My Path to Peru by Dustin Cady, FINCA Peru Exports Intern

      On the night of March 21st, 2008, I found myself in a local bus station in the town of Huamanga, in the department of Ayacucho, Perú, waving goodbye to my good friend and fellow international volunteer Jennifer. She had just completed her six-month volunteer experience and was about to be carried away on a Cruz del Sur bus and into her post-Peru life. I could not help but think about what I would feel like when I am in her shoes only a month and a half down the road. It was a goodbye mixed with a number of different feelings. I primarily felt the sadness accompanies saying goodbye to a good friend and older mentor, someone who has been an important part of my life recently and someone who I had grown to respect and count on for advice. Almost as strong as that sadness was a sense of nervousness and anticipation that stirred within because Jennifer’s departure also signaled a new important phase of my experience: I was now in charge of the FINCA Perú Exports project. And with that new responsibility I felt excitement as well.
 March 21st was only two nights ago and the same feelings I felt that night still linger. I have been working for FINCA Perú Exports (FPX) since January 7th and the previous three month’s frustrations and successes have all been preparing me for tomorrow, Monday morning. At twenty-one years old I will be in charge of running every aspect of a start-up, small-scale import/export organization. It is not something I expected I would be in charge of at the beginning of my internship, but something that became apparent soon after I arrived and realized that Jenn would be leaving in late March with me as her replacement.  I knew by the third week of my internship that when March rolled around and Jenn left, the reigns would be mine.
That means for the next month and a half I will plan and run all the meetings with the artisans, be the connection between them and customers abroad, be responsible for running the accounting of the project, creating marketing and promotional materials, maintaining product quality control, fundraising and fulfilling orders. And under each one of those basic responsibilities lie a thousand little tasks that I will get to organize and carry out. It is a responsibility that in January would have seemed daunting and impossible, and while the butterflies still flutter I also know that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to leave a positive mark on an organization while benefiting personally as well.

Ayacucho, Exports and Artisans: Why I Am Here
 At the beginning of my internship I often times found myself questioning how I managed to end up thousands of miles away from the University of Oregon campus in a small dark office, in the middle-of-nowhere Perú, trying to succeed at something in which I have no prior experience. Ayacucho is the second poorest region in Perú and one of the most isolated as well; located in the middle of the Peruvian Andes, only 3 tiny passenger planes fly into the airport every day and the 10 hour bus ride to Lima has enough curves and sharp turns to make even the toughest of stomachs cringe. When I first arrived I often used those exotic reminders as motivation to get me through the difficult cultural adjustment and reinforce why I would choose to do something like this. But the novelty of all that has worn off by now and it has become very clear as to why I am here.
 In August 2006 I took a trip to Perú that changed the course of my college career in a number of ways. After I got home from Peru, the following September when school started I immediately changed my major from pre-business to Spanish and international studies. In two brief weeks of traveling through Peru doing community service work and getting a small taste of the culture, I knew that spending more time abroad would enrich not only my academic experience but would be valuable to my career and personal goals as well. That first Peru trip in 2006 included a two day visit to Ayacucho where I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of exactly what it is I am doing here now: working with artisans and trying to export their products abroad. I remember visiting various artisan workshops and watching in awe as they carved with impossibly fine detail different animals and nativity scenes out of huge chunks of alabaster stone. I also recall watching men and women working in dusty rooms filled with looms, weaving and sewing by hand beautiful tapestries and rugs. In a paper I wrote two years ago after getting back from that trip, I say:  “The day I spent in Ayacucho was one of the many highlights of my trip. The meeting we had with HEIFER International, a micro-finance organization that seeks to improve the way of life of local people in struggling communities, opened my eyes to opportunities that I had never previously imagined.  As our group shared ideas with this organization about creating an import/export business with local artisans and art galleries in the United States, a sense of excitement and enthusiasm filled me from within.  What an amazing opportunity that I had never considered:  take the beautifully handcrafted art that these people produce, export it to the United States where rich Americans will spend a fortune on it, and send the profits back to the artisans and their community.  And as we talked about all of this, my awareness continued to grow: I speak Spanish, I am studying business, I love to travel, and helping people brings me lasting joy.  The inspiration that I had searched for all year was revealing itself before my eyes, and the source of that inspiration had not been in my thoughts, but in the world all around me all along.  Wow, I was learning a lot.”

And here I am today in Ayacucho once again, three months into an internship doing exactly what I wrote about two years ago. Obviously my perspective back then on the import/export process was slightly naive and very simplified: finding clients abroad who will pay the high price for a unique piece of art as well as the high price of shipping, actually shipping the product itself and then getting the profits back to the artisan is a complicated process with many steps. But getting to know that process and all of the challenges that accompany it has taught me more than any class I have ever taken, and now being in charge of the project I am about to learn even more. Looking back on my journal gives me the answers to the questions I had about how I ended up here.

This experience has reinforced what I already knew before coming to Peru: in whatever career path I choose there will be an international element. While I am learning a good amount about how to run a small business, my strengths and weaknesses in the business world, and what I enjoy and do not enjoy about an office job, I also learn just as much outside of the workplace. The cross-cultural interactions this experience allows me to have has made all of the challenging moments at work worthwhile.