A Visit to Jockey Plaza

Our domestic helper and gardener came to our house today for their once-a-week touch-up of our house. We also signed the renewal of the lease for our house today, and also met up with a NGO that is a potential partner for our ImpACTS project next year.

Tomorrow is a public holiday in Peru. So, we decided to go out tonight with our friends Karen and Oscar, and Jose, a Christian psychologist who is a friend of Karen. We had dinner at a chicken outlet in Jockey Plaza, the largest shopping mall in Peru, before adjourning to a cafe for some coffee and fruit juice. We were hoping to catch a movie show as well, but none of the movies appealed to us, so we just went into a bookshop after our time at the cafe, where I bought a couple of magazines to read over the holiday.

In one of the magazines "Business in Peru - October edition", there was a special report on the profile of managers in Peru. Some statistics based on a survey of 1,537 Peruvian managers in 2006 include the following:

• The typical Peruvian manager stays in a company for 4.1 years on average
• The typical Peruvian manager works on average 11 hours a day
• 18.4% of the Peruvian managers feel a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in their jobs, while 69.3% feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled

It is a rather telling sign that the majority of the managers feel a sense of lack of fulfillment. Clearly, remuneration and status alone cannot bring about a sense of fulfillment to a person's work. I am quite certain that laziness will lead to a man's ruin eventually, but addiction to work is the opposite extreme that many people in this postmodern age often swing to. Many people jump into the heat of the rat race and begin running without taking a moment to reflect on whether they are running on the right track, only to discover at the end of the journey that they are no closer to the finishing line, and have instead wandered into some limbo that is both eeriely lonely as well as devastatingly devoid of meaning.

Before we join the hordes of modern work addicts who have aimlessly run off the main running tracks of life, we should take a moment to step out of the cauldron of activities, and reflect on the course that we are taking in our lives. What is the defining purpose of our lives, and is it a purpose that takes on an eternal and timeless perspective that is bigger than our personal ambitions? Is our work moving along in parallel with the advance of this purpose, or is it merely touching the purpose from a tangential perspective? Socrates once said, "The unreflected life is not worth living." Perhaps it is time for all of us to take stock of our lives once again.

World Challenge 2006

This is a view of the nice beaches that we can find in Lima. Peru is famous for its beaches. This is a view of one of the less beautiful beaches, a shot that I captured from the Larcomar shopping mall in Miraflores about a month ago.

Today I had a chance to briefly browse through last week's Newsweek Magazine. I chanced upon an interesting article about 2 finalists in the World Challenge contest that is organized by the Shell company. The contest is about organizations that are making maximum social impact in global communities through innovative entrepreneurial means. The winner would receive a grant of USD 20,000. So far, 12 finalists have been chosen, and the Newsweek magazine would be highlighting 2 every week. One of the finalists is the company "Cards from Africa", started by a Bristish expatriate and a Rwandan artist in 2004. The company markets greeting cards made by a poor Rwandan community to shops around the world, and it now provides a steady income for 40 young Rwandans. Apart from providing employment, profits from the company are also channeled towards helping orphans in social projects in Rwanda.

As I read the article, my mind shifted to our current scene in Peru. The "Cards from Africa" program seems very similar in concept to our "YES to Education" project for the youths. Here we are also teaching the youths entrepreneurial skills in order to enable them to raise funds for their education. Unfortunately, we are not a finalist in the contest, but if we had submitted our project earlier, we might have been one of the finalists!

Starting Project "Healthy Lifestyle"

We finally had a chance to re-start our project "Healthy Lifestyle" again today. We went for a jog around the park near to our house in the evening, and our friend Oscar joined us as well. This morning, Oscar brought his mum to join us for our regular Sunday morning meetings. She got the chance to try our "sweet potato" soup dessert. She enjoyed her time with us and would be inviting her other sons to join us for our Sunday morning get-togethers.

