Archive for October, 2008
The incredible shrinking country…
Tajikistan is quickly becoming a nation of women and children… and a diminishing number at that. The low incomes and lack of jobs have resulted in more and more men leaving for Russia to send money back to the family. With a minimum wage here of 20 Somoni a month ($6 US), people are working multiple jobs, opening side businesses, working abroad and generally doing whatever it takes to survive. Inflation is clicking at about 20% and the price of bread is $1 a loaf. Imagine a loaf of bread in the US at $150 – a rough equivalent as a percent of the monthly minimum wage. People here dream of going to Russia, America, anywhere, somewhere.
Traditionally the families here are large and many from the older generation have a half dozen or more
Gavkhar is a Kiva client - she sells recycled aluminum
siblings. I met with a Kiva client last week – Gavkhar – and she lived together with her 11 children and grandchildren huddled in a cinder block building which lacked electricity for 16 hours of the day. The stairway was so dark we had to use our cell phones to light the way and I traced my hand along the crumbling wall. For most of the last century, Tajikistan had the highest birth rate of any of the Soviet republics. But younger families are having fewer children because of the difficulty in providing for them. In the market stalls you can buy a single diaper for 1 somoni (30 cents) and they are reused ‘until the tape loses its stickiness’ by replacing the absorbent liner with cloth.
What’s far more noticeable than shrinking family sizes is the number of absent husbands and fathers who leave for Russia to find work. Many of the women in the Chkalovsk market told me their husbands had been gone for months or even years. In some cases they simply disappeared and the money stopped coming. Most take jobs as laborers working construction jobs in the city. Tajiks are generally looked down upon in Russia and have been victims of many racially motivated violent crimes. There is even a Russian sit-com which features a caricature of a Tajik laborer, often bumbling and incompetent. In reality there are many highly educated Tajiks here, but there is more money to be made as a workman in Russia than there is teaching at a university in Khujand.
Nearly everyone here will confide that they want to leave for Russia, America, somewhere, anywhere else. Estimates are that somewhere around 1 million Tajiks are living abroad – roughly 15% of the population. Standing out in the cold earlier this week waiting for approval of my visa registration, I mingled among the modest crowd of Iranians, Afghans, and Uzbeks. A man from Kyrgyzstan who spoke English asked me, ‘Why are you here? Nobody comes here.’ He was visiting family.
This sentiment is even more prevalent in the winter and already the power was on and off several times yesterday here in the MicroInvest office. My fingers are numb and I wear my down jacket sitting at my desk. Occasionally I’ll lean back, blow on my fingers, and wonder how I ended up here. But every
Accordion on the square - daily life goes on in the winter
Kiva client I meet reminds me that there is a real need for credit here and that it does make a profound difference in their standard of living. Tajikistan’s poverty looks like drudgery and everyday hardship – families split apart, sharp minds reduced to swinging hammers, shivering in dim candlelight. But despite it all, people find a way to survive. Early in the morning the buses are overloaded with women bringing satchels of goods to market, students arrive at school, and officeworkers wipe the dust from their shoes. Life goes on and, while the country lacks enough fuel to heat their homes, there’s more than enough fuel behind the dreams of those wanting to move on from the conditions here and find a better life somewhere, anywhere.
Rob is a Kiva Fellow in Khujand, Tajikistan working with MLF MicroInvest. For more information on MicroInvest, please follow this link.
For a slideshow of Tajikistan photos you can visit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29346838@N05/sets/72157608467919856/show/
Gali Sends Greetings from Samoa
For those of you who know me as Eviatar (or do not know me at all), I am now Galumalemana, or Gali for short. This is my Samoan name, bestowed upon me by some of the loan officers during my “initiation” on my first Friday night here. The event included some rugby rituals, a healthy amount of Vailima (the delicious local beer), karaoke, many laughs, and a fuzzy feeling of being welcomed into my new family.
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Samoa is beautiful, but poor. The fishermen in the background are standing in the ocean and fishing with a net.
