Life on the farm

This is Dionisio. He is our resident green thumb. The last year or so he and a handful of other boys have turned into quite the entrepreneurs. Here he is pictured in his “garden”.

He and the other boys, taking small plastic bags, have been growing trees and selling the saplings. The have quite a collection of lemon, orange, papaya, banana, passion fruit, and tangerine trees. They have a little sign out front saying “plants sold here” or something of the sort. But unfortunately as the orphage is on a quiet and lonely street, nobody over comes by so the plants have just been slowly growing on their own here.

Dionisio and the others have diligently been watering and caring for their trees for about a year, and their patience has finally paid off as last week they landed whale of a customer that bought over two hundred of his plants: Victor.

The plants are to put all around our farmland we recently just bought that's about 20 minutes away from where the orphanage it. Dionisio and all the other kids spent days out there last week as we transplanted all the pants into the ground all throughout the land.

And Dionisio is learning a lot about entrepreneurship. Namely, negotiating before you perform a service or provide goods (of which he did both). Now, instead of him receiving the market price for his plants, Victor has given himself a volume discount,AND the friends-and-family discount, AND opted to not charge him for the water he used nor rent for the space on the orphanage where his garden sits, AND rang up the account on store credit.

The second lesson he is learning is to not forget your investors. You see, as the boys have been doing their project here, the person that has diligently been buying oranges and tangerines and the like and giving all the seeds to them has been me. Now that they've hit pay-dirt, I've come knocking wanting a return on my venture capital that was so earnestly invested in their enterprise.

This is all tongue-in-cheek of course. When we started purchasing the farmland last year (with the goal of becoming a source of income for the orphanage) we had asked the boys to start germinating plants to eventually put them in the ground. I think Victor promised them a couple of bicycles as a reward. And as the farm project has been taking longer than anticipated, they've enjoyed selling some plants on the side.

As the boys have seen his success after this last week when all his stock got bot basically with a standing request to buy anything and everything else to put in our farm, the other boys have been getting in on the gig too. Jordao staked out a section of the garden but is frustrated that the chicken bones he planted haven't sprouted yet and Jose has been religiously watering the salt he planted in his section. One of these days I will sit them down to explain how plants work, but I kind of want to see what else they'll plant first—pens, pencils, soccer balls, spoons, there really is no way to tell without waiting to find out.