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Fail, Pivot, Feed: Lessons Learned Hustling in Baguio, Philippines

This is about a local entrepreneur I met in Baguio, Philippines. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. If you want to read another story about a woman trying to start a restaurant business in a different part of Southeast Asia with very different prospects, see this.

She is one of eight children: four boys and four girls. She studied psychology in undergrad. One of her brothers, who was a professor I believe also in psychology, committed suicide at the age of 22. She said that she felt like the family did not ask him how he was doing enough or show him positive affection. She finished her degree but decided not to work in psychology because she associated that with her brother. She also said she has had to forgive herself and others and to heal from this, which has been a process.

She loves cooking and serving others food. She much prefers that, finding it very life giving. She currently runs a small, counter-serve restaurant. This is her fourth or fifth business. The others failed, and she finally learned how to be successful in it.

Her first business was a restaurant that she co-started with a friend. She and her friend had several disputes. In particular, her friend bought stuff without her permission, which caused the business to blow through its budget. She said the core problem was that they weren’t on the same page on who would run the business. Her friend wanted to have someone fund her to do her own business, and she wanted to be equals in the process of the business. She also said she had to learn the hard way value of first approaching the person positively instead of accusatorily.

Her friend offered to split the business 50-50 with each person controlling their portion to do their thing or cash out and cut her losses. She chose the second because the lack of an amicable partnership made continuing to work with her seem unrealistic. She said she had to learn to make sure that you and the person you are working with are on the same page before working together on a business.

She then set up an online clothes store with her sister, but she eventually gave this up because it was not generating enough revenue. She also started a food stand near Baguio’s main university, but this too failed because she was not prepared on how to run the ins and outs of making food in a cost-effective manner.

With this business, she finally has success, though. She started in February of last year. On her opening day, she made 3,000 Filipino pesos (about USD $32) and the next day 6,000 pesos (about $64). She broke even from her starting expenses 3-4 months in. She generally makes about 30,000 pesos (or $320) a month, which is good enough to get by on. She tends to sell out on her food everyday with a line of customers going around the corner of her block during peak hours, a clear sign of success.

She said she learned the lessons from her past businesses. She set this restaurant up by herself instead of getting anyone else involved. It’s next to a big grade school and gets a lot of business in weekday afternoons when the kids finish school. Her strategy is to sell significantly cheaper than other nearby restaurants so that she sells more of it, and it seems to be working.

Her restaurant is a single room that’s about a meter/yard wide and maybe 3 meters/yards long. That’s her kitchen full of her stove, cookingware, food, etc. In the front is a little wooden board facing the street where people come up and place their order. Once she makes it, she hands it to them, and they go on their way.

She works practically nonstop. She works six days a week except Sundays, her one day off. She wakes up at like 2:00 am or 3:00 am to buy her food for the day at the market. She then works until around 9:00 pm when she closes (but sometimes she closes earlier, closer to 8:00 or even 7:30 pm if she has already sold all her food).

I suggested she may need to take some time off to rest by eventually hiring an assistant to work some of the time instead of her. She said that moments during the day when she doesn’t have customers is her rest. She took a week-long vacation to go to Manila a few months ago as well.

Her plan is to save money to retire by at least 48 (she’s currently 37), even if that means hustling now. For retirement, she wants to go to the rural province where part of her family is from.

Many of her siblings work abroad, since wages are low in the Philippines. One is in Saudi Arabia; another Japan. Others have traveled to other bigger cities in the Philippines where they can make more money. She had a job offer for a white collar job in Thailand, and she refused it. She prefers staying here in Baguio with her parents. (In Filipino culture, often one daughter – generally the youngest – is expected to stay back with her parents.)

She also said she helps others. She said that when a person asking for food walks by, she gives it to them, giving them whichever dish they want. Similarly, she gives her leftovers to the street cleaning lady who comes by with a broom to sweep the street or sidewalk in the evening. She believes in karma, and that if you help others, you help make the world around you (the community, nature, etc.) a better place for yourself.

When Advancing Seems Hopeless (Life Snippet from Battambang, Cambodia)

This woman’s story seems to be a story of doing all one can to beat the odds and rise above the cycle of poverty. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. For another snippet also from Cambodia but from someone with a very different position in life there, see this.

(Caveat: We spoke in 2023. I decided to maintain the present tense tone in this piece, but the present refers to the end of 2023.)

Chivy (not her real name) is from Battambang, Cambodia. Her dream is to start a restaurant, since she loves cooking and hospitality. She and her cousin recently co-founded a restaurant. It’s on the first floor of the same apartment building that her family (her mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and her) rents the second floor of. But the business has been struggling.

She worked at her restaurant from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm everyday, and to make ends meet, she had a second job working the evening shift at a local bar as a barista from 3:00 pm until midnight. Her cousin works at their restaurant during the evenings until 10:00 pm when Chivy is gone.

The rental for her restaurant business costs $200 a month (Cambodia uses the US dollar as one of its currencies, so she’s paid in dollars), and her barista job pays her about $400 a month. She uses her second job to pay the rent for the restaurant and keeps the rest to contribute to rent for her home expenses for her and her family.