I arrived in Samoa two weeks ago, and have had an interesting time since. I will try to not be too redundant with previous entries written by fellows who served in Samoa, so I won’t talk about the myriad churches, the beauty of the country, the heat and humidity, the crazy drivers, the fascinating state of poverty, or the kindness of the people. (If you haven’t already, I suggest that you read their very interesting entries by searching for “Samoa” at the top of this page.) Except, the poverty and the extent of the friendliness of the people here is so fascinating that I must write about it, even if it is in repetition. Hopefully you will find something unique in my impressions and interpretation.
Poverty here is intriguing because it presents itself in such an unexpected way. I haven’t been here long enough to make any judgments and pretend to be an expert (that’s next week), so here are some initial observations regarding poverty in Samoa. Although Samoa ranks 36th on the UN’s Least Developed Countries list, that is far from obvious. People here are extremely nice, and it’s hard to imagine any hardships going on in such a paradise of smiles and helpful strangers. Also, there is a very strong extended family and community support net, which keeps the poverty hidden underneath the surface. Samoans would never let anyone sleep on the street or go hungry, even a stranger. They are very generous- and not of the sort that expect something in return, but of the sort that gives because they can. However, this social support places a burden on everyone’s resources. Without going into welfare economics, I should mention that the impact of this system on incentives for people to work hard has crossed my mind a few times.
The second stand out topic is the extent of the happiness and friendliness of people here. Although there is no way for me to tell for sure how happy people truly are in just two weeks, I take their constant smiling, laughing, and kindness as positive indicators. It’s so pronounced that you have to wonder what makes a whole nation so nice. Is it the History? Geography? Chance? Genetics? Climate? Let me illustrate this kindness with an experience that despite its subtlety, startled me quite a bit. A few days after arrival, I went to the immigration office to finalize my visa. There were two booths with clerks in each. One clerk was busy assisting someone, and the other was doing some paperwork. People were sitting in the waiting area, waiting, I assumed, for one of the clerks to become available and invite the next-in-line. I sat down, and within a few minutes, someone entered the office, and headed straight for the clerk doing the paperwork. After exchanging their greetings, the newcomer caught my gaze, understood the situation, and immediately invited me to talk to the clerk before him. Apparently the people in the room were waiting for something else, and I was supposed to have interrupted the clerk on arrival. Most locals in every other place I have visited would have taken advantage of me, never mind been sensitive enough to notice and consider my position. Importantly, I feel like this was not a fluke. Although most of my experiences with the kindness of people here are subtle and individually unimpressive, I am confident that anyone here would go out of their way to help me, even if doing so would send them in the complete opposite direction.
I came to Samoa not to be the recipient of kindness, but to help SPBD with Kiva-related processes. Over the last two weeks, I have been learning how the microfinance institution operates, going over their procedures and the new Kiva interface with the office staff, planning ways to improve their processes, and arranging excursions into the field to write journals. Still, I have not overlooked the fact that I have had the luck to be placed on this beautiful island. Accordingly, I have been exploring quite a bit, and yes, it is extremely beautiful. Upolu is one of the two main islands comprising Samoa, and where I have been staying. It is covered by thick greenery, exotically painted flowers, and white beaches riddled with palm trees. To my peers in Sudan and Azerbaijan, please take comfort in knowing that most of the beaches are occupied by coral. As my scraped hands and knees can attest, this makes for unpleasant swimming.
I look forward to discovering more about Samoa, especially the effects of microfinance and Kiva on the people here. This should happen when I meet borrowers in the field starting in the next few days. Until then, be sure to borrow a page from the Samoan way of life, take it easy, and know that no hardship is worth being unhappy for. I’m constantly reminded of the first sentence I read about Samoa: “If relaxing was an Olympic sport, Samoa would win gold.”
News Flash
Earlier this month, the Rwandan government announced that French was no longer to be the official language of communication and teaching. Currently, French is used as the language of instruction in over 95% of schools; all of them must now switch to English. In addition to schools, government workers must be fluent in English. The agenda is effectively to phase out French in the country.
