From Wikipedia:
August 11 (or, as sometimes cited, August 10) is claimed by some to be National S'more Day in the United States.
During PST, I remember that we all had to come up with some thing that could be made using simple materials, and sold again to make a profit. This was where we learned small business skills that we could then take with us to our towns and help organize their efforts at making an income. The problem is that the people do many such things to earn money, but they often fail to use basic accounting operations to determine how much each unit costs to produce and then to add a mark-up to ensure profit. And if the product does not move at that price, then they should find something else to market that is affordable and can still turn over a profit.
I saw this in person, and it taught me a lot, especially after understanding better the major lesson of value-added goods. People in Candelaria, for example, were known for two things. Raising papas and wheat, then every few weeks taking giant bags of them to Tarabuco to sell. In other words, they sold only the basic produce without any further steps to refine them somehow. It's like selling twenty pounds of coffee beans for a dollar, when instead you can make a Starbucks venti mocha and sell it for five dollars. Twenty pounds of coffee sold in that, way, then could go for 200x what you originally sold the unprocessed beans. So, you can sell milk and peanuts, or process it into cheese and peanut butter, and make 3x more than the basic product. That, along with some protectionist policies, is a big reason why the US has made far more money than Africa, even though Africa has a much greater productivity. It helps a whole lot to own the factory rather than the fields. Both, ideally. Because the factory takes simple inputs and then turns them into something unique worth far more.
Candelaria does this, taking sheep wool and adding far more value by making it into brightly colored weavings that they sell to tourists. In Tarbuco one day, I came across Damien and saw a big, fat European tourist with white hair, a hawiaan shirt and a little goattee show him the weaving he had picked out, then shove a 100 euro note into his hand. I translated for him: Esto es suficiente?
Damien nodded and quickly tucked the money into his jacket, with a very big grin on his face. " Do you realize how much money that is?!?" I asked him. 100 Euros is about eight or nine hundred Bolivanos. That's 6 weeks of pay for the richest people in Candelaria, the school teachers!
It sure beats selling 50 pounds of papas for hardly any profit. Of course, the weaving might have had half a million stitches or more in it, but it was quite good money. Value-added. The same amount of sheep wool would have fetched maybe a dollar (similarly, they say that the ingredients to make a human--the carbon, and precious minerals, and salts and protein--would only cost 50 dollars if you were able to make one yourself). I also began to understand how nearly everyone in Candelaria was upgrading their homes. Especially with the museum, that Alisa had helped create, they had money to spare!
But back to Pre-service training. We had people making yogurt, cheese, and beeswax lip balm, as well as little bottles of alcohol-rich propolis. And when Natalie and the other girls had 200 samples of beeswax, then they sat down to determine how much they should charge to make a profit. Andrew and the others, Lebo, i think?, had to see how to package and sell their cheese, and whether or not to charge more for the spicy kind that had peppers. And so things went on for a few weeks. But there was a deadline, and there were real stakes involved: in conjunction with our community bank/microfinance initiative, you had to come to different meetings and show a business plan, complete with finances, then update the group on the progress as time went along. At these same meetings, you were supposed to know how much money you needed for the loan from the bank, and if you didn't sell enough of your product then you would have to swallow the loss and not get any interest back made from the profits.
But, what was I going to do? Everyone formed groups and discussed what they might make. Yet I never found a group that interest me, and so ultimately I was alone. And I decided that I could do it on my own, since I found the perfect product. Something very easy that could help accomplish some of goals 2 and 3 (culture sharing), as well as an easy revenue getter. The question became, how do I package this particular thing, since they are supposed to be served hot, or even still flaming?
So soon I traveled to the supermercado, and there they were, the prime ingredient. But they weren't white like we all were accustomed to. No, these were yellow, blue and pink. Still, it would do in a pinch, so I got the jumbo kind and then went searching for the rest of the materials. And I saw three or more different kinds of chocolate bars, and I eagerly put them in the cart. I soon went over the loan I had taken from our community bank, but it didn't matter. Because I would have eagerly spent my own money on these, just to embrace the nostalgia (and the cool points) that I'd get from making my product.
So I showed up that fine day with everything I needed in a bag. "SMORES! SMORES! Taking orders now to make them during lunch!" People looked at me like I was insane. Some didnt want them, especially when they asked how I had procured the ingredients. These would not be the kind you got at home. But they seemed destined to be a hit, so long as people got past the multicolored marsmallows, and the subsitution of sweet crackers in place of the graham kind. I even went a step further saying that they could get some with jelly as well, and that they could choose the kind of chocolate... there was milk chocolate and a special coffee flavored one that provided the extra perk that these bedraggled PCVs-in-development needed during our long lectures.
Some people were less interested in buying my product than in selling there's, so I made a deal that if they bought mine then I'd buy theirs, as well. Some people had been lugging around their items for more than a week, and had been having difficulting meeting their proposed sales targets.
Lunch came, and so I asked the women if I could pay them to use some of their natural gas for the flame required. And I was able to provide some people with the added-value experience of cooking it themselves, allowing them to heat up the marshmallow in the way they most enjoyed them, burnt or evenly brown all over. Brownish-pinkish-green. And I sold doubles for people that wanted an extra marshmallow and an extra piece of chocolate inside their S'more.
So these are fun memories to go back to. Part of the business plan was to make caramel at home, but this was soon scrapped when I nearly ruined a pan. So, like PC is famous for, something that intially filled me with dread and apprehension became a cause celebre, something that I continued until the last days of evacuation in Lima. I remember walking around there trying to make one last batch of S'mores before we were all split up for good. But it didn't happen.
Still, since I was placed in Candelaria and Sugar City (Sucre is French for Sugar) was famous for its chocolate, then the S'more habit only grew. We may have made them eight or nine times after the first trial run at Huayani. YUM! There seemed to be a fire there every week, and with it came cooking hot dogs and s'mores. A little piece of America in the middle of the Andes.
That's the big surprise of going to Bolivia. I believe we all ended up eating very well. Not necessarily all the time, but whether it was the trendy pizza place upstairs and down the road, or the sushi place BRAZILLIAN COFFEE, or just things like this, or salteñas.
