This past weekend I contacted a
school in Haiti that sounds like it does something similar to what I want to
do, albeit on a much longer time frame of about a year. Here we have classes for 5 weeks followed by
a week of computer classes and then a 6 week internship. During that time they draw up their business
plans and we help them launch. Starting
a small business is probably similar to anything else, you learn heaps more
while you’re in the trenches as they say.
With this in mind, I contacted
the school in Haiti to see if I could get involved from a distance. The head emailed me and I need to get back
with her so hopefully we can arrange a mutually beneficial relationship. I told her I was interested in investing in
one of the students so hopefully we’ll head down that road. There’s another guy in Haiti I read a BBC
article about who has made cookstoves and is employing 30 of the people
there. He’s looking to expand and get a
warehouse as the first one was wrecked in the earthquake a few years ago. I follow his company on Twitter and need to
see about contacting him firsthand as well as I think what he’s into is super
exciting. He said one of his employees
is now about to buy a house after 3 years of working for him and he sees that
as a success. Those are humble words in
my outlook; that’s a huge and remarkable success! If he’s able to purchase a warehouse, he’s
looking to employ 400 Haitians, how incredible would that be?!
There’s another company still
that I’ve started following on twitter as well entitled SOIL I think. They work with farming techniques I believe
and enriching the soil of Haiti. They
might also work with planting trees but I’m not sure on that front right now;
I’ll have to check when I get a chance.
Either way, it’s exciting stuff, right?
I mean, that’s where my heart and passions find themselves all of a
sudden; providing jobs for Haitians.
Specifically helping Haitians launch their own businesses.
Recently I must admit I’ve also
considered Cuba as a place to potentially set up shop for a few reasons. The main one is that Havana is very close to
Tampa. I realize that sounds silly, but
when you hate driving as much as I do it starts to make sense. Maybe as they continue to slack sanctions
towards Cuba hopefully I’ll have a better chance of getting in there, who
knows? Of course if my great senator
Marco Rubio, cough cough, has anything to say about it we’ll just continue to
place a crazy amount of sanctions on the account of a few. If we were serious about sanctions in order
to change countrys’ behaviors, why aren’t we sanctioning China? Yeah, there’s more at hand there, isn’t
there?
Haiti will always have a special
place in my heart ever since I went there in 2010 following the quake
though. I just don’t know if it’s a
viable option due to all the NGO’s and such providing everything for free. How do you sell something when that something
is being given away for free by some foreign NGO? Just this past month I saw a couple of good
friends start a Facbook page where they’re going to collect 25,000 pairs of
shoes to send down there. That is simply
heartbreaking in my book and will do so much to enable the Haitian people, not
empower them. As a result of this, I’ve
sought out a Haitian friend on Facebook who is currently making sandals and
selling them right there in Haiti.
Hopefully I can help her somehow or at the very least learn from her and
her perspective.
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