Kijiji cultural adventures
Marie Gervais, PhD. www.global-leadership.ca
Buying and selling on Kijiji can be a cross cultural adventure!
If you are interested in meeting people from a variety of cultures and don’t want to leave the comfort of your home, I have a solution for you: Kijiji. Sell anything on the online free web service and a variety of interesting people with very interesting stories about why they want to buy your stuff will contribute to your intercultural education. Let me tell you how I got started on this adventure myself.
My sister was closing her spa in Fort McMurray and figured she would have a better chance selling all her equipment if I sold it for her in Edmonton. I agreed even though I had no idea what most of the spa equipment was and was unlikely to be able to answer anyone’s questions about it. People started to email, text and phone about the spa equipment and within a day or so I met a Filipina woman who had a spa with three friends and they came looking for waxing pots. We had a great chat about their business, their families, the people they had already met in their Kijiji adventures while looking for low cost spa equipment and their relatives back home.
Next came an East Indian family with two brothers, an aunt, a grandmother and a young lady recently arrived in Canada as a new bride and who was the latest addition to a spa run by the extended family. I learned about the wedding and what traditional wedding customs they observed and did not and from what regions of India. And I learned about the way an Indian family business was run as well as a couple of Indian aesthetics practices that have been used for centuries. This group bought all the boxes of scented wax.
Then a very touching story when an instructor in an aesthetics school wanted to help one of her students; a single immigrant mother who was just starting her own spa business. The instructor was quietly colleting a few things this student would need and intended to surprise her with them the day of her graduation, but very discretely. She came back a couple of times to look at the spa chair and finally decided it would do the trick since it fit into the color scheme her student had already described. This generous instructor described the quiet way she would present the items to her student at her home. I practically wept when the woman gave me the cash for the chair.
Then I met a most endearing woman from Columbia who was an architect back home and was rebuilding her career here as a spa owner. After a couple of “getting to know you” conversations, we have become good friends and I go to her spa as a customer.
Once the spa equipment was gone, I decided to try my luck at selling a desk. The Russian couple that came to buy it told me that just a couple of neighborhoods away from me was what they called “the Russian district” and that they had their son on the waiting list of a Russian daycare close to my home. The mother told me the daycare waiting list was two years long and another daycare and a Russian immersion kindergarten in the area were in the works. I had heard lots of people speaking Russian while grocery shopping, but did not know there was such a demand for Russian language programs for children.
I have never seen Kijiji advertised for anything but buy and sell online, but the amazing thing is that I discovered the people in my neighborhood, and area, cultural groups living here, buying patterns of different cultures, and the ways people think of business from several cultural perspectives…while making a little cash on the side. I don’t think I will ever get rich from my Kijiji sales; people are looking for cheap or free after all – but I am certainly richer in understanding, and I even have a couple of new friends from my Kijiji adventures!
