ÁLVARO SERRANO DUARTE - Tradesman Of Neighborhood, Writer - Barranquilla, Colombia
To be a tradesman is an activity that I have not still been able to classify; I don't know if it is an employment, an occupation or a profession.
Let us begin with profession that definitively it is not, if for professional we understand of somebody with an academic formation and the presentation of a title.
I don't imagine the universities graduating professionals with the grandiloquent title of "Tradesman of Neighborhood."
Also the government demanding graduate degrees and masters to mount a "chuzo", and the clients asking that the specialization diplomas are exhibited to sell them three green Guineans or two hundred pesos of cigarettes. Definitively I don't imagine it.
I neither officiate it is, because although our activity is carried out manually we don't make it on a certain object.
We move among goods, refrigerators and cabinets, in a more mechanical way that creative, therefore we cannot say that the sale of a room of oil to a housewife or a beer to the neighbor that drunkard arrived has to do with an art, as if they can say it of his works a baker, a carpenter or a bricklayer.
An employment neither is because the employee only invests his work force during eight daily hours, and he receives a juicy wage, benefits of health, education and compliment the time a jubilation pension.
While the tradesman, to part of their work force, during eighteen daily hours, still Sundays and festival; it invests (and this differentiates it totally of the employee); a considerable economic capital, to create a micro-company that he always lives lining in the collapse and on the edge of the crash.
The employee only has a pattern; with the tradesman some companies have claimed that right ordering them that color to paint, where to place to that price to sell.
Also, the employee works him only to sustain to his family, as long as the store works the dad, the mom, the four children and until the visits and with great difficulty they are sustained.
If Tradesman of Neighborhood is not a profession, neither an occupation, neither an employment, then that it is?
Allow me to think it....... I already know!
It is a vocation. That is!
Do all recognize these men and women that great vocation of service, that great work capacity and that great sacrifice spirit (or slavery?) Characteristic of a religious inclination.
And also like in all the congregations for vocation all that is won is for the community...... managerial.
This doesn't tolerate a fair margin of profitability that allows to the tradesman's family a worthy, so certain life it is that in these days of insecurity with so many murdered tradesmen one has to go to the charity and the public collection to replace the expenses of the burial (and nobody chista anything that shame!).
When when giving some data for a survey I was asked by my profession or occupation, I responded that he had a small provisions store, then the young lady wrote merchant.
This word doesn't know if it is the appropriate one to define our activity, because its meaning is so extensive and so impersonal that they accept it willingly from the big suspenders until the smallest suspenders, from those that sell you manufacture and companies, ships and computers, until those that sell chewing gums and cigarettes in the streets of Barranquilla, also admitted naturally by the tradesman.
But the merchant so broadly defined if he has the vocation, the spirit of service and of a tradesman's of Neighborhood sacrifice?.
