are Argentine, and are generally of similar educational backgrounds as the average public school US kid. And a few are children of very successful Paraguayans who bucked the trend and carved very successful niches for themselves, based on their parent´s example. But my university kids are a mixed bag, depending on background, and convincing them on why learning English is not just necessary, but CRITICAL can be an uphill battle.
Those private students, the New Paraguayan Businesspeople, are the ones I´m after, because they´re the ones who are going to get Paraguay out of the mess it is in. Not the government. Politicians, I am learning, are about as useful as a Jonas Brother on the space shuttle.
So you´re probably thinking I´m living large, drinking Moet & Chandon and driving a Volvo.
Well....
On average, I make 2 million guaranies (the local currency) per month. WOW, you say. But, the exchange rate last year, on average was 5000 guaranies to the U$D. In reality, I feed my family of four on $400 per month.
I just did my taxes. Last year, after the current exchange rate of 4600 guaranies to the dollar, I cleared a whopping $3856.85. And am ineligible for US gov´t programs like the EIC or child tax credit, even though my oldest is a US citizen, too. Thanks, America.
So how are we not starving?
The important lesson in working in a developing economy is this:
YOU ARE NOT WORKING FOR MONEY, BUT ARE, IN FACT, TRADING TIME FOR STUFF.
Example:
Let´s say I earn $10/hr in the US. $80/day. That means, if a quart of milk is $2, I have to work 12 minutes to buy it. If I need to pay my monthly cell phone bill of $79.95, I need to work a full eight-hour day. If I want a thousand-dollar laptop, it takes 2 and 1/2 weeks to earn the scratch to buy it.
Last year, my rate was 30,000 guaranies per hour. A quart of milk is 3000 = 6 minutes of work. My cell phone bill is 60,000 = 2 hours of class. So far so good, except...
If you want to buy a laptop, for three million guaranies, that´s 100 class hours, which is my monthly average.
Pediatric medicine can run 125,000 guaranies, sometimes double. Even though the doctor´s appointment is cheap (30,000 = one class hour) the medicine can potentially cost a day´s worth of work. If I want an iPhone from the local shops here, it´s at US pricing (weeks of work). On the other hand, my son´s monthly tuition only takes four-and-a-half hours to earn. A used car starts at 30 million guaranies; that´s 10 MONTHS of work, if we choose not to eat.
So this is lesson number one: try not to get hung up on the money you make, but rather focus on how much time it takes to make the money you need to get what you want.
This was a great help when deciding on pricing my services. I could figure out what I needed as a minimum every month, and how much I could charge and get away with it. I was even able to adjust my pricing this year for inflation, and did not lose a single client because of it. Priced correctly, I have the certainty that even in the slow part of the business year (Christmas to Easter here), my wife and children are taken care of. A little extra push, maybe "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed" will let me buy comics online.
Next Zombinomics Post: The nuts of 3rd world business management. And later, the cast and crew of my daily dramas. Until then:
Keep shambling.
RAW - the American Zombie
After moving to Paraguay, I took up employment as an ESL instructor (that´s English as a Second Language to you acronym fans out there) at a local language center. As the ONLY NATIVE SPEAKER ON STAFF, I was frequently asked about doing business with the US, and soon found myself specialized in Business English. When the institute imploded due to the mismanagement of its owners, I was faced with two choices: work for another language school, or work for myself.
And thus, Business English Services was born.
To summarize briefly, it´s full service English language services for businesses here in Paraguay. I still teach English, but now I also do "culture-coaching" and corporate/internal translations, and, if the gods are generous, by midyear, I´ll be doing official/government translation as well.
I did this mostly because I discovered what I thought was a small hole in the local market for language instruction, namely, a need for professional English, that went beyond ordering in a restaurant, talking about sports and vacations, and understanding a movie without subtitles. To talk in the lingua franca of global business.
