How to Move Forward
When Daisy was 11 years old, she found a L.10 bill (less than $0.50) and had an idea. She bought flour and meat to make a handful of pastelitos and went out into her community to sell them. Once she had sold her homemade snacks, she realized, “I really liked doing business!” Throughout her years in high school, she applied her entrepreneurial instincts by selling products on the weekends to earn a bit of money for herself. As an adult, she got married and had three children and found herself less able to devote time to work. Later, however, she and her husband got divorced, and she didn’t have money to invest in a business but had the desire to revive the entrepreneurial spirit of her youth.
That’s when a few friends recommended that she take out a loan with Adelante Foundation, and Daisy agreed to give it a try. She borrowed L.4,000 (about $167 by today’s exchange rate) “to begin to start again;” she used the loan to purchase food to start a business selling her cooking door-to-door on her motorbike. The business did well, and eight months later she took out another loan of L.6,000 ($250) to invest in growing her business a bit more. Since then, she has gradually borrowed steadily larger sums of money, investing them not only in her door-to-door food sales but also in a restaurant and store where she sells a variety of meals, grocery items, clothing, toiletries, propane gas, and general goods, and she also rents out tables, chairs, and tablecloths. She has additionally been able to buy better motorcycles and even a car, a great help to her in her business. She currently has an Individual Loan of L.36,000 ($1,500), commenting, “This has helped me to grow in my business, thanks to Adelante, and with very low interest rates.”
Daisy has additionally been able to use some of her profits to make improvements to her home, expand her kitchen, buy better quality furniture, and provide better food for herself and her family. She’s now remarried and deeply appreciates her husband’s support: “My husband is very hardworking with me, by my side. We work together. He’s his boss, and I’m my boss.” Daisy says that it’s a gift to be able to “work honorably with your own hands, with your own mind. I also like that I don’t have to depend on anyone else — I work for myself, and I’m my own manager and everything. Yes, I do really like having a business!
Although you would never guess it based on her sunny demeanor, Daisy’s path has been darkened by tragedy. In the midst of her growing success as a businesswoman, Daisy’s oldest child, a son of 29 years, died suddenly of a heart attack. Five days later, one of her daughters, also in her 20s, was murdered. Thinking back to this horrific time, Daisy can’t keep tears from streaming down her face. “Losing your children is so hard,” she says. Incredibly, though, she says through her tears, “Despite this, I’ve moved ahead, with the help of God, and, well — here I am, still moving forward with my business.” She adds, “My groupmates from Adelante were with me for many days when this happened to me, supporting me.” As challenging as it seems to run a business after suffering such personal tragedy, Daisy thinks that her work gave her strength, remarking, “I think that being responsible helps you to avoid falling into the abyss.”
Something else that gave Daisy strength after losing two children was that she promptly became the caretaker of her late daughter’s two young boys. She explains, “If you know that you have to be responsible, if you know that you have someone else to live for, you have to carry on. I thought that I was going to pay back my loan at the time and then stop working. But my grandsons were very small, and when the day that I’d paid back my loan arrived, Adelante asked, ‘Daisy, are you going to continue? You know,’ they said to me, ‘you can keep going, you can move ahead.’ So, I decided to try again to move forward with my business. It makes me happy that Adelante supported me in this way.”
Daisy poured her heart into creating a happy life for her grandchildren, and she began investing some of her profits into their education. The older boy is studying in a bilingual elementary school, and the younger one is in preschool. “More than anything, my husband and I work so that our grandchildren can have a good education.” Moreover, Daisy lovingly imbues her grandsons with the work ethic that has propelled her throughout her life. She gives them small tasks to do in the restaurant and store. “I taught my children to work, and now I also teach my grandchildren. My grandson is small, and I tell him, ‘This is your job,’ even though it’s tiny. That way they learn that, in this life, you have to work hard.” Daisy is extremely proud of her third daughter, who runs her own beauty salon. “She’s a very hard worker, just like me.” Daisy smiles to imagine that her young grandchildren may one day grow up to be entrepreneurs, too — “that they learn to work and take care of themselves.”
Daisy is exceedingly hardworking, starting each day at 5:00 a.m. and often not stopping until 10:00 p.m. She says, “Sometimes I wonder, how can I have so much energy? I think, how is it possible?” She has, indeed, accomplished seemingly impossible feats, and she knows that she will continue working hard to achieve more. When asked what her greatest accomplishment has been, she said, “I think that it’s been that I moved ahead, and that I’m an entrepreneurial woman. I’m proud of who I am because I’m a woman who’s very honest and positive in my business. I always think that, in doing business, I know that I’m going to continue moving forward.”
