Well, there was quite a dramatic um shift over time about how the internship came to be and what it ended up being over the years. You know, it was first inspired by work we were doing in Brazil, believe it or not, the birthplace of the economy of communion. We actually had a project down there and um there were two things or three things we needed to to make that come about because we are a small company.
What's a small company doing in Brazil? How did we get this opportunity? Well, it was through a client of ours in Indianapolis that had a facility in Brazil and needed help. So anyway, to to give you a lead into that, we needed uh two things. We needed translation services. How are we going to go to Brazil and not speak Portuguese and help our company, the company uh that we were working with? And number two, we had a computer network we needed to set up down there and do some technical work.
You know that I mean everywhere we go, we have laptops, but we needed a printer. We needed a network setup and and it's a little different going into another country knowing how to do that. But because of our connections through the economy of communion, we knew some entrepreneurs that we had met in Rome at a meeting a few years before and we said, "Hey, we're we're going to Brazil and uh we we would like some help.
This would be a good opportunity for the network to help each other and and they said, "Great, good idea." So they they they went and they explored the technical side, the uh the network side of the computers and they also said, 'You know, we have a young person out of work. He's unemployed. He has a family. Do you think you could use him to do the translation services on for you when you're there for a month in Brazil?
We said, "Hey, this is it's a great idea. You know, it he's out of work. He is he's in poverty. He has a com he has a family and we need that." So, so we um so we flew down Brazil with our team from the United States. We got to the airport and our client forgot to pick us up. They were supposed to pick us up at the airport. Imagine going into a company uh a country you've never been in and not having someone pick you up at that time.
It was a it was a shock. But we had our contacts with the economy of communion. And I called them on the phone and I said, "Hey, our client forgot to pick us up." And they said, "We'll be there in 15 minutes." And they showed up and they took us an hour and a half away from S. Paulo to our project site, help us set up our network, brought the young guy who was unemployed to help with our translation.
And on that Monday morning, we were sitting there with our network laid out, our translator there, and our client from the United States who had flown down realized they forgot to pick us up. And we were sitting there and he looked, he was amazed and he said, "How did you do this? You've never been to Brazil before, right?" No. How did you do this? We forgot to pick you up. You couldn't get a hold of us. you're sitting here Monday morning and you have a translator.
I said, 'Well, I'll tell you more about this, but it's from relationships with this thing called the economy of communion. This is a multinational corporation, by the way. I'm telling you some back back end of the story because it it it matters. Well, three weeks go in uh and uh we had to give a status report and turns out our young intern had saved their company $100,000 because he saw something in the Brazil in the Portuguese contract that wasn't right that someone was going to take advantage of.
So, they found that out. The intern save saved the company $100,000. Um we were getting fantastic technical results on our environmental work we were doing down there. It was it was clicking. It was like it you couldn't ask for better performance. And so finally the night before we were le leaving going home successful project our our our client our multinational client said I you got to have you have to tell me what's behind all this. This is I mean we're a big company.
We you you acted like a multinational corporation and I know you only got 20 20 or 30 employees in Indianapolis. How do you do this? So we told him the story of the economy of communion in the heart of Brazil where it all started where we address the p you know where there's poverty being addressed by this network of companies and the client said you know and and he pointed to this intern who we had there.
How did he learn English so well and do this work? Well, it turns out our our intern had gone to Ireland to learn English from another economy of communion company in Ireland. So, that was an interesting part of this, right? And he said, "You know what? This is amazing." I said, you know, we're thinking about starting an internship program where we're going to bring young people like this to the United States and share about this economy of communion and environmental work.
And he said he said and he lived in Indianapolis. He said, "If you do, my family will host the first intern that you bring to the United States." And that's what happened. The next summer, we brought an intern, our first intern from the United Sta to the United States, and they stayed a couple months with our our client, our multinational client's family, and that began this program we've had over the last 20ome years of the of interns coming to to our company.
And you know since then we've had about a hundred uh interns from all over the world come as as part of that. Um and I'll just say this succinctly is that that when they come they come to learn about the economy of communion about the environmental work we do but what I found is that we fall in love with whatever comp country they come from because we learn about their country and they fall in love with the United States.