The hole turned out a little bigger, and more complicated than I thought. I am learning, because I, like most other US Americans, grew up with the luxury of choice, and freedom to choose. These are NEW and FOREIGN concepts in the developing world, and as such, are seen as dangerous waters for these people to navigate.
Paraguay, to give some frame of reference, was for many years dominated by the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and after, by his political party. Critical industries were protected with an iron grip, banks were destroyed, and when the country found itself too far in debt, it simply printed the money it needed to pay it off, and devalued its currency in the process.
In 2008, the elections here were held, and a former Catholic bishop was elected president. Fernando Lugo is a socialist liberal that was perceived as the shining new hope (in contrast to the corrupt 60-year stranglehold of the controlling party. After six decades of the Reds, we had a Blue president.
Who, for the last year and a half, has proved to be as bad, if not worse than what was had before.
One of the reasons for this, lies in the fact that this is a culture who was brainwashed NOT to choose or think freely. To illustrate this, imagine this situation in your mind...
For years since you were a child, you went to the supermarket with your list of groceries: milk, bread, coffee, sugar, ham, cheese, mayonaise, Coke. No problem; you only had ONE milk (from the national dairy cooperative), ONE choice for bread (although delicious because it was baked fresh right there), ONE brand of coffee, and so on, ... and Coke, because, well everyone has Coke, thank you Douglas Ivester you genius you...
And so it goes until one day, you go to the store, and you have SIX brands of milk, in whole and skim, because the cooperatives split into regions, TWELVE different breads in white, wheat, seeded, unseeded, because all the bakers want to have their bread sold at the central supermarket, SEVEN brands of coffee because of a new free trade agreement that loosened up the coffee imports, and...Coke. Coke Light. Coke Zero. Sprite. Fanta, in orange and grape. Plus one local guy created a soda/juice hybrid.
I imagine you would be shellshocked by all this instant free choice.
This is how an oppressed, uneducated populace views choice, whether shopping for groceries, or electing a president.
If you want to oppress your country, you must control how ideas are communicated. The most obvious way to do this is to control the media. Even after the recent changing of the presidential guard, this still happens here, forcing you to read between the lines in your local news.
The more insidious fashion is to diminish education. Diminish its content, its quality, and its importance in the local mind of the culture.
First, diminish the content. Here in Paraguay, for years, a child only was impelled to finish up to the 6th grade. Beyond that was voluntary, and was focused on trades, industrial and agricultural. The arts were local only. For example, under Stroessner, lots of Guaranias (a Paraguayan polka sung in guarani, the 2nd official language here), but rock and roll was almost nonexistent. Put another way: Part of my advance course is a focused conversation on art. I use mostly Picasso´s Guernica, because I get the best responses. I still had one student ask me who Picasso was. And she was a doctor.
Next, diminish the quality. Last year, all the public school teachers had to retake the Qualification Exam required by the State. A kind of minimum skills test. 87% failed. A few in the outlying parts of the rural areas were functionally illiterate. Many "country schoolhouses" consist of desks under a shady tree. And most schools make it the parent´s responsibility to provide school materials and textbooks. We send my oldest to a private Catholic school, and even we had to buy his texts. But at least we know he´s using them, and learning. Here, education really is "you get what you pay for".
Finally, diminish its importance. The attitude here is that school is not as important as work. So it should come as no surprise the number of kids selling fruit, cleaning windshields, clearing trash, helping mama y papa in the family store, instead of going to school.
An uneducated populace is a docile one, and won´t make no trouble.
So part of my job is actually to fill in the gaps that their education and experience did not provide. Many of my students are Argentine, and are generally of similar educational backgrounds as the average public school US kid. And a few are children of very successful Paraguayans who bucked the trend and carved very successful niches for themselves, based on their parent´s example. But my university kids are a mixed bag, depending on background, and convincing them on why learning English is not just necessary, but CRITICAL can be an uphill battle.
Those private students, the New Paraguayan Businesspeople, are the ones I´m after, because they´re the ones who are going to get Paraguay out of the mess it is in. Not the government. Politicians, I am learning, are about as useful as a Jonas Brother on the space shuttle.