I heard this news, of course, with some astonishment. Were the teachers going to learn English overnight? What were the implications of switching languages for millions of Francophone employees and civil workers? For high school and college kids already dealing with quarter-life crises? My first inclination was to interpret the announcement as a sort of grand political gesticulation, not unlike a motion for certain wars. This I read as foolhardy: postcolonialism might be all the rage, but after all I haven’t heard of Mexico abolishing Spanish.
To my surprise, my colleagues and friends took this news with all due nonchalance. Oh that’s nice, they said – it was a move that neither surprised nor nonplussed any of them. As they explained to me, the change had been justified for two reasons:
As has been well documented, the first is political. The soured French-Rwandan relations after the 1994 genocide undeniably smolders in the background of the decision. A report this year from an official commission investigating the role of France in the Genocide alleged that the French provided weapons and support to Hutu-extremists behind the killings, and furthermore facilitated the escape of militants from the pursuit of justice. Rwanda has over the past decade made several motions to sever ties with France, including the shutdown of the French embassy and the French-Rwanda cultural exchange center in Kigali.
However, the main reason on record for the move (as stated by Industry and Trade Minister Vincent Karega) is business – English is, in his words, the “backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe” – while French is, he dismisses, “spoken only in France, some parts of West Africa, and parts of Canada and Switzerland.” The business impetus became even more important in recent years, after Rwanda joined the English-speaking East African Community, consisting of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania.
Admittedly, my indifferent colleagues say, the change will not be easy for many citizens of Rwanda. But they’re not concerned, quite simply, because for the majority of Rwandans neither French nor English is lingua franca; Kinyarwanda remains currency. As with many other matters, the shift mandated by top-level announcements does not reach very far below.
By some estimates, English is spoken by 3% of the population. French is spoken by around 8%. In the marketplaces and streets, transactions continue as usual; money and goods exchanged hands as they always have, in the vernacular. Here at VFC the loan officers looked at the headlines, shrugged, and saw little of relevance for the clients they serve.
Tajikistan’s “White Gold”
It’s easy to tell when cotton season has arrived in Tajikistan, not because of a change in temperature or rainfall but because university students start disappearing from the city. Each Fall universities throughout Tajikistan come to a standstill as hoards of students are sent to do unofficially mandatory labor in the cotton fields. They are often paid little or not at all; are forced to abandon their studies and jobs; and risk loosing their diploma if they decide not to go. While this practice is officially illegal in Tajikistan, it is still widespread and devastating.
Tajikistan’s economy and culture are dominated by cotton. The industry employs roughly 50% of the country’s labor force, accounts for 15% of its exports, and is the biggest contributor to Tajikistan’s GDP. Everyone here has a story about how cotton has affected their life, their family, or their job. It is everywhere and it affects everyone. It even affects IMON, the microfinance agency that I am working for as part of my Kiva Fellowship.
A couple weeks ago 2 of my colleagues at IMON, also students at the local university, were called to work the fields. They were only given a few hours to prepare for a difficult two week venture: it is likely they will work long days without rest, sleep in the fields, become exposed to dangerous pesticides, and receive little in the way of nourishment. They could always pay the $100 bribe, a steal by most Western standards (including my own), but a hefty sum for the average Tajikistan worker.
A dark cloud slowly crept over the office as that day progressed. Almost everyone identified with the futility of the situation – they had also been forced to pick cotton and knew what the students were in for. The managers at IMON tried to pull some strings in order to free their employees from the assignment. But several hours spent making phone calls was only partially successful: one of the employees was able to shirk the responsibility but the other, one of the Kiva staff, was forced to leave. In addition, another staff person was asked to abandon their own job and take over the student’s Kiva responsibilities, including posting the month’s available loans on the Kiva site.
And it’s not just students that have been ordered to pick cotton. The IMON deputy director’s wife has also been called into the fields. As a doctor and a government employee, she is required to pick cotton one day a week during the season. She is older than most of her fellow pickers and is only able to pick around 10 kilos a day. And what does this established doctor receive for her day’s work in the fields? Around 74 cents! It costs her twice that amount to take the bus to and from the field, in addition to the lunch she must purchase for herself.