Battambang has been an important tourist destination until the covid pandemic. Then tourism stopped, causing huge hardship as most people in the small city lost their jobs. People working in tourism, food and beverage, and other service sector industries were the worst hit, because there were now few customers to pay for these services. When I was there, the pandemic had ended. Tourists were starting to come back, but not to anywhere near the same numbers they were before in Battambang and Cambodia, so restaurants still struggled to find customers.

At the same time, she is exhausted. She works fifteen hours a day with only has nine hours in the day to split between relaxation, any chores she needs, and sleep. She has one day off a week on Wednesdays. She says everyday she feels exhausted. Her friends have told her that she is slowly killing herself by overworking, and she suspects she can’t sustain this forever.

At the same time, she really wants her restaurant business to succeed. Her dream is to start a restaurant. Her cousin wants to throw in the towel, saying they haven’t gotten enough business to keep them afloat much longer, but she wants to keep trying. She hopes she can make it.

Both her and her cousin have been strategizing the best way to beat the odds and rise economically from their initial position, but they have found this incredibly difficult.

Chivy would like to move to the US, where she would work for at least 10 years. The greater income in the US (even if she works a low-income job in the US where she is barely scraping by while there) would allow her to save far more money than she’ll ever earn here working as, say, a barista. She would use that money to buy a home for her mother. The family would then craft that home into a homestay where they could rent out a few rooms to tourists and through that, build wealth to allow them to advance to the middle class in Battambang. She told me that moving to the US is a dream, though, that she knows will never realistically happen.

Likewise, her cousin has been trying to find a job in South Korea. She applied for a program the Cambodian government hosts to work there. The program pairs Cambodians with companies in South Korea, where they tend to work in a few different types of low-wage blue collar or service sector industries like manufacturing, agriculture, or if their Korean is considered good enough to interact with regular customers, food and beverage.

She had to take a series of exams to demonstrate her competency. She studied Korean for three months in order to prepare for an exam. She needed a score of 110 out of 200 to pass, and she scored 125. She also had to take a dexterity test, placing blocks in holes and other physical activities, which she also passed.

She is waiting to see whether a Korean employer will choose her. She is pessimistic that she’ll get an offer, though. Korea’s program has 400 slots for Cambodians, and about 2,000-3,000 Cambodians apply for these 400 slots. She said they mostly select men in their twenties for factory work, the industry that would be most likely to hire her, so as a 33-year old woman, they may not pick her.

If she does get a job offer, most contracts are for two years, although some stay for as long as five years in total after renewing it a few times. The typical pay is $2,000 a month in Korea, which would also allow her to save to buy a home to use as a homestay. If this doesn’t work out, though, she may move to Siem Reap (a major tourist city next to the famous Angkor Wat) where tourist and food and beverage jobs are more plentiful.

Chivy’s and her cousin’s stories demonstrate the complexities of trying to advance economically in small cities and towns in Cambodia. Other residents in Battambang have told me the area can feel almost feudal with class mobility being very difficult and people becoming locked into their station in life. This shows how difficult it can be to change that.

Even the best entrepreneurial endeavors are likely to fail and options feeling limited, causing them to look to other parts of the world where they can work and save money, but these options are also limited. It’s easy to feel sad and stuck, and even working 15 hour days may not be enough to cut it to create one’s dreams.

What is It Like Teaching in Sao Paulo, Brazil? A Reflection on the Issues Facing Brazil Today

I recently spoke with Sao Paulo teachers. To protect their actual identities, I will refer to the first one as Gabriela and the second woman as Ana. They taught me a lot not only about life as a teacher in Brazil but also about societal forces affecting regular people in Brazil. Here are their perspectives on life as a teacher and Brazilian society overall:

Working as a Teacher

Ana teaches middle school reading, and Gabriela English for middle schools and high schoolers. Most schools in Sao Paulo and Brazil overall have two or three sessions throughout the day: one in the morning (say from 7:00 am to 12:00 pm), the second in the afternoon say from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm, and sometimes a third night session after 7:00 pm. Students attend one session each day.

To make ends meet, most teachers, however, teach both in sessions at two different schools: teaching the mornings at one school and then going to another school to teach evenings, which seems to amount to 11 hour days (plus lesson prep and grading). Ana knows a teacher who teaches three (night shift too).

Gabriela teaches a morning session at one school five days a week and then an afternoon session two days a week. Thus, she said she works about 35 hours a week, which is a bit more manageable.

As a teacher, Gabriela said she makes about $3000 Real (about 600 US dollars) a month. They both teach in a poorer neighborhood in a black suburban community. They said that sometimes the students and others in the community express concern on their behalf that they do not make a lot of money.

At the same time, their students will see that they can afford certain things like a car or the ability to travel to other countries, and think, “You are wealthy. I thought you didn’t make a lot of money.” To their students, that seems like a lot of money, but to them, they are not paid a lot relative to their level of education. They can still almost afford things like international travel and cars if they budget their money well, but that is significantly less than many other college-educated professions. From this depiction, I got the sense that they would fit into the lower middle class.

