Chapter 21: THE BUSINESS PLAN
God's Little Drop of Water
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Taliya spent a great deal of time puzzling over how she might go about earning money. The babysitting on Shishi was becoming a regular occurrence, now that Ima and Abba trusted Taliya to mind her brothers. They had told her on several occasions how proud they were of her for being so mature and for taking such good care of her brothers. They said their friends had been positively astonished, and very impressed, when they’d been informed that Ima and Abba had not hired a babysitter for the evening because they had not needed one, as they had put Taliya in charge.
This praise only served to underscore Taliya’s belief in her decision not to ask Abba and Ima to pay her for her babysitting duties. She therefore set about devising another means of earning money.
In preparation, Taliya began to use one of Abba’s electronic calculators to play “store”. She set up a make-believe store, stocked it with inventory, and set about the buying, selling, and managing of that inventory.
Taliya soon devised a method for earning money. She would, however, require actual inventory. She began to accumulate and to save gogo’s, which in English were apricot pits. Whenever Taliya ate an apricot, she carefully washed and dried the little brown pit she’d found in the middle. She soon realized that she would need more gogo’s, so she began eating more apricots. And then more still, until one day Ima discovered that the entire collection of apricots which had been in the refrigerator had been eaten, and she removed the entire contents of the refrigerator searching for them. But to no avail.
That Friday, Shishi, when Abba went to the market, he bought extra apricots. Taliya immediately set about eating all of them, sitting on the sofa with her face and fingers covered with orange apricot, until at last she had an impressive collection of gogo’s. She was ready to enact her plan.
Two days later, at school, during the lunch recess, Taliya gathered together a small group of children and proceeded to teach them a new game. She informed them that this new game was a lot of fun and was very exciting. It was called Gogo’s, and she pretended to have seen it on television, and that her aunt, who lived in America, had brought the gogo’s themselves all the way to Israel because it was so popular in America, and all the kids there were playing it.
Taliya then demonstrated how the game was played. She found a stick and drew a line on the ground. Players were required to remain behind this line. Each player then flipped their gogo into the air and bounced it off of a nearby wall. The player whose gogo remained closest to the wall was the winner and was entitled to all the other players’ gogo’s.
Taliya asked her classmates if they wanted to play Gogo’s.
Everyone did. They were very excited.
Taliya explained that she would be willing to trade her gogo’s for other items of value. The children began producing all manner of objects, pens and pencils and erasers and notebooks and Flash Gordon trading cards.
Soon, Taliya had traded away all of the gogo’s.
While the children were busy playing the game, Taliya made her way around the school yard, showing her items to the other children, and when they showed interest, Taliya asked them if they wanted to buy it.
Before long, Taliya had sold all of the items and had real money in her pocket.
That evening, Taliya sat on the floor of her bedroom, arranging the coins she’d earned, grouping them by denomination, which made them easier to count. She removed her beloved purple notebook from her backpack and carefully created a ledger in which she kept a precise record of how many coins she had and what was the grand total.
While Taliya was reviewing the numbers in her ledger, counting and recounting the money and confirming that her addition was correct, Abba came in to tell her that dinner was ready.
“Wow, that’s a lot of money!” he said, smiling. “Where did you get all that?”
“I made it.”
“How?”
Taliya quickly explained the basics of her business plan, how she’d spent more than a week accumulating gogo’s which she then traded for items which she then sold.
Abba asked Taliya what she was going to buy.
Taliya informed Abba that she was not going to buy anything. She was going to save her money.
Abba was very proud of her. He scooped Taliya up off the floor, hugging and kissing her, assuring her he would buy even more apricots for her the next time he went to the market. Together they joined the rest of the family in the kitchen for dinner.
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