Still on the theme of a healthy lifestyle, I realize that I have not been eating too much grilled red meat of late. Most of the food that I eat consists of either fish or chicken. Lunch consisted of fish soup and a Chinese cucumber dish cooked with some beef slices, cooked for us by the owner of a Chinese restaurant himself, a 50-something Chinese whom we have come to establish a rather good relationship with over the past few months. In the evening, Aili and I had a bowl of fish porridge each for dinner, while Delia has a bowl of fruits as her stomach was not feeling that well. We also took some time to prepare some crab mayonaisse for breakfast tomorrow morning. We also took the chance to watch a DVD together - a comedy called "Super Nacho".

This coming Wednesday will be a public holiday in Peru. I think they are celebrating Halloween. It will be a nice break, and we are planning to go out for a movie together with 2 of our friends Karen and Oscar on Tuesday night.

Launch of our youth project

Laura is talking to our neighbor who is keen on organising a jewelery party for her well-heeled friends in support of the project to raise funds for the education of the youths.

Some of the professionals who came for the presentation by the youths. Next to Aili is my friend Luis, a business consultant with one of the biggest consulting firms in Peru and who has worked for several years in Mexico and the United States. Next to Luis is Karen, a marketing manager with a multinational company in Peru, and who has been very committed in working with us to fulfill the same vision. Next to Karen is Manuel, a consultant who has just returned from his work in Korea. On the other side of the chairs are some of our other friends, including a journalist, an accountant and a businessman. Delia and Oscar are standing behind. As you can see from the picture, Oscar is almost like one of us now, and he looks more like one of the hosts than one of the guests!

Some of the cars today. There was no more parking space left in front of our house! A good problem indeed!

These are the 5 members of our youth committee who are spearheading the project: (from left to right: Johnnie, Carolina, Sonia, Laura, and Wilmer - some people have commented that Wilmer looks a little like me).

Some of our youths who came today. We are thinking of getting the girl on the far right, Kiara, to be a model for some of the jeweleries that the youths would be selling to raise funds for their education.

Today, we launched our youth project where the youths would be selling products to raise funds for their education. Several professionals turned up as well, including almost all the professionals who turned up for our last talk on Chinese culture, as well as Oscar, Karen and Luis, whom we had dinner with last Monday. The 5 youths from our youth committee did an excellent job in presenting the project, and responding to the questions of the professionals. One of our friends commented that he was pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism that these youths were able to demonstrate despite their relatively young age. All the professionals were also very keen to share some tips with the youths, and to contribute their contacts for direct sales or indirect publicity by the youths. In fact, including Karen, Oscar and Luis, altogether 8 professionals have pledged their support for this project, and plan to meet up regularly, perhaps once a fortnight, to chat regarding the progress of this project. Our youths will be preparing a weekly progress report that will be presented at these meetings. The first meet-up will be next Friday, and to kick things off on a high, they have all requested for me to cook a Chinese dish for everyone to savour! So next Friday, I will be preparing one of my signature dish, the Szechuan chicken wings, together with the help of Oscar and our 2 guys from the youth committee. Guys in charge of food? Well, times have changed - modern guys are now the masters of the kitchen.

I think we are finally having some breakthroughs in our drive to connect to more young professionals. In fact, I will be having lunch with a lawyer in his late thirties next week, and he too has expressed interest in helping us with our personal matters as well as our projects. It's interesting how people recognize my penchant for food almost immediately. This lawyer was asking me if I liked seafood, but without waiting for my reply, said: "I am sure you like seafood." Haha...... a belly speaks a thousand words!

Dinner with some good friends

We had dinner tonight with the family of one of our good friends, Edgar, who is a local businessman. His traits have obviously rubbed off on his son, who was very animated and excited as well whenever he was sharing about some topics related to entrepreneurial characteristics in Peru. Our friend Oscar also joined us for the dinner, and in fact, he helped in cooking the dinner as well! I cooked ginger chilli noodles with peanuts, an adaptation of the Szechuan "gong bao ji ding". Aili also cooked some 5-spice chicken wings, which I think is an adaptation of a fusion Hokkien-Cantonese dish. We had chrysanthemum tea to cool down the spicy flavor of the food. Our friends enjoyed the food very much.

