Monday, February 12, 2007 Editorial: Doubt busters
NO ONE is better than an entrepreneur at understanding solitude and company.
He is alone when taking risks; he has company only if he survives those risks.
Yet entrepreneurship offers hope out of poverty, especially for women who have the risk-taking ability, competitiveness, hard work and geographical mobility required for enterprise.
The scaling up of urban and rural poor women—from poverty to micro-enterprise, from the informal sector to the formal—involves the interplay of gender, education, environment and other factors influencing enterprise development.
Mettle
Senen Ouano, 58, was only seven when her father died. Unable to provide for them, her mother distributed them to different relatives.
Senen went to live with a family of doctors. In college, she took up education as this was what affordable.
She, however, started a carenderia (roadside eatery) along Sikatuna even while she was still an undergraduate. When she quit college and got married, she opened another roadside restaurant in Liloan, across a popular seaside resort.
Not formally trained in cooking, Senen credits her “oido” way of cooking to the taste buds she inherited from her late father Aurelio. She also reads recipes from cookbooks, modifying these to suit her taste or local ingredients.
When the Liloan venture lost money, she went into farming. Still reading references and consulting the then Ministry of Agriculture (MA), Ouano went into integrated farming in Consolacion.
Her piggery and duck farm generated waste turned into biogas. Animal waste also became organic fertilizer for her orchard of fruit-bearing perennials like mango and mahogany.
Following the advice of MA technicians, she experimented with planting apple-guava trees. She reaped a windfall when the fruits became popular with grocery stores, which regularly ordered at P25 a kilo.
In November 1990, super typhoon Ruping devastated the province, including a hectare of her apple-guava trees. The damage wiped out nearly P400,000 worth of fruits not yet ready for harvesting.
Grit
After the devastation, husband Marcelo told her they would just try to make both ends meet as three of their four children were in college, with the eldest studying medicine.
Trying, Senen recalls telling him, was not good enough.
She plowed what remained of their capital into the only business she knew: cooking and selling food. For seven years, she sold food from their home in Banilad.
Senen says the patronage of her suki (patrons)—medical students and faculty, neighbors—allowed her to move into catering on the eighth year.
Today, Senen’s Fastfood and Catering Services has a clientele that books months in advance during peak seasons. They catered for the employees of a five-star hotel-resort used as a venue in a recent international summit.
The grandmother still wakes at dawn to cook. Since her husband’s lack of skills in management led to the closing of the Liloan venture, she has two daughters helping out with administration and operations.
Marcelo supervises their current project to convert nearly four hectares in the uplands to an eco-resort. Senen wants to resurrect the farm Ruping destroyed by blending catering, recreation and agribusiness.
“Attitude is your altitude” is Senen’s mantra. Rather than depend on one’s husband, a wife must help by stretching budgets or raising a mini-garden for the family pot.
But should there be obstacles, this survivor suggests: go your own way.
