One day in August, two boys from club
(Yeudy and Jefry) came to my house visit with me. I had told both of them
before that my family was coming to visit me from Indiana for a week in
October. The first thing that Jefry tells me when he gets to my house was,
“Jim, tell you mom to bring me some roller blades.” Unfortunately this is a
pretty bad habit that many of the shoe shiners have is begging in the street
(many time because they are put up to it in by their families). It was interesting because the form in which
he asked was not really asking; he was demanding that I tell my mom to bring
him skates. I told him, “Jim, tell your
mom to give me skates? Show me the money and then we’ll talk.” I continued on
by saying, “Tell you what, you have exactly 2 months until they get here,” I
figured this would be an awesome opportunity to teach them about saving their
money, “If you can save up enough money to buy the skates, I will talk to my
mom to see if she is willing to bring you the skates that you will buy.”
So we
began to discuss how much they think they could save daily from their earning.
They said that 25 pesos would be easy to save up daily and I explained that if
they would spend one hour less in the arcade they could use that money for
something they really want. I continued
to explain that if they would save just 25 pesos a day by the end of 2 months
they could have saved $1500 pesos. Their eyes lit up and were shocked that they
could make that much money in such a short amount of time. They decided that
they were up for the challenge. I happened to have two empty spaghetti sauce jars in
my cupboard and we made then into piggy banks. We decorated the jars with
construction paper and random things I had in the house, and we put their names
on them. They even sealed the lid so that it wouldn’t be easy to open in order
to eliminate the temptation to spend their savings. They were so proud of their
piggy banks. Yeudy and Jefry left very happy and excited to start the
challenge… I started them off by giving each of them 5 pesos and I said now all
you have to do is find 20 pesos more to finish the day. They left the house on
a mission. Two days later I was leaving the supermarket in town and I had
another one of my boys from club (Alexander) come up to me and asked if I had
any more empty jars, he wanted to participate in the challenge as well. I got
really excited because that meant that Jefry and Yeudy also began sharing the
idea of saving with the other boys in the street. About a month later, I found
out that unfortunately, Jefry had stopped and ended up using the money for
other things including things for the family. Yeudy, come to find out his family
wasn’t too crazy about the idea either, however, he ended up being able to save
a nice quantity of money and ended up buying himself some new clothes. I am
very proud of them for taking the challenge and really impressed that they made
it as far as they did. I am a little frustrated with the families because I see
that basically there is a hindrance in not allowing them to literally get out
of the situation they are in.
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