Day 3, 4 and 5 — The people of Panama City

Getting to know the characters

Word(s) of the day: la tapa (lid for your coffee cup), hasta qué punto (to what extent); la propina (tip)

The days in Panama City are starting to develop a routine. I get back from each day absolutely exhausted from all the new impressions and interviews and fall asleep at 9pm promptly. I then get up at 4–5am and this is my time for blog writing and video making until I leave for the Esperanza office.

There are a few Panamanian characters who punctuate my new daily routine; the omelette chef, Jaime, who already knows my breakfast egg preferences by heart, Aurelio, one of the hotel porters, who loves to talk about the English football league — I cannot contribute much, just bits of non-football gossip about David Beckham — but he is so kind as to everyday take time for me a quick chat in Spanish, and Blas, the driver who Esperanza hired to pick us up everyday — we are gradually getting to know his biography — he is not the youngest bloke, but has a young son and works all hours driving to support him. He can’t do enough for us. He has a great desire to improve his English, so we have a kind of tandem language learning event on the way to and way back from work.

Days 3, 4 and 5 have been about continuing to meet as many people as possible who could tell us as much as possible about their experiences with Esperanza in the most diverse roles: the business owners in Casco Viejo who employ Esperanza graduates and give them a chance to have a “normal” job, psychologists, and mentors who have coached former Esperanza “graduates”.

Day 3 — We started by trying to post-it up the needs we had learnt from the Esperanza entrepreneur success stories Juan and Alexis the day before.

Then it was time to meet 3 local business owners. They have all supported Esperanza by employing its graduates. We wanted to get their input on business skills they thought the up and coming entrepreneurs would need.

From these business owners only Brian had acted as a mentor, so we focused on getting their opinions about the skills they thought would be important for new entrepreneurs. They compiled quite a list on post-its.

Then Maia and Natalie from Pyxera popped by with our team coach Kat Pellatt to see our office and discuss a possible SAP social week activity in conjunction with Esperanza and the SAP office in Panama City. As the guys in the current intervention are going to “graduate” at the end of next week the idea was that we all help the gang intervention participants to write their CVs and cover letters, and how to present themselves to potential employers. Then it was time for lunch.

After lunch, we had an interview with Ricardo — the mentor of the electrician entrepreneur Alexis from Servicios Elektron who we had met the day before. We wanted to know how he had mentored Alexis without having had any real guidelines, and what information he would like to have had upfront and during his mentorship. Also we wanted to find out if it is important that the mentor has a very similar job to the entrepreneur. We gleaned that this is definitely advantageous (Ricardo is an architect) but that for him, the most important thing was being more of an emotional support. It was clear that Ricardo and Alexis have developed a deep friendship and that Ricardo still puts jobs Alexis’ way and looks out for him, but with the “official” part of the program being over, we then asked ourselves; how long can a entrepreneur/mentee expect such valuable emotional and moral support.

We started to compile a list of qualities that could be expected from the future mentors based on all we had heard from the current mentors.

In the evening we all met up in Casco Viejo to celebrate Maia and Natalie’s final goodbyes.

Day 4 — Thursday morning we needed to consolidate and cluster the many post-it notes we had accumulated from the past days. Running out of stickable wall space we started using our desks.

Changing our focus from the mentors, our other task is to define a training curriculum for the future Esperanza entrepreneurs. So all the posts its that had to do with the training curriculum we took back into our back office room and used the whiteboard there to cluster.

We changed tack slightly because we were expecting a prestigious visitor in the afternoon, Stefy Cohen — a young and energetic Panamanian entrepreneur who will soon broadcast her first TV show “Start up with Stefy” — with her fresh view on entrepreneurship from a start up point of view, we were hoping she would give her feedback on the information we had so far.

A bundle of energy and inspiration, Stefy sprang into our office and gave us her opinions. She reaffirmed what had already concluded — that social competence skills are far and away the most necessary skills — we learnt a lot about what “adminstrative” tasks are not necessarily essential in a small Panamanian business and she helped us to reduce the mass of information we had to to 3 or 4 main focus points.

We then asked Matt from Esperanza to come in an explain the Social Venture Club concept to us again — we had quite many questions after this first week.

We decided to spare Blas fighting through the rush hour traffic and walk the 5km home along the seafront with its amazing skyline. This wasn’t much slower than by taxi — it was a beautiful evening.

Day 5 — Every morning and lunchtime we have a fight with the office door, there are three keys, all of which you have to turn in a different direction to get in — by day 5 it seemed Jacques finally found the knack for the tricky bottom lock.

We had another busy morning of meetings, firstly with the psychologist from Esperanza, we wanted to ask his advice on how to profile mentors and mentees, and presented him our idea that the definition of mentor needs to be strictly defined — and that we would tend more towards separate sources for business skills and social/moral support-type interaction. He thought it was a great idea.

Then we met the second mentor of Alexis, Ivana, who had a quite different take on her experiences as a mentor. From her we got a lot of new insights. She also had a quite good relationship with Alexis for six months of so, but she was infuriated by him and his behaviour at times, like just not turning up for appointments she had made for him, so she confirmed yet again the necessity for instilling social competence skills as a very first step. When it came to helping him with accounting and so on, he really didn’t want to disclose any information — which made this tricky. She was not sure if this is because she is a woman — so the question of having same sex mentors arose. Basically she didn’t click with him on a personal level as well as Ricardo, the other mentor, had done. This seems to be paramount. But still remains the question how we can best ensure a personality match between mentors and mentees.

We met Matt and Margaret for lunch in Aki and on the way back got a paletta — a kind of ice cream and fruit bar — though once out of the air conditioned shop and back into the intense lunchtime heat it was a race against time to eat it before it melted.

First challenge after lunch was find sufficient whiteboard space — coupled with the fact that we realised that there was a rogue permanent marker hanging round which we had used on the whiteboard. With no alcohol around we started the arduous task of getting the pen off my drawing over the permanent marker with a proper whiteboard marker. Arm exercise done for the day.

So with time remaining on Friday, we made a first draft of a training timeline.

And then we came up with a first-draft timeline for the “application and profiling process” for the potential mentors/training, for the mentees/entrepreneurs and then a process for matching them together.

As we are becoming accustomed, the rain was falling hard, Blas came to pick us up and it was a long journey home in the rain throught the Panamanian Friday rush hour traffic. In this first weeks we interviewed many people and had already gained many insights into Esperanza, the social venture club, the mind of the young men entering the Esperanza programs, the minds of mentors and the motivation for mentoring and employing those who come out of the program.