Since that day, I have learned more about cotton than I ever thought was possible. I’ve heard countless opinions on what’s wrong with the system and how the government should fix it. But, the deeper I dig, the more I realize just how complex the situation really is.
Is it the fault of the government?
In most cases the cotton farmers do not own the land on which they farm. They lease the land directly from the government, which in turn sets fixed prices on the cotton. The government also exercises strict control over what is grown on the land and in what quantity. While other crops like potatoes, melons, and wheat are often much more profitable to grow, the government has imposed unrealistic quotas that require farmers to dedicate most of their land to cotton.
Publicly, the government opposes student labor but they tend to turn a blind eye this time a year. They see cotton as a way for Tajikistan to compete globally. After all, the country is still recovering from a devastating civil war in the early 90′s and, previous to that, decades under the heavy hand of Soviet control. Their economic development has since relied heavily on agricultural exports, especially cotton. But their ability to remain competitive in this market is constantly constrained and challenged by the global downward push on prices.
Is it the fault of the farmers?
Farmers stepped in to develop the cotton industry after the Soviets left and have faced difficulties in finding the local investment needed to make much-needed upgrades to their equipment. They instead have been forced to seek outside financial investment from ‘futures companies’ that set strict and unreasonable quotas for the farms. If at the end of the season a farmer has not met those numbers they are subjected to high interest rates on the initial loans, which they cannot begin to pay off until the following season.
Is it the fault of the universities?
Many argue that the universities do not have to force the students to work in the fields – it is illegal, right? In addition, the universities have been charged with withholding payments that the students receive for their time in the fields. These funds are instead used to purchase books and supplies that they can’t normally afford.
Is it the fault of banks?
Farmers argue that they would be able to break the downward cycle if they simply had access to equitable funding. They would be able to repair and upgrade their equipment, thereby allowing them to improve the efficiency of their operations and produce a higher quality product that can earn more on the global market. But most reputable financial agencies within Tajikistan won’t provide these loans because they don’t want to get involved with the issue of forced student labor.
Breaking Free
The reality is that it is not the fault of one agency or one group. And the problem cannot be resolved unless all of the main players step up and work together.
In the meantime, we will just have to wait. My co-worker was supposed to be gone for two weeks, but that time has already come and gone. The staff at IMON is hoping that he will back soon, although many worry that he could be gone until December…..that’s how long they were forced to work in the fields when they were in college.
Want to learn more?
Check out this recent article in the NY Times and this report by the International Labor Rights Forum.
Thanks again for all of your support – Carrie Ferrence, working with IMON International in Tajikistan.
Welcome to the 3 K’s: K-MET, Kisumu, Kenya
When I last corresponded with you, dear Kiva Fellows Blog reader, I was still in my home country, chucking trespassing snakes out of my house and considering whether just one bottle of Pepto-Bismol would be enough for 10 months on a foreign continent.
I write to you now from my desk at K-MET, in Kisumu Kenya, my home for the next 3 months (Kisumu, you know, hopefully not the desk). I am drinking my morning tea, which is scalding hot, milky and sweet with just a hint of spice, listening to the roosters in the yard and the chatter of birds waft in through the open window.
I arrived in the country 9 days ago, on a rainy Sunday night in Nairobi. After a long travel day and a tedious visa queue, I was very happy to see the smiling face of a fellow Kiva Fellow, Dave, who was kind enough to meet me at the airport. I spent the next two days benefiting from Dave’s semi-veteran status as he helped me navigate matatus in the city, and from the hospitality of Kiva Partner Development Specialist David Kitusa’s family. I was lucky to have such a wonderful start to this experience.
David Kitusa was scheduled to be meeting with my host organization K-MET that Wednesday, a coincidental piece of good fortune. From the Kisumu airport, David and I took a taxi down some bumpy roads to the K-MET office, where we were warmly welcomed with carved wooden necklaces. I immediately liked the place. Now, I’m not saying that I can be won over by a necklace, but this was a really cool necklace. Each member of the staff was friendly and kind, extremely generous with their welcomes. I felt very much at home and could tell that I would enjoy coming into work each day to work along side such nice people.
