More Interviews

June 10th
More Olive Tree interviews today.  We interviewed a lady selling beans in the market place.  I hope she can stay in business as there were many bean sellers in that same area, I hope they can all stay in business somehow.  Back home in America that many people selling the same thing wouldn't work out all that well.  Below is a picture of how beans are sold, I don't remember the prices but it effectively goes like: 50cents for small can, 2dollars for large, .75cents for medium.  Excellent pricing scheme, by fixed volume instead of by weight - which is much costlier to do in terms of equipment.  As always, all the below pictures can be seen bigger when clicked.

Bean Stall

Next we visited a small shop in a residential area.  She was doing decent, great location as she was at a 'Y' in a "major" road zone.  A couple blocks off the main thoroughfare.  So hopefully she gets sales by saving people the time of walking all the way to the market or to the main street.  She seemed to be doing alright in business.

Thanks to the Lord for our next one.  We hadn't planned on having another interview but one of the gals, who sells garments from bags and walks around near peoples homes, just happened to be walking by as we were walking towards another ladies house.  So we did an interview right there, and I got to pray for her.  Valerie bought a brown dress which just so happened to fit her quite perfectly.  Awesome job Lord!  There was a little boy watching us during this time who happened to be wearing men's sized shoes.  They were probably the only shoes available to him at the time, so that is sad, but it was still an adorable picture.

Filling My Father's Shoes.

The next lady we visited was a member of the finance group, though I'm not sure if she has a loan or has started a business.  But she let us use her house as a pitstop on our journey.  She was heavily pregnant so we prayed for her as well, and I guess she successfully had her baby 1-5 days later. Told you she was heavily pregnant!  As we left her house school just happened to be released so the road was utterly filled with kids.  While kids are always nice and they are always pleased to see white people (wazungu) it was a "nice" reminder of how we are generally viewed when I was walking with two boys and they asked for 50bob (shillings).  "Give me 50bob!"  My response was a natural "No".  After which they asked "Give me 5bob and I will go eat".  My response was still a "No" maybe with a 5 second lecture on working instead of begging as they ran off to find a more kind hearted white person (mzungu).  

Lastly, we did more interviews in Kathy and Cindi's hotel room this evening.  I made the mistake of putting this down as yesterday's evening activity; but it was actually today.  We had 7-8 gals over and did a round table interview.  Most of them are leaders in the Olive Tree and manage money, distribution, accountability, .... and are all outstanding ladies.  As the interviews commenced I mainly stayed in my room and read, but would venture in and out to see how they were doing.  Near the end I went to grab menus from the hotel's restaurant and collected a list of what people wanted for dinner then went back and ordered it.  I don't know what the bill equated to, probably $175 for 15 people or so.  Room service for 15 people worked out to be 500 shillings, which at the time was approximately $6-7.  Not to shabby!