La Chocolatería

Ayacucho, PERU

Over the last few weeks my work at Los Cachorros has involved a lot of varied things, including:

• being a referee at a football blitz between some of the organisations for children in Ayacucho;
• bringing one of the kids to hospital when he fell and broke his arm - unfortunately Jorge was already phyisically disabled and he broke his good arm; and
• discovering that four of the boys had run away from the shelter during the night when it was my turn to have the sleeping shift (i.e. I was in charge of the shelter at the time) - thankfully they all came back later that day so my worries that they would go back to their old ways of sniffing glue and sleeping rough were unfounded.

A lot of my time in the past week was given over to our chocolatería. As a way to raise money, as well as to help the kids develop some skills and to earn some pocket money, Los Cachorros operates a little chocolatería. It is run by one of the volunteers and one of the teenagers being helped by Los Cachorros, Dayse (an eighteen-year-old mother of two). Initially I was brought in to assist on the administration and accounting side of things - they knew I worked as an economist and so I "know about numbers". As those of you have have studied economics will know, a knowledge of economics does not mean you know anything practical about how to run a business. So I had to go back to my Colemans Car Care training in order to tidy up and streamline the bookkeeping. While Dayse understood why I emphasised the need for clarity in accounting, I have a way to go yet in my effort to teach her the fundamentals of running a business - but I am confident we will get there.

Then two events meant that I got heavily involved in the making chocolate side of things. Firstly Los Cachorros decided to operate a stall at Ayacucho's monthly food and crafts market. All the volunteers had to help out making chocolates, cakes (I made two lots of brownies, which sold very well!), as well as baby mobiles - the kids of Los Cachorros had been making these for a few weeks, but the trickier part of finishing them off was left to us. Like with my baking skills, I was pleasantly surprised with my sowing abilities. I also then worked at our stall - while being the only gringo (white foreigner) working at the market attracted attention to our stall, the selling was tough going given the high level of competition (it turns out that I am more of a fan of competition in theory that I am when faced with it in practice!). Still, we sold a lot and made some money.

The second event was Mothers' Day. We received orders for 1400 chocolate roses - we only had three days to make them and, because the volunteer who normally supervises the running of the chocolatería was on a week off to travel with her parents, I found myself in charge. By getting the kids involved and by me working two 24 hour shifts in the space of four days (the 2pm - 10pm afternoon shift, the 10pm - 6am sleeping shift, and then the 6am - 2pm shift), we made our deadline and raised lots of money. However by the end of it I never wanted to eat chocolate ever again! Well, we'll see...