We were treated to a power point presentation giving a background of K-MET and what the organization does in the community. I was, frankly, blown away. As I continue to see each day the work the organization does and how it strives to create innovative and practical solutions for vulnerable people, I realize even more how valuable their work is for the community. And I’ve only been here 6 days.
K-MET is the Kisumu Medical and Education Trust. It is an indigenous non-governmental organization that was started by a group of Kenyans in Nairobi in 1995. It now operates in 5 of the 8 Kenyan provinces, with its headquarters in Kisumu. Their mission is to promote development of underserved communities through innovative health and education programs.
K-MET was originally founded in order to address reproductive health care. While abortion is illegal in Kenya, many back alley abortions are still performed, and this contributes to the region’s high rate of maternal mortality (1,000 deaths per 100,000 births compared to a US rate of 17 deaths to 100,000 births). K-MET provides post abortion care and promotes family planning and contraceptive use in order to create an environment where every child is wanted.
K-MET has expanded over the years to provide a wide range of health care services in communities through clinics and home based care programs. I could go on and on about their different programs: the clinical services, the home based care, the nutrition program, the program Sisterhood for Change, which provides skills training for girls out of school…
But you, who have stuck with me this far, must be wondering how microfinance plays into all of this. Other Kiva partners are solely microfinance institutions and here I am typing incessantly about health care. K-MET is an interesting Kiva Partner in that their primary focus is indeed not on microfinance. Rather, the microfinance program supplements their broader vision of meeting communities’ health needs. The microfinance program was initiated in 2004 and they began their partnership with Kiva in 2006. K-MET has big ideas for the program and I am excited to learn what they have in store for the future.
Perhaps you have browsed through K-MET’s clients on the Kiva website and are now thinking, “wait! I see how a doctor purchasing an ultrasound machine is health related, but selling charcoal? That’s a stretch…” While some loans are made to Private Network Providers with health facilities, in order to make improvements to their clinics and services, others are made to what are known as Community Based Service Providers. These are people who work in the Home Based Care program for K-MET as volunteers and have a business from which they receive their income, selling charcoal for example. With a loan from K-MET and Kiva, they are able to maintain a steady revenue flow, and even increase profits, allowing them to continue their volunteer work caring for patients.
I have started attending borrower group meetings and even had the opportunity to talk to four women about their loan applications yesterday. Hopefully you will see Yucabeth, who is applying for a loan in order to purchase vegetables for her vegetable stand, on the Kiva website soon!
Yucabeth Akinyi Ochieng
I want to leave you with a video created by a former intern at K-MET. Sadly, the portion on the microfinance department is extremely short, but it will give you a bit of an idea of the organization as a whole.
For Daniel
From the executive director’s hand gestures, I gathered that Daniel had been blindsided when another motorbike cut across an intersection. Daniel was one of DINARI Foundation’s loan officers, but he was also in charge of a pilot project teaching loan clients how to use stoves fueled by coconut oil. He had been training DINARI’s staff in western Bali and was riding his motorbike home when the other driver hit him and fled the scene.
Daniel and his Motorbike
I met Daniel when I first arrived at DINARI, a Christian foundation in Bali with a large microfinance component. Our introduction lasted just a moment, but I remember his wide, kind smile, accentuated by narrow eyes.
A few days later, he asked me in halting English if I liked sports.
“I like basketball,” he said. And soccer, table tennis, and Frisbee. I imagined he was a good athlete. Short, slim and well proportioned, he moved with a graceful economy and purpose. In a different setting, I could picture him as a Himalayan Sherpa, or maybe a carpenter.
During my first week, he gave me a ride to work on his motorbike, whipping around the turns as I tried to hang on both nonchalantly and firmly. He liked to practice his English and taught me a few Bahasa Indonesia words in return. He had a worn maroon pocket translator that he kept in the front compartment of his backpack.
One evening, he called back over his shoulder to me to explain a Hindu ceremony.
“Full moon. Today people pray.” He carefully enunciated the Indonesian translation, which I promptly forgot. The moon made the winding road sheen, and the night air washed the day’s thick heat from my arms and neck.
