After a great week of social enterprise visits, entrepreneur meetings, and project proposals in Quito (more on these awesome adventures in a later post), I’m more than ready to head back to Yachana tomorrow… this time armed with an arsenal of insect repellents and light layers.

Coming up…

On Thursday I’m starting a “Village Capital Junior” program at the high school, whereby the students will create their own mini-social enterprises and peer review each other’s work along the way.  At the end of three weeks, they will have (hopefully!) learned how to create a business model, pitch their business idea to classmates, and identify key success factors for a successful enterprise.  The peer-selected winners of “Village Capital Junior” may even have the chance to present their business ideas to the Yachana Directors for a chance to take out a small loan and put their business plan into action!  I’ll be sure to relay the results.

Starting this week and continuing through the next month, I’ll also be conducting research and administering surveys on the adoption of social media sites in the Amazon.  The US has already seen the impact that sites like Facebook and Twitter can have on personal relationships, commerce, and mass communication.  Not to mention, the unprecedented voice they can give to a politically charged nation.  Living in an area that is on the cusp of adopting google, facebook, youtube, and all other off-spring of broadband internet is pretty exciting, and therefore worth researching!

Oh, and by popular demand, more baby otter footage 🙂

Probably the cutest thing in the entire Amazon