Early this morning I delivered my weekly supply of cooking chocolate to home industries near Bogor.Six months ago I started with 2kg. Now I deliver 5 to 6kg a week. The families, three neighbouring houses, in small complex were busy. They will need the chocolate I deliver today for dawn tomorrow.
Everyone was buzzing around. Making chocolate filled buns, chocolate dipped donuts,chocolate tarts, pralines, peanut brittle squares and other fast snacks.By seven the snacks will be packed into plastic containers are quickly whisked off on motorcycles to be distributed to the mom and pop shops within a radius of ten kilometers.
Yes, they said business was good. People were buying.Customers were happily paying a 20 cents a bun to about 30 cents a donut.nd enjoying them.
It is a three-family combined effort. Each family's turnover is about $50 a day.Which gives them a turnover of Rp10,000,000 a month of which 40% to 60% is profit. This small industry and 11 others I work with, seem not to have heard of the Global financial crisis. When I told them they would'nt believe me.Five of them didnt have bank accounts. They needed to have cash around to keep paying for their supplies.
They laugh and play as usual. Immune from the worries that are weighing down, the"investors" who were making their money work instead with chic consultants at Citi, Standard Chartered and others.The money, it seems, simply ran away.Where to? Dick Cheney? Murdoch? McDonald's? Who can tell?
It seems that the "poor" are afloat. The secret seems,energy and hard work.They will stay afloat. Every morning they are pushing out carts of hot soups, fried rice, noodles, chocolate filled buns. Others are turning out children's toys, recycling tires,making bricks, wrought iron gates,selling chickens and goats, knocking out furniture, making door mats, mattresses, meat balls, hamburgers, hot dogs....the list is literally endless.If it is infectious and sweeps the country, wouldn't we have a healthy and jolly economy.
With the profits they continue to pay the school fees, daily needs and take the kids out to the zoo occasionally.A blessed enough life, it would seem, for anybody.
And since they buy nearly 80% of their ingredients from backyard and neighborhood sources, life seems to go on with a calm, contentment for at least all around for a radius of five kilometers.And they keep chocolatiers like me up enough for an occasional respite at Starbucks.What a pity not enough though for a plunge at the Spas like those lucky AIG bastards.
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