Aaron Christian J.

Adriano
10 – Zatti
The Bazaar 2016 Experience

This year’s bazaar was different—very different. And being one of the
organizers of the event made it made it even more “special”. Trying out our hands in
the world of business and entrepreneurship is not new to us as we’ve already tried it
last year, but that didn’t totally help us prepare for this year. In this essay, I will be
talking about my experiences before, during, and after, both as an organizer and as
an entrepreneur in the 2016 Bazaar.

To summarize my experience before the bazaar, well, it was tons of fun, to

say the least. In the entrepreneur side of things, we were grouped of course. And I
was actually grouped with a very good set of people, people who I knew were skilled
and were up for a challenge. We did some planning—discussed what we were going
to sell, assigned who was supposed to bring what, who was going to do this and that
and such. We all agreed on nachos and tacos by the way. And so, planning was
done, and us, being young and inexperienced businessmen, we were not able to
foresee the possible future problems that could have occurred on the day of the
bazaar, which I’m going to touch on later in the essay. Now, for the organizer’s point
of view before the bazaar. I don’t even know how or where to begin. I could even
probably write a whole paragraph or maybe even an entire essay out of this part of
the experience. Honestly, planning the event was way more fun than the event itself.
Since the whole Kapampangan concept was somehow new, we didn’t have any
template to follow, we had to build almost everything from the ground up, which for
me made it an even a better experience. We had to learn culture to be able to put up
a decent program.
 The day we have not been waiting for came, and everything we worked for
came down to this very moment. Again, beginning with the entrepreneurship, it was
quite depressing, stressful, tiring. I took duty in roaming around and selling our
product to people, which I thought was going to be easy. It was not. It even came to
a point where I was the one making “tawad”. It was an awful experience, yet I fondly
remember it being joyful. It was quite fun being able to mingle with people I don’t
usually get to be with under normal circumstances, despite not being able to sell
much of our product. We didn’t sell much. Most of the food we tried to sell ended up
being given away. As if entrepreneuring wasn’t difficult enough, then comes the
program, the supposed-to-be highlight of the event. In my own honest opinion, it was
not a memorable one. It was not bad, it just didn’t deliver. Being an organizer, and
being one who wants to put up a good show, I literally went running around making
sure everything was good and well. Everything was OK, I guess, but it surely could
have been better.

After everything was said and done, I get to realize that nothing comes easy.
Running a business is not easy. When competition is tight, like it was during the
bazaar, and you go against 40 other groups, you really have to stand out to get
customers. I thought we performed badly, and we did, but seeing many other groups
feel the same way about themselves made me think that, yes, our group performed
badly, and so did many others because this was not to see who was better (of
course it somehow still was, but anyway), but to enhance our skills and potential.
The same goes for running a program. It’s not easy. Hopefully what we were able to
accomplish in this event and the following can be used as stepping stones for the
future leaders of the school.

In this supposed pair work, I opted to work alone since I thought I had a quite
different experience and wanted to share them. Plus, in my opinion, I work better
alone, and I like it that way.