Daniel and Panca
After work, he and another loan officer would have a cup of coffee and cigarette with Ferdinand, DINARI’s liaison to Kiva. I accepted the invitation to join them. Daniel first washed his motorbike and then joined the rest of us on the small patio of Ferdinand’s boarding house. I was questioned about America, Arnold Schwarzenegger, my family and the population of Boston. I tried to divert the conversation away from me, asking Daniel where he grew up.
“Daniel a Javanese man,” Ferdinand said as he scowled playfully. I learned that Daniel had arrived in Bali in January.
“Why did you move here?”
Daniel grinned, and the others erupted in the laughter of insiders.
“He comes for Balinese girl,” Ferdinand explained. “He knew a girl in Java, from college. He followed her here. He lost her.”
I was lost.
“He couldn’t find her on the island!”
“You didn’t have her number?”
Daniel smiled again. Apparently not.
“Are you still looking for her?” I asked.
“She is just a memory,” Daniel said.
It was my turn to smile. “I think we all have those.”
Daniel came to DINARI’s morning devotional service two days after his crash. He wore sandals and shuffled with a considerable limp. On his right hand, there were small bandages on two of his fingers. When people were asked for thoughts on the day’s bible lesson, Ferdinand spoke about the importance of giving thanks even when bad things happen.
My mind couldn’t process this, even though I had come to understand the transformative effects of suffering in my own life, how it heightened my self-awareness and steered me to purposeful actions. But I couldn’t accept a hit-and-run, not when I could see how gingerly and tightly Daniel held himself as he sat.
Ferdinand then asked that we pray for Daniel, since he was still sick. This made the other staff laugh nervously, and Daniel didn’t so much blush as he did bronze. And then he smiled again.
Shot from my patio
The video clip from the previous post was filmed at the memorial commemorating the 2002 bombings. As always, I am grateful for your comments. Kiva has asked me and the other Kiva Fellows to keep our blog entries relevant to microfinance, and I would like to try to honor that request for future entries. So please let me know if there is anything within the realm of microfinance that you would be interested to read about. I would also like to encourage you to check out new loans from the DINARI Foundation: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=82&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb
A Match Made in Heaven
After working at FINCA for six years and then earning a Masters degree in the United States, Winnie Terry was well prepared to start a new microfinance organization (MFI). Together with some former colleagues, she opened an MFI in Dar es Salaam known as Tujijenge Tanzania (meaning “build together” in KiSwahili). With Winnie as the managing director, they kicked off in July 2006 and were giving loans to their first groups that November.
When Winnie first learned about microfinance in 1998, her initial reaction was, “that will never work!” But after she started working at FINCA, she found she related well to the women receiving loans and liked this systematic method of offering credit. When opening Tujijenge Tanzania, her and her colleagues were looking to fine-tune the process of offering credit. Even today, Tujijenge isn’t trying to be the largest MFI in Dar es Salaam in terms of clients or portfolio size. Rather, they want to be an MFI of best practices. They work hard to determine the needs of their clients and meet those needs through innovative products. For example, Tujijenge administers debit cards when disbursing a loan instead of handing a client a wad of cash. They believe this hinders the urge to quickly spend the cash on hand, and is safer for the clients and loan officers than carrying cash.
In the next few years, Tujijenge is hoping to expand its outreach and grow its portfolio – but at a sustainable pace. In 2009, Tujijenge intends to open a second branch in Mtwara. Just north of the Mozambican border, Mtwara is a rural area where there is little or no access to credit.
When speaking with her, Winnie stressed the importance of being a transparent and honest MFI. To Winnie, working for a transparent and honest organization is more important than anything else. When I heard this, I immediately thought about the importance Kiva places on transparency. Perhaps this underlying principal of transparency is why Kiva and Tujijenge Tanzania are such great partners!
To see loans currently being fundraised by Tujijenge Tanzania, click here.
