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Flying back home for Christmas
We are flying back home to London for Christmas on Friday. Our Moldovan hosts are going to London for Christmas too, they lived and worked in London for four years a couple of years ago and will be spending this Christmas and the New Year with their friends in London.
Meanwhile we have been having a hard time trying to get our volunteers to leave. The core team is so awesome and people bonded so well that they do not want to split and leave. Three people (two Americans and a Dutch guy) who all came here separately and met each other while volunteering for us have now become Moldova's hottest interior designers to the stars (albeit Moldovan stars, which is rather low key) apparently and are swamped with the contracts from Moldova's upper class.
They designed and built the interior of our community house, the wife of a local MP saw it when they visited, liked it a lot and that was their breakthrough. They are quite excited about the money they can make here from those introductions and will be staying for at least a couple of months for which they already have contracts designing interiors of Moldovan MPs' hunting lodges apparently. Interestingly, not one of them actually is an interior designer. Well, they are now I guess. If there is a market with a low barrier to entry and not much competition when it comes to interior design, Moldova is that market apparently. This reminded me of Tony Hawks's "Big in Albania" a lot.
They want to continue living in the village at our place for volunteers though and are asking us to charge them rent because they won't be volunteers anymore. We agreed that they would just make a donation to the local art school instead to make it simpler now that we have closed the first phase of our project here.
Meanwhile we have been having a hard time trying to get our volunteers to leave. The core team is so awesome and people bonded so well that they do not want to split and leave. Three people (two Americans and a Dutch guy) who all came here separately and met each other while volunteering for us have now become Moldova's hottest interior designers to the stars (albeit Moldovan stars, which is rather low key) apparently and are swamped with the contracts from Moldova's upper class.
They designed and built the interior of our community house, the wife of a local MP saw it when they visited, liked it a lot and that was their breakthrough. They are quite excited about the money they can make here from those introductions and will be staying for at least a couple of months for which they already have contracts designing interiors of Moldovan MPs' hunting lodges apparently. Interestingly, not one of them actually is an interior designer. Well, they are now I guess. If there is a market with a low barrier to entry and not much competition when it comes to interior design, Moldova is that market apparently. This reminded me of Tony Hawks's "Big in Albania" a lot.
They want to continue living in the village at our place for volunteers though and are asking us to charge them rent because they won't be volunteers anymore. We agreed that they would just make a donation to the local art school instead to make it simpler now that we have closed the first phase of our project here.
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Have a safe trip home!
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I know very little about interior design market but I think that the barrier to entry in most places in the world will be higher than in Moldova and it would be very difficult to enter that market without prior experience and straight into the kinds of clients the guys scored here ). I am also not sure how impressive "Top Interior designer in Moldova" would sound if one wanted to use it to get business in London, Milan or New York ).
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Safe travels home.
That's awsome that some of the volunteers got jobs in Moldova.
Athena
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Happy holidays to you too.