Business workshop 

July 2, 2015 Rex and I taught our first “Starting and Growing my Business” class from the Self Reliance section of the LDS website.  We acknowledge we are terrible business people. We couldn’t even sell our Money Making Moron Movies, but we are just presenting these people with the Church’s script as written, playing the designated videos, and giving them the assignments. They work hard. It is very intensive.

Ideally we would have had each student have a book to keep, but since the branch here can’t afford books for everyone, we put the materials onto a Power Point presentation for everyone to take turns reading. We then copied and pasted the text and pictures onto a word document so they have the entire script to take home and refer to without having to worry about taking notes the whole time during class. It is appreciated. The first meeting, we also gave them each a 100 page notebook to write notes, impressions, findings and in which to keep their business records.

The workshop is once a week for 12 weeks, plus a graduation. We have had three classes so far. The first class, we had 7 people. Marica, our Young Women’s President, had asked to take the class, but she was not there. She has a table in the market where she sells mats and crafts. She is definitely one we know will benefit from this class. We called and invited her to join the class. We set up an appointment and gave her a one-on-one lesson in her home to catch up with the others. We also gave her the assignments to do that week.

It takes about 45 minutes at the beginning of each class for them to return and report all they have done and share some of what they have learned. It is enlightening as they teach the rest of us.

It had taken me about a week to get all the Power Point presentations finished and ready to go and all the notes ready to print out. Now we just meet, present the materials and learn from them. It is a growing experience for all of us. Businesses here in Fiji are indeed different from America.