So you´re probably thinking I´m living large, drinking Moet & Chandon and driving a Volvo.
Well....
On average, I make 2 million guaranies (the local currency) per month. WOW, you say. But, the exchange rate last year, on average was 5000 guaranies to the U$D. In reality, I feed my family of four on $400 per month.
I just did my taxes. Last year, after the current exchange rate of 4600 guaranies to the dollar, I cleared a whopping $3856.85. And am ineligible for US gov´t programs like the EIC or child tax credit, even though my oldest is a US citizen, too. Thanks, America.
So how are we not starving?
The important lesson in working in a developing economy is this:
YOU ARE NOT WORKING FOR MONEY, BUT ARE, IN FACT, TRADING TIME FOR STUFF.
Example:
Let´s say I earn $10/hr in the US. $80/day. That means, if a quart of milk is $2, I have to work 12 minutes to buy it. If I need to pay my monthly cell phone bill of $79.95, I need to work a full eight-hour day. If I want a thousand-dollar laptop, it takes 2 and 1/2 weeks to earn the scratch to buy it.
Last year, my rate was 30,000 guaranies per hour. A quart of milk is 3000 = 6 minutes of work. My cell phone bill is 60,000 = 2 hours of class. So far so good, except...
If you want to buy a laptop, for three million guaranies, that´s 100 class hours, which is my monthly average.
Pediatric medicine can run 125,000 guaranies, sometimes double. Even though the doctor´s appointment is cheap (30,000 = one class hour) the medicine can potentially cost a day´s worth of work. If I want an iPhone from the local shops here, it´s at US pricing (weeks of work). On the other hand, my son´s monthly tuition only takes four-and-a-half hours to earn. A used car starts at 30 million guaranies; that´s 10 MONTHS of work, if we choose not to eat.
So this is lesson number one: try not to get hung up on the money you make, but rather focus on how much time it takes to make the money you need to get what you want.
This was a great help when deciding on pricing my services. I could figure out what I needed as a minimum every month, and how much I could charge and get away with it. I was even able to adjust my pricing this year for inflation, and did not lose a single client because of it. Priced correctly, I have the certainty that even in the slow part of the business year (Christmas to Easter here), my wife and children are taken care of. A little extra push, maybe "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed" will let me buy comics online.
Next Zombinomics Post: The nuts of 3rd world business management. And later, the cast and crew of my daily dramas. Until then:
Keep shambling.
RAW - the American Zombie
Friday, December 4, 2009
COMING SOON!...and Welcome.
Hello, welcome, greetings, salutations, hola, nei hou. By way of introduction, I am the American Zombie, although maybe it would be more correct to say I am just another survivor of the mindless apocalypse around us all. And if you have found me, I must assume you are a sympathetic reader of such things as this.
Officially, this blog will be kicking off 1 February 2010. What can you expect?
*Armchair ECONOMICS!!!
*Social CRITICISM!!!
*Superhero PHILOSOPHY!!!
*Arts & ENTERTAINMENT!!!
*Political COMMENTARY!!!
...and of course, ZOMBIES!!!!!
Why am I blogging this way, other than an outlet for my flacid Creative Writing skills? Well...by way of confession, I was once just an average mook getting by in the good old USA, and having socked enough shekels under my mattress, went to reunite with my child and marry my love in Paraguay. What should have been a simple two-connection flight soon spiraled into a colossal comedy of errors. Trapped in my Dante's Road Movie, my 6-week odyssey finally brought me to my goal, the heart of South America. Uncertainty in INS...oops, sorry, Homeland Security rules and regulations meant that I would be living down here a while, so I'd better make the most of it.
And what have I learned, other than a mediocre pidgin Spanish?
Only this: being an average mook getting by in the good old USA doesn't cut it. Raising a family, maintaining a marriage, starting a business to put food in our mouths, and attempting it in a Third World Latin American economy really realigns a person's thinking.
