Howdy!?
This past January, I had the opportunity to travel to Panama with Texas A&M’s chapter of Global Business Brigades. The purpose of this trip was to provide free business consulting to micro-businesses located in rural Panama to create sustainable economic development.
This incredible & rewarding journey started with a group of Aggies meeting, for many of us, for the first time at the airport without ever participating in a previous brigade. Most of us did not really put a face to the name with one another until we were off to Panama. While a little nerve-racking at first, we were fast friends united by an international adventure and a motive to serve others.?
As a first-time traveler to Central America, everything was new! Aside from getting to appreciate a new country and culture, the work we were doing made the trip that much more special, and Global Brigades played a big part in that. Global Brigades made the logistics of the trip stress-free and enjoyable. They provided our rides, filtered water, booked the hotel, figuring out meals, and translators that really made this experience so manageable. Their support really allowed us to focus on what we went there to do: help the community of Altos Del Coco to improve their livelihood by sharing our knowledge.?
In order to accomplish this service mission, we first had to meet our clients and understand their businesses and goals. My team was assigned to a community bank that was just starting. These banks exist to allow community members a more forgiving and local way of borrowing money to invest in their businesses without the strict and rigid corporate banking policies. The most important part of these community banks is that they have the community?s trust. As a new bank, we focused on marketing solutions to not only spread the word of a bank to the community but also inform community members about it so they could trust it with their money. Thankfully, we had a bilingual Aggie in all of our groups which made the process of asking questions and developing solutions so much easier. They were incredible at translating our ideas into ways the community could understand! I am honestly so grateful for them. They were key for translating our marketing materials and communicating our presentations on leadership and budget making to the community. Seeing our client?s faces when we handed them our solutions, was absolutely heartwarming and the joy I felt seeing their excitement is so hard to describe other than a rush of pure happiness and pride. The opportunity to take our knowledge that we?ve accumulated from education and share it with someone who can use it to save up money to put their kid through school or purchase something they need is so powerful. This program changes people?s lives, and I am so grateful Global Brigades has created this platform to allow me to help.
Of everything I learned and enjoyed about the teamwork and growth of this trip, something that really stood out to me was the pure love these people had for their community and others. Growing up in the United States you see this environment where laws are constantly being added or changing to prevent people from doing unjust things or to close loopholes people found. But in this community, everything they did was simply to help one another. The bank existed solely to help their neighbors reach their business and economic goals. And they based their policies on a principle of trust and understanding. People paid their loan interest because they were supposed to and if they couldn?t the bank looked at their situation and circumstances preventing them from doing so, with the lens that they were doing the best they could. The bank was there to help the community members, not to solely make a profit or put them in more debt. That human compassion was so refreshing and really happy to see.
I am so grateful to Global Brigades and the community of Altos Del Coco for putting on this trip and for sharing their culture with us. I learned and grew so much from this experience that it?s hard not just write 10 pages about it! Working with others who did not have to be there for such a good cause was a truly worthwhile experience and I am grateful for everyone involved!