We then had a good time talking about our youth project which is about to be launched tomorrow. Edgar shared with us about the mechanics of small and informal businesses in Peru, and also gave us a crash course into the tax structure of Peru, and in particular how small businesses would manage their tax submissions wisely to take advantage of all the incentives provided in the tax law of Peru. Meanwhile, his wife, who works as an obstetrician, agreed to give a talk on sexual eduation to the group of youths that we are working with.

We were a little tired after the dinner though. Aili and Delia had just finished an English exam, which their college had required every teacher to take, regardless of whether they were native speakers or not. Meanwhile, I had a long afternoon of travelling to a meeting at a shopping mall that is more than an hour from our house with the traffic jam.

In the afternoon, I went to the Megaplaza shopping plaza with a friend from our professional group to meet the marketing manager of the shopping mall. The marketing manager was a pleasant young lady who was rather helpful, and she agreed to submit a proposal to her directors to see if they could let us have a small stand on an ad hoc basis for the youths to implement their project to sell products to raise funds for their education. It was a good start, even though she did mention that Megaplaza was primarily catered to customers from social class C, and therefore products exceeding a certain price range would be unlikely to sell in Megaplaza. The journey back from Megaplaza was a nightmare, and the jam on the road reminded me of the terrible head-splitting jams that I encountered previously in Thailand and Indonesia when I visited these countries a few years ago.

Yesterday was a relatively bad day for me. Our water pump was spoilt, and there was no water supply for almost an entire day! That meant that yesterday was the first day for almost the past 4 years that I did not get my customary cup of black coffee. On top of that, I received an email from one of clients telling me that they did not receive one of my jobs, and therefore would have to cancel the PO. I was naturally rather angry and sent back a rather strong reply and followed it up with a call. And yesterday night, I slept really early, but as I am a Christian, I spent a short time with God in prayer and asked him to help me sleep well and to take care of everything despite the bad day. After the prayer, I calmed down and I decided not to pursue the matter of the dispute over the PO anymore, and to commit it to God. Amazingly, today I got a mail in the morning, an email from my client apologising for what had happened the previous day. It turned out that the entire problem occurred due to a problem in their email server. So naturally, besides the apology, my PO was restored as well.

A Tiring Day

This is a picture taken of a small party that we prepared for a small of group of abandoned children about three Saturdays ago at a home for abandoned children in Zapallal, a place which is about an hour and a half away from where we live. We used to run free English classes for these kids every Saturday, but we had to stop the project sometime this year because the company that was sponsoring our transport went into some restructuring, and were unable to continue to dedicate funds towards sponsoring transport for social work activities.

All of us are having a bit of a hangover from our consecutive late nights since last Friday, and feeling a little tired today. We usually sleep quite early over here. We have different ways of dealing with fatigue over here in Peru. Delia and Aili's formulas are basically a mix of watching some TV to relax and sleeping early. My formula is a little more sophisticated - I usually go for a 30-minute massage by one of the blind masseurs, and then charge myself up again with either a bottle of red bull or a glass of wine, or a combination of both. Of course, I would also allow myself the luxury of a short nap in the afternoon, as I have a flexible work schedule. Nevertheless the fatigue affected my cooking abilities today as well. I tried cooking seafood fetucinni, but the end result was certainly not something that I am too proud of even though it was edible, compared to my other signature dishes such as the Szechuan chicken wings and gong bao ji ding. I know my cooking is a hit whenever the girls whisker off all the extra food for their lunch the next day without leaving some for me! When I find the food still in the fridge the next day, I know I have missed the mark for the day.

Although we are a little tired, we are also excited because a few professionals have confirmed their attendance for our event this Saturday, and have indicated their interest to help us in our youth project to raise funds for the education of the youths through entrepreneurial means. We hope to extend our young professional network through their involvement in these projects, and we hope to help them take steps towards discovering meaning and significance in their lives.

