This is the first post in a series about Five Talents' Business-as-Mission (BAM) program, which develops training materials that professionals use on short-term mission trips to train entrepreneurs. The author of this post, Jim Oakes, is currently on a BAM trip in South Sudan. Read parts two, three, four and five.
No one seems to mind the chickens wandering through the classroom.
I'm writing from Lietnhom, South Sudan, where my teammate, Tim Purnell, is teaching recordkeeping to about 40 business owners and church leaders. (Stoddard Lane-Reticker, our other team member, just finished the section on marketing). We arrived here on Friday evening after several days of delay waiting to get a flight from Juba. We finally got on a World Food Programme flight yesterday from Juba to Wau, and then drove about 150 kilometers on some of the worst roads I've ever seen to get to Lietnhom. Not the easiest place in the world to get to! Thankfully, both Stoddard and Tim have proved to be amazingly flexible, and they are doing a great job teaching.
I've led teams teaching this curriculum more than a dozen times, so some of the things we are seeing are familiar to me – the attentiveness of the students, their eagerness to learn, and their enjoyment of the skits we use to drive home key points. I know a number of schoolteachers who would kill to have a class like this!
But there is always something new. We are teaching in a meeting hall of the local Episcopal Church, and they keep chickens on the grounds. So no one (except us) seemed to think it odd when the occasional chicken wandered through the room looking for bugs, hopping on the table to check out the tea and chapatti, and generally scoping the place out. But I confess that the random squawking made it hard for me to keep my focus. I guess its all in what you're used to.
We'll finish up here tomorrow and head to Kuajok, where we will repeat the class. It has been a wonderful blessing to see the continued development of the Five Talents program in Lietnhom, which now has over 500 people involved in savings groups. The businesses are mostly what you would expect to see in a rural area like this – vegetable stands, small retail shops, and the like. I did meet a woman named Mary who embroiders sheets to make decorative tablecloths. She seems to have a good idea of her costs and profit, and is eager to start a full fledged small business – she is the head of one of the savings groups here.
A final point – Lietnhom, which has no running water, no electricity, and no paved roads within 100 miles or so, has wireless internet access and pretty good cell phone coverage. I hope someone can explain that to me.
Jim Oakes, a 30-year veteran of the health care information systems industry, serves on the board of Five Talents-USA. Click here to read more about Five Talents' Business-as-Mission (BAM) program.