My folks always accused me of learning things the hard way. Guilty as charged, but sometimes those are the only things worth learning.
So, for better or worse, I'm going to share those things with you. They'll probably fall under one of the following headings:
ZOMBINOMICS: I teach Business English in Asuncion, Paraguay's capital. I've also discovered that, even with my craptacular math abilities, I really like Economics. Once the numbers are stripped away, economics can be a looking glass (or funhouse mirror, depending on your POV) reflecting how the world works. The emperor Claudius used to ask "Cui Bono?" Who benefits? And as I'm discovering, incentives matter, especially here!
POP CULTURE MOMENT: Being that I do not possess a single athletic bone in my body, my brothers and I were movie/TV/music junkies. Two of us took the music route, the third is a successful artist in the Big Apple (he did my portrait for this blog; so I'll be hyping his; check out pw!). So I'll be ranting on all three, plus books and comics besides. Speaking of which...
COMIC BOOK PHILOSOPHY: I grew up on these things, I never stopped loving them, and not being able to get them down here makes me want them more. They also informed my worldview as much as CCE classes at church. Underneath that gaudy, 4-color power fantasy are some interesting ways of looking at our world, and commenting on it, and helping us figure out where we stand. Plus, there's capes!
DINNER TABLE CONVERSATION: Family dinner at my house growing up. Mom has prepared a delicious meal. My brothers and I recount our day at school. We tell sophmoric but clever jokes. Then Dad, refilling his plate, says, "So boys, what do you think of the controversial..." So, amongst this very innocent, if not haphazard blog, controversial topics (such as Paraguay's president, who, when he was a priest, fathered 5 children) will be open for comment and debate. To quote Bill Hicks, "Let the party begin!"
WPL?: What's Paraguay Like? When my wife was my girlfriend, I would tell people who asked that she was from Paraguay. And they would all say, "Wow...where is that?" The only way I know how to explain it is to compare it to the United States somehow and draw a conclusion. Which leads us to...
WIMAA: What I Miss About America. You don't know what you got until your government says you can't go back to it until you fill out the following government forms.
ZOMBIE SPECIAL REPORT!: Thanks to my artist brother, I am now obsessed with the zombie in popular culture. So I'll share any special moments I have had with the living dead.
WANK: I am still trying to fine-tune my writing skills, so I'll be posting an open document in the future with a semi-autobiographical fictional account of my travels through the lens of the zombie apocalypse. It's mostly an exercise for me, but I would like some honest feedback from anyone who stumbles upon it. Appreciated in advance.
So if I am a Z.A.S. (Zombie Apocalypse Survivor), why am I calling myself a Zombie? To be blunt, my old self was nothing to be too proud of. To be a husband, a father, an entrepreneur, hell, to get out of the Panamanian jungle, I had to admit that my old way of living was flawed. Horribly. I had to declare the old me dead, bury it, and rise again as something more than I was. Relentless. Unstoppable. The irony is, in this "developing" part of the world, I'm surrounded by people who think like the old me. And they make me angry (a "rage zombie"?) and they repeat the tired conventional wisdom the talking heads repeated the night before and I am split between a need to argue in the most brutal fashion I can pre-censor, and blathering them about with a baseball bat. Seeing myself in them is a hard pill to swallow. And you know the type: the mindless victim.
And so here I am. The American Zombie, shambling across the globe in search of brains.
Join me, won't you? You can share my canned tuna.
RAW
Officially, this blog will be kicking off 1 February 2010. What can you expect?
*Armchair ECONOMICS!!!
*Social CRITICISM!!!
*Superhero PHILOSOPHY!!!
*Arts & ENTERTAINMENT!!!
*Political COMMENTARY!!!
...and of course, ZOMBIES!!!!!