At a personal level, I am glad to see that my work space in our home office has improved quite significantly in the aspect of organization, with some help and supervision from Aili. It was difficult initially as she would make me clear up and organize my things even when I looked rather tired and wanted to sleep. But I look at some of the visible progress today, and I am glad for the "army-style" training. I have created a filing system for myself based on a system that we used in the first law firm that I worked in when I was in Singapore. I have also finally created a proper accounting system to register the transactions that I have with my clients. I believe that building the proper systems into place is a necessary condition if I want to take my business to new heights in both breadth as well as depth in the year to come. A friend of mine who is the CEO of a 300-staff multinational law firm in Peru has also invited me to visit his firm to see how he runs the firm, and to look at the possibility of sharing some mutual clients in the future. It has been a nice experience, as I am slowly learning the various system aspects of how a multinational firm is managed, as well as the internal aspects of managing and communicating with 300 staff. This is the first time that I am seeing how a mega-size organization functions, as my previous work experience had always been with small and medium-sized companies with less than 30 staff. It is obviously giving me a new perspective into the corporate world, and I look forward to catching up again in the near future with another good friend of mine, the CEO of an energy company in Chile that is embarking on a project to build the largest hydroelectric power station in South America. He has previously offered to share with me his experience with staff management and project management, as he is on the verge of retirement, and he feels that the most meaningful thing he can do is to pass on his experience to the new generation, but I guess I was too busy previously managing other areas of my life to take up his offer.

A Good Dinner Together With Some Friends

Tonight, I invited a friend of mine, a business consultant, over to our house for dinner. It seems to me that the maxim “opening up the stomach is the best way of opening up the heart” is a universal truth! Aili prepared some sushi for appetizers, while I cooked the main dish - teriyaki chicken noodles with zuchini toppings. We had an interesting rule for dinner tonight - "eat with chopsticks, or no food for you"!

Karen and Oscar joined us for the dinner, and the 6 of us had a good time chatting up with one another, and exchanging ideas on how we could go about helping the youths and setting up other social projects. Everyone could speak English, so communication was made much easier. My friend had looked at the website of our NGO before coming over for dinner, and he commented that it seemed like activities were happening only in our Chile branch! I told him that the website had not been updated for a long time, and so there were many activities in the Peru branch that were not put up on the website. He brought a couple of newspaper cuttings along as well, which highlighted some indigenous people from Peru who had succeeded in their small businesses, whose stories might be able to provide some inspiration to our youths.

We hope to have such dinners once a fortnight. This Saturday, we will be having a presentation session from our youths regarding their project to raise funds for their education. We will be inviting more professionals to come along, and hopefully there will be more young professionals whose hearts will be opened to help us in our projects.

Yesterday’s version of the local newspapers El Commercio had an interesting report about how the Peruvian economy has grown over the past 4 years. According to a survey carried out by the consulting firm Apoyo, Opinion y Mercado, the socio-economic distribution in Peru over the first 9 months of 2006 is as follows:

Class A families (which make up 5.3% of the population) now have an average monthly family income of USD 3,534, and after expenses for basic consumption such as food, education, transport and utilities, the monthly disposable income remaining is USD 2,260.
Class B families (which make up 18.0% of the population) now have an average monthly family income of USD 838, and after expenses for basic consumption such as food, education, transport and utilities, the monthly disposable income remaining is USD 332.
Class C families (which make up 33.6% of the population) now have an average monthly family income of USD 408, and after expenses for basic consumption such as food, education, transport and utilities, the monthly disposable income remaining is USD 97.
Class D families (which make up 27.6% of the population) now have an average monthly family income of USD 248, and after expenses for basic consumption such as food, education, transport and utilities, the monthly disposable income remaining is USD 7.
Class E families (which make up 15.5% of the population) now have an average monthly family income of USD 171, and after expenses for basic consumption such as food, education, transport and utilities, the monthly disposable income remaining is USD 4.

