Day 21: Singaraja

Quite a classroom day today! Unlike what seems to be standard here, we actually had a lecture-like day with topics such as Crafting Your Message, Using Media and Budgeting covered. The information was useful if not self-explanatory at times, but per usual my group had our own agenda.

We followed the set work time for identifying our key audiences, but by the time we needed to create our own media plan we realized that we really needed to revisit the criticisms that we got yesterday and decide what we were doing. In standard Abhi fashion Abhi was already three steps away from where we had been, and was jumping up and down in excitement ready to pitch a new idea to the group. I actually really liked and supported his idea, and I do think it’d be easier (art fair rather than physical art store), but the rest of our group was less receptive.

Part of the issue was definitely me as I realized that in my head I thought we had accepted and gone with the trainers suggestions of dropping the computer skills workshops from our plan, thus I couldn’t wrap my head around why people were revisiting that idea. After I realized what was actually the issue I told the group, but by then we were all pretty set in our different views. Also at this time Ary decided to share that he was a business owner, who cooperatively owned an Internet cafe with three of his friends. Keep in mind that this is about three hours after I asked him if he knew any business owners in the area who we could talk to in order to learn more about starting a business. To that questions he said yeah, I might be able to get in contact with a few. What!?!?


I think I was understandably frustrated at this point, since his addition of this information was key in showing us that a physical shop isn’t as expensive or difficult as we had thought it’d be, but it would really have been great if he’d shared this insider knowledge with us hours or days earlier when we were comparing the feasibility of our different ideas. He excused his behavior by saying that he didn’t want to brag, but I am pretty confused by it.

Anyway, very long story short we are moving forward with our cooperatively owned art shop, based off the model of a local KC cooperative that my family friend Robin kindly ran me through. We have a full day of field research to get through tomorrow and I’m hopeful that we will receive positive feedback from the artists we pitch the idea to, but either way Alessia and I basically told Abhi that he cannot keep distracting our group with very creative but grandiose plans that keep us from working on our actual project. I know he understands but we shall see how that goes as it legitimately isn’t him to not think five steps ahead.

Post school we had a failed girls night dinner which was still fun and I had the best Nasi Goreng and a surprisingly delicious hot ginger tea. Of course after all this eating and hot liquid I was sweating and per usual we all went and got ice cream where I discovered the most delicious Magnum bar flavor of chocolate brownie. I pasted the wrapper in my scrapbook so I can remember forever. And it took significant will power to not buy another, so you should all be proud!

Lessons Learned:

Kiva is a pretty sweet organization. I had heard about it and I know the concept but I definitely want to look into it more when I return to normal life with constant Internet access. The more I think about it the more the model makes sense.

My sleep patterns are weird here. Erica and I stayed up until about 2:30 yesterday just talking, and this is quite a change from my usual 10ish pm bedtime. It also meant it was the first time in weeks that I have been woken up by an alarm rather than my odd internal clock.

There are cooperative art shops all over the US! With roughly the same model. I am hopeful but it really does depend on finding the right artists willing to sign up for this venture. We should have more answers tomorrow.