Why am I blogging this way, other than an outlet for my flacid Creative Writing skills? Well...by way of confession, I was once just an average mook getting by in the good old USA, and having socked enough shekels under my mattress, went to reunite with my child and marry my love in Paraguay. What should have been a simple two-connection flight soon spiraled into a colossal comedy of errors. Trapped in my Dante's Road Movie, my 6-week odyssey finally brought me to my goal, the heart of South America. Uncertainty in INS...oops, sorry, Homeland Security rules and regulations meant that I would be living down here a while, so I'd better make the most of it.
And what have I learned, other than a mediocre pidgin Spanish?
Only this: being an average mook getting by in the good old USA doesn't cut it. Raising a family, maintaining a marriage, starting a business to put food in our mouths, and attempting it in a Third World Latin American economy really realigns a person's thinking.
My folks always accused me of learning things the hard way. Guilty as charged, but sometimes those are the only things worth learning.
So, for better or worse, I'm going to share those things with you. They'll probably fall under one of the following headings:
ZOMBINOMICS: I teach Business English in Asuncion, Paraguay's capital. I've also discovered that, even with my craptacular math abilities, I really like Economics. Once the numbers are stripped away, economics can be a looking glass (or funhouse mirror, depending on your POV) reflecting how the world works. The emperor Claudius used to ask "Cui Bono?" Who benefits? And as I'm discovering, incentives matter, especially here!
POP CULTURE MOMENT: Being that I do not possess a single athletic bone in my body, my brothers and I were movie/TV/music junkies. Two of us took the music route, the third is a successful artist in the Big Apple (he did my portrait for this blog; so I'll be hyping his; check out pw!). So I'll be ranting on all three, plus books and comics besides. Speaking of which...
COMIC BOOK PHILOSOPHY: I grew up on these things, I never stopped loving them, and not being able to get them down here makes me want them more. They also informed my worldview as much as CCE classes at church. Underneath that gaudy, 4-color power fantasy are some interesting ways of looking at our world, and commenting on it, and helping us figure out where we stand. Plus, there's capes!
DINNER TABLE CONVERSATION: Family dinner at my house growing up. Mom has prepared a delicious meal. My brothers and I recount our day at school. We tell sophmoric but clever jokes. Then Dad, refilling his plate, says, "So boys, what do you think of the controversial..." So, amongst this very innocent, if not haphazard blog, controversial topics (such as Paraguay's president, who, when he was a priest, fathered 5 children) will be open for comment and debate. To quote Bill Hicks, "Let the party begin!"
WPL?: What's Paraguay Like? When my wife was my girlfriend, I would tell people who asked that she was from Paraguay. And they would all say, "Wow...where is that?" The only way I know how to explain it is to compare it to the United States somehow and draw a conclusion. Which leads us to...
WIMAA: What I Miss About America. You don't know what you got until your government says you can't go back to it until you fill out the following government forms.
ZOMBIE SPECIAL REPORT!: Thanks to my artist brother, I am now obsessed with the zombie in popular culture. So I'll share any special moments I have had with the living dead.
WANK: I am still trying to fine-tune my writing skills, so I'll be posting an open document in the future with a semi-autobiographical fictional account of my travels through the lens of the zombie apocalypse. It's mostly an exercise for me, but I would like some honest feedback from anyone who stumbles upon it. Appreciated in advance.
So if I am a Z.A.S. (Zombie Apocalypse Survivor), why am I calling myself a Zombie? To be blunt, my old self was nothing to be too proud of. To be a husband, a father, an entrepreneur, hell, to get out of the Panamanian jungle, I had to admit that my old way of living was flawed. Horribly. I had to declare the old me dead, bury it, and rise again as something more than I was. Relentless. Unstoppable. The irony is, in this "developing" part of the world, I'm surrounded by people who think like the old me. And they make me angry (a "rage zombie"?) and they repeat the tired conventional wisdom the talking heads repeated the night before and I am split between a need to argue in the most brutal fashion I can pre-censor, and blathering them about with a baseball bat. Seeing myself in them is a hard pill to swallow. And you know the type: the mindless victim.
And so here I am. The American Zombie, shambling across the globe in search of brains.
Join me, won't you? You can share my canned tuna.
RAW
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