One Month with Manos Amigas

We have now completed just over one month volunteering with Manos Amigas.  It has certainly been a busy  time.  It is hard to know where to start writing.

We arrived at Manos Amigas with a lot of unanswered questions.   What type of work would we be doing?  Were the folks who run Manos Amigas really even that excited about our being there?  Was our work appreciated?  Were we going to have opportunities to work with artisans as well as the administrators of the organization?  These questions swirled in our heads during our initial days and even weeks with Manos Amigas.

Our communication with Manos Amigas before we started was more limited than I would have liked.  Yannina who runs the organization is clearly very busy and we wanted to limit our initial email exchanges as much as we could when we were making our plans to come here.  We got the impression she was busy because there was often a delay of several days or more when we sent an email and we knew she was doing a lot of travelling related to some of the tours Manos Amigas organizes.   So we were really taking a bit of a leap of faith in choosing Manos Amigas as our volunteer destination.   Apparently they felt the same way about us.

Even during our initial emails, Yannina let us know they had not had a lot of luck with past volunteers.  Despite our work experience, despite sending detailed resumes, even though we were recommended by a mutual colleague, it felt as if we were accepted as volunteers somewhat reluctantly.   We have recently heard some of the horror stories about past volunteers which helped us better understand their hesitation.  Early on we decided that we had to prove ourselves as capable and helpful. 

Our first task was helping Manos Amigas with their website.  We had noticed before we left the states that their website was no longer up.  We also were no longer receiving responses to emails we sent Yannina and we thought these two issues might be related.  It turned out they were.  It is a long story but it sounds like because of a dispute with their former web designer, they lost their website address and their email addresses.  By the time we arrived at Manos Amigas, their website had been down for over six weeks although they were able to set up new email addresses before then. 

The first day we started work, Yannina asked if we had experience with websites.  Alison and I both had limited experience in website development and upkeep.  Neither one of us are experienced designers but within a matter of a few days, we were able to get a functioning website up and running for them.  For an organization that ships products to some 21 countries and works with 87 artisan workshops, having a functioning website is critical. 



A screenshot of the new website, www.manos-amigas.com.pe

While Alison has continued to make improvements to their website and began developing their product catalog, I shifted my focus to their annual “remate” or clearance sale.  Each year Manos Amigas holds a sale of their old sample items and of items made for shipment but for one reason or another never shipped.  I was put in charge of managing this sale and Alison provided much needed help with this as well.

Manos Amigas has a nice showroom within their office building/warehouse.  It is filled with natural light and is ideal for displaying products.  However in the showroom they have pieces of plywood set on top of stacks of old wooden crates that they use for display tables.  When I arrived, every flat surface was covered with different types of products.  And under these makeshifts display tables were boxes and boxes of old product, often ceramics that were thrown in the boxes at varying levels of care.  And then I was shown the really big boxes that were full of a LOT MORE stuff that had to be stored in another room because they didn’t fit in the show room.  “All of it” I was told should be put out for the remate.  I kept thinking of the Global Gifts staff and how each year it seems like an impossible task to put all the new holiday merchandise out on the floor in addition to stocking up on regular items for that busy time of year.  That experience served me well here.

In addition to displaying all of this product (more on that later) I was to price it.  About 25% of the product had a price on it and another 25% had a code or SKU but no price and the remaining 50% had neither.  If it had a price, great, with some cleaning it was ready to go.  If there was a code but no price, than I needed to take it into another room, and find the item in their database.  Especially for any Global Gifts staff that may be reading this, this database is an excel spreadsheet that literally is broken into about 15 tabs across the bottom and there are probably close to 40,000 to 50,000 SKU’s in the database.  So it is not necessarily a quick thing to find a sku.  For those items that don’t have a SKU it gets more complicated.  If the item didn’t have the SKU, I was to find a picture of it and the picture would be named with the sku.  Then I could look it up in the database.  To find the picture, I was to look through around 80 different artisan folders on the computer, to see which one of them might have made the item and therefore had the picture of the product I was looking for in their folder.  “Not exactly an efficient process” I thought.

After looking up enough product prices I thought I was getting the hang of what the prices would be without looking them up.  That coupled with the fact that I knew these products were really old and they were motivated to get rid of them made me feel comfortable enough to propose that rather than looking up all these prices (which would take forever) maybe I could just assign prices without looking them up.  After suggesting prices for several items to Yannina, she agreed that would be a good way for me to work going forward.  Things went much quicker from there.

Next came putting these products out for display.  When Mario introduced this project to me he took me to the second level of Manos Amigas which is still under construction.  Picture bare concrete floors and walls, piles of boards and scrap lumber, metal pipes and re bar sticking up out of the floor, sawhorses and other tools scattered around.  "Use any of this for display,” he said, pointing to the construction site material.  Old wooden crates, rough wood boards of varying lengths, a metal pole, rusty mattress springs were all up for grabs.  And it was all covered with a thick layer of dust.



An example of what I started working with.



I had fun rummaging through this material to figure out how to create displays from it.  And I enjoyed putting the product out and making it look the best I could.  It was interesting to open up the numerous old boxes to see what might be inside.  What wasn’t fun was finding many of the boxes were crawling with silverfish or discovering painted gourds full of sawdust from termites or other insects.  Every now and then my hands became so black handling product that I needed to wash them before going on.

A crate with a board on top creates nice levels for a sea of miniatures.

Another photo from the remate



This display of musical instruments was nearly bought out in the first two days :)



The sale has been going on now for a couple of weeks and it seems like it is off to a good start.  People come to shop every now and then.  Some days no one comes.  Mostly just friends of Yannina’s mom come and shop.  It’s a good thing Yannna’s mom has lots of friends.  At one moment there were 5 women all wanting to check out at once and no one seemed to get the concept of a line.  In addition the women were all giving me special instructions (in Spanish) and for a while it got pretty crazy.  “I thought I was going to miss the Christmas rush this year” is what kept going through my head.



A broader view



More is happening but this post is already long so I’ll include more in another post.  We are now feeling like our work is appreciated and we are happy with our choice of volunteering with Manos Amigas.  Tomorrow artisans begin arriving for a capacity building training Manos Amigas is holding.  I’m doing a presentation on what makes a great selling product.  I’ll let you know how it goes.