This morning sat on the edge of a golf course while we waited to meet Jorge Guerrero for his interview (luckily, we were unharmed by rogue golf balls or clubs). Jorge is a recent graduate of the agricultural school and is now attending university in Asunción. Okay, that was the normal part- now prepare to be intimidated. He comes from a family of 19 children (he’s number 10 if you’re curious) and grew up helping his family run the farm. With 19 kids, his family can’t afford to pay for him to go to college, so Jorge decided to put his newly developed entrepreneurial skills to work.
FP helped him work out a deal with a nursing home in Asuncion: the nursing home provides him with room and board if he creates and manages a bio-intensive garden and provides the home with vegetables. When Jorge showed us around the grounds I was amazed at the extensive amount of vegetables that he takes care of all by himself. Never complacent, the 20-year-old businessman explained that he has plans of expanding. His intended acquisition? Chickens.
After he has provided the nursing home with the agreed upon number of vegetables, he sells the rest in markets to pay for his tuition at school. So Monday through Thursday, Jorge is in class all day getting a degree in business and Friday through Sunday are spent laboring over a garden and producing enough vegetables to not only feed an entire nursing home, but surplus to sell in the market. Yeah, right about now is when I started thinking about all the times I’ve complained about how much homework I had and started to feel like pond scum.
BUT THERE’S MORE! Jorge recently attended a conference at Harvard to honor young CEO’s (only four international students were chosen to attend.) He was also asked by a student business group at George Washington University to come speak at the school in September.
Jorge is a testament to the amazing things FP and the farm school can do in the lives of the students that attend. The idea of self-sufficiency that the school instills in its students can (and has) been used as a successful business model and can unite the seemingly opposing careers of “the farmer” and “the CEO.” FP students are learning to think like both in order to become both. The farm school is still a young program (only five years old) so hopefully as time progresses, more and more stories like Jorge’s will be told.
-Jamie