Despite this, they said that some days they love teaching and feel like a champion, and other days, they can’t wait to leave and go home. They see their students everyday for a year or sometimes multiple years, which gives them a long-term vantage point on their students’ learning.

The Worrying Creep of Authoritarianism in Brazil

They felt that democracy is fragile in Brazil. Gabriela’s father was born in 1966 and grew up under Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorial regime. Brazil eventually became democratic afterwards, but leaders like Jair Bolsonaro speak nostalgically of the regime. When the current president Lulu (or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) beat him in the last election, Bolsonaro still tried to agitate his followers to reinstate him after he lost the election.

Even during the election, they felt Bolsonaro used his power to try to cheat and maintain power. For example, in the remote rural provinces in northeastern Brazil where Lulu’s base is, a special service busses people the far distance to the polls on election day. They said the federal police under Bolsonaro pulled over these busses and insisted on seeing everyone’s papers in order to waste time. That way, by the time the bus of people got to the polls, they were closed, preventing them from voting.

They said that as teachers, they see some of the parents of their students start to advocate for family values and other ideas that they worry about. These movements they see as connected to the above authoritarianism. This can come up when they discuss certain issues in the curriculum like sex education and racism in Brazil.

Sex education can make many parents skeptical, but it’s important for students to learn. They don’t just teach about sex but also about how teenagers should treat the changes in their bodies. They also teach how to be treated properly and respectfully in relationships, including how to identify abusive or violent sexual acts. In situations where a family member is sexually abusing a child, that behavior is often depicted within the family as normal and okay. The school is most often the place that teaches the kid that this behavior is wrong and unacceptable. The sex education curriculum is the best defense against such behavior, even though that can cause a pushback against families where such behavior is normalized.

Afro-Brazilian Experiences of Racism

Gabriela, herself a black woman, said that many people in Brazil act as if racism is not a thing, as if this place is a racially just society now, but there is a long history and structural racism until this day. Slavery was awful in Brazil, lasting for several centuries. Brazil was one of the last countries to end Transatlantic Slavery. Then once they were set free, it wasn’t like they had a place to go or got any resources.

Gabriela’s family came from the backlands, a word for a desert-like wilderness area without a lot of infrastructure or resources. Her grandparents moved to Sao Paulo. Many black people from there moved to Sao Paulo several decades ago in the second half of the twentieth century to build the railroads that connected Sao Paulo with more remote parts of the country.

These people usually lived in eastern Sao Paulo where their existence as poor black people from rural communities were considered a “problem” by many Sao Paulo residents. Yet, the city needed their labor to construct the railroads, so they tolerated their existence somewhat. After the railroad was completed, many remained in eastern Sao Paulo. This resulted in a huge boom in Sao Paulo’s population: both because these railroad workers chose to stay and because the trains made it easier for people to migrate from the countryside into the city. Most people in Sao Paulo have parents and/or grandparents in some rural part of Brazil who migrated in the second half of the twentieth century.

People in Brazil often talk about the US history of racism. For example, Gabriela said that people who want to argue that racism does not exist in Brazil will point to the fact that Brazil never had legalized segregation like in the US South.

She also said that she and other black people loved the shows “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Everybody Hates Chris.” They, especially Fresh Prince, had a formative experience for her and other black millennials. The show was the first time she saw really successful black people navigating high society. It taught many Afro-Brazilians that black people could be successful. The controlling nature of Chris’s mother in “Everybody Hates Chris” also reminds her of how many Latina mothers are.

The group who dubbed Fresh Prince in Portuguese here in Brazil became famous here. They retranslated the language (or codes if you want to use more academic linguistics terminology) that the various characters spoke into parallels in Brazilian Portuguese.

They explained that central parts of the city tend to be wealthier and the outskirts or suburbs of the city tend to be poorer (where there is less infrastructure like subways or other public transit). Structural racism is very prevalent in how people from the poorer suburban areas are more likely to be black.

This is the opposite of the US where based on redlining and white flight, the suburbs are often wealthier and whiter, and communities in the city nonwhite with less wealth accumulation. Gabriela likened it to how when the black slaves were first freed, they had nowhere to go, so they went up into the hills around the community and built homes for themselves there. She surmised that was how favela’s first formed (poorer black neighborhoods in the hills surrounding a city).

Conclusion

In this conversation, I found it fascinating learning how societal dynamics are similar yet different between the United States and Brazil. There are many overlaps in the stories – such as structural racism, overworked yet underpaid teachers, and troublesome authoritarianism lingering under the current in politics – yet Brazil has some stark differences in how these manifest.

I find it particularly interesting learning about the history of Black peoples and racism in Brazil. The many parallels yet contrasts with the experiences of African Americans in the United States taught me a lot about how racist historical forces influenced both, giving me a case study to view what is unique to the United States or to Brazil or what experiences seem common for Black peoples across the Western Hemisphere.

You can learn a lot by visiting other parts of the world and then once you are there, talking to people and listening to their stories.

(If you find discussions of people’s experiences in other cultures around the world like this interesting, please let me know, and I will be sure to keep writing these.)