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.
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.
posted by Terry at 9:32 PM
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