What is very interesting is that the Class C families, which as a whole form the largest economic unit in Peru, spend 83.6% of their disposable income on food (and the rest are spent primarily on transport, education and utility bills)! Let me translate a very interesting sentence from the report: “Whether rich or poor, the first thing that residents of Lima do when they have additional disposable income is to go to a restaurant to eat.” It is no wonder that I have seen several new restaurants sprouting up in Lima over the past one year.

A Busy Month Has Passed By

22nd October
Sunday afternoons are always a nice time for us to relax and treat ourselves to a good meal after a long and tiring week. Usually we would eat out and then do our groceries, but today we decided to eat in and watch a DVD along the way. I prepared the Szechuan delicacy "gong bao ji ding" and whipped up a fusion dish of Italian zuchinis cooked in a Chinese style, Aili prepared a few sushi rolls made from cucumber, egg, carrots, crab and tuna, and Delia cut some salmon sashimi slices. It was quite a satisfying lunch, and the girls complemented the meal with a healthy cup of pineapple juice each, while I sipped away at a glass of California red (though I was made to drink a glass of pineapple juice first as well). As you can see from the photo, it was a relaxed and informal atmosphere, and we did not even take out our tablemats, improvising instead with some newspapers. We planned to go for a jogging session in the evening, but unfortunately I fell asleep, so we will have to postpone our "Healthy Lifestyle Project" to next week.

It has been a busy month that has just passed by. During the stay of our friend Joan from Singapore, we held a talk on education in Singapore at one of the top colleges in Peru, and then a talk on Chinese culture that was targetted at professionals and businessmen. The talk on Chinese culture coincided with the Mooncake Festival Night, and so we invited our guests to sample some Chinese mooncakes. Unfortunately, mooncakes don't seem to be too much of a hit among the locals. Besides these two talks, Joan also had a great time doing up some question and answer session with some youths here, and the topics ranged from issues such as tips for preparing for exams to issues such as whether there is a difference between evangelical Christianity and catholic Christianity.

Recently, we have been engaged in some lively discussions with different groups of people from different age groups over a very pertinent question: What is the meaning of life? Most people would be familiar with a king from the pages of biblical history, whose name was Solomon. It is interesting to note that the most wealthy, intelligent and powerful king in history made this conclusion at the end of his life: "Everything is meaningless". It's interesting that this conclusion is reached today by many rich and successful people today as well. Recently, I had the chance to talk with a couple of very successful professionals from Peru and from China, both of whom had significant educational degrees and who owned large multinational firms. Despite all of their wealth and success, they were both beginning to wonder if there was any meaning to all their achievements, since it was slowly dawning upon them that they could not bring these achievements with them to the world beyond this lifetime. In contrast, I have a friend in Peru who has just quit from his job. This morning, he was sharing to me that he must be "the most happy unemployed person in Peru". He suddenly discovered that he had more time to do things he had always wanted to do, like reading, helping his mother with the household stuff, and most importantly, to help in the development of the youths from financially disadvantaged backgrounds in our youth project. Amazingly, he has also been receiving a flurry of freelance assignments which have more than met his financial needs. It would seem that meaning in life is found beyond a collection of personal achievements, and moving towards the capacity to help and bless other people. Even that may be fail to provide the ultimate meaning in life, but an altruistic outward-bound perspective certainly brings us nearer than a self-centered perspective.

Many of our youths are waiting to enter the university. They are unable to enter university not because of lousy grades, bad character or health reasons. They simply don't have money to further their education. As a result, we are setting up a project to enable the youths to earn some money for a centralized education fund through entrepreneurial means, and we are inviting different professionals to join us to act as consultants to the youths. In fact, we are having dinner at home with a young business consultant that I met recently tomorrow together with two other young professionals Karen and Oscar, and we hope to discuss ways in which we can get more young professionals to be involved in this project. We believe that getting involved in this project will bring the young professionals one step closer towards discovering a life of significance, a life that is filled with a sense of meaning and fulfillment. Of course, we are holistic people, and they will be sampling my Chinese-Japanese fusion delicacies amidst the time of getting to know one another.