#16 Meeting with the Mayor

We had a meeting this morning with the Mayor of our town. The four of us had been trying to form a youth group to teach about small business and have compete in a Peace Corps business competition for the past two weeks. Unfortunately after the first meeting, we had been only been able to pull three students, two of them being host sisters. We needed help.

After waiting for about an hour to meet with the Mayor and chatting it up with a local offering to give us pottery lessons, we were sitting in his air-conditioned office (oo0o0o0o!!) and the fun began. The four of us trainees and our teacher negotiated with this heavily authoritative man for help in recruiting the youth. About 15 minutes into our discussion I was convinced I was misunderstanding the Spanish that the mayor was speaking. It took me another 15 to realize that I was hearing correctly and he really did want us to teach a group of 16-20 year olds about electricity. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked through the offices of an accounting firm, but I can assure you if you were to pick a few topics that businessmen/accountants are not experts in, electricity would likely be included. While we had wanted only 2 hours a week to work with the youth in the local community center, we were now bargaining 2 hours every Tuesday and Thursday in addition to 2 hours of electricity classes on Sunday.

It took us a little while to understand all this, mind you he’s talking Spanish to the lowest group of Spanish trainees in Nicaragua at the moment. We negotiated back and forth, back and forth (hey Mebaa), and ultimately decided to hold meetings for two hours each Tuesday and Thursday, and split the group into his electricity students and our business students. The four of us are now splitting up into two business teachers and two aspiring electricians each week. He did come up with some great ideas that we will implement into our classes, such as teaching selling to Americans using our marketing skills (price tags, product history, how it’s made, etc…) because the local townspeople sell all their beautiful ceramics to Americans, and we will teach them English sales phrases and customer service. We are expecting upwards of 40 people at our next meeting and are giddy about it. Seriously, Matteo was giggling so much we had to learn the word for it. Risilla.