One Rung Up and Flat
We exited the main highway to Jinja, somewhere between Lugazi and Njeri. It’s an obscure and easily missed unimproved road, and not one I would guess leads anywhere. The dirt track is peppered with fissures and ruts and undulations, and winds slowly through countless hectares of banana and pineapple trees. Uganda is blessed with fertile soil and an abundance of rain; here, things grow fast and big – and apparently everywhere. Except for the brown dirt road we followed, there’s nothing but endless fields of tall green as far as the eye can see. I’m riding in back, in the open bed of a pick-up truck, sitting on a bag of charcoal next to a large bunch of green bananas, enjoying the air. I’m thinking how lovely this country is, away from the hustle and bustle of Kampala; that this must be the “real Uganda.” Occasionally, we pass a peasant farmer on foot or on bike, always wearing flip-flops, carrying large loads of palm thatch or bananas or firewood. Back home, this would constitute backpacking or mountain bike riding. No such recreational diversions here. In Uganda, these are just modes of transportation; people serving as their own beasts of burden. I feel guilty whizzing past them in the relative ease of a vehicle.
This is where Pearl Microfinance works. Its niche is serving Uganda’s economically-active rural poor, the most neglected sector of the economy and almost entirely overlooked and excluded by the financial services industry. It’s simply too difficult and costly to deliver services in remote areas like this. Difficult enough on dry soil, I doubt even passable during the torrents that arrive each afternoon. Despite coming here weekly, our driver stops more than once to get his bearings. No road signs, no visual cues – just miles of disorienting tropical flora.
Main Street
I’m joining Pearl’s Jinja branch manager and credit officer into the field to meet some Kiva borrowers to learn how micro loans have impacted their businesses and lives. Grace is also with us. She’s Pearl’s Kiva Coordinator, whom I work closely with in Pearl’s main office in Kampala. I’m excited to hear first hand accounts of real people struggling through the despair of poverty with the aid of Pearl’s microfinance programs and achieving ever-growing levels of new-found prosperity. At least that’s my hope.
That hope soon vanishes. Poverty is like an onion: you peel away one layer only to find many more beneath it. Indeed, the more I learn the less I realize I know. What I learn this day is that the methods of evaluating success sometimes need to be turned upside down and examined from an entirely different perspective.
The perspective I brought with me, the one taught to me in school and reinforced in practice, is that market economies are fueled by consumption, and specifically the growth in consumption. Organizations are valued in great part by how quickly and consistently they produce increasing profit. Investments are intended to spur further growth and are gauged by their ability to create or accelerate growth opportunities. Progress is a measurement of growth, and growth is the intended end to the means. Flat revenue and earnings, therefore, are bad; and if they persist, utter failure.
It’s natural, then, to wonder how small loans to the rural poor have improved the growth prospects for their businesses, personal savings accounts and family lifestyles. This I wanted to know.
Nothing suggested our arrival into the village. No sign, no traffic signal. Main Street is more like a poorly maintained driveway. I wonder if this village has a name or a postal code. I ask my colleagues but they don’t know. It is little more than a one-block strip of mud and block structures cut into the jungle. There’s a hardware store that advertises auto parts and electrical supplies and think it must be in jest: electricity doesn’t supply this outpost and the only vehicles are a few scattered bodas. And I fail to see any value in advertising. It is, however, a nice village, quiet and peaceful and nestled in a pocket of breathtaking beauty. It must see few visitors because within seconds of stopping, we’re surrounded by throngs of excited, laughing adolescents, all boys, wearing orange school uniforms. Most are barefoot. They appear from out of nowhere, and they seem fascinated with…me. Perhaps this is their first encounter with a muzunga. Maybe it’s just that visitors come seldom and white skin marks not only the arrival of something out of the ordinary, but of good fortune.
School Boys
Meeting borrowers is perhaps the greatest joy and privilege of being a Kiva Fellow. Here, I met with four borrowers, all women, each hospitable and gracious with her time. My questions were centered on assessing the financial and social impact of their microloans. I learned that their struggles are not that different from ours, except in magnitude: earning a livelihood, raising and educating their children and managing finances, including loan obligations. In this small village, bankruptcy is not a financial strategy; it’s a certain means to starvation and illiteracy, a punishment far more dooming than a poor credit rating.
My library of potential questions is extensive and explores a range of topics to help me understand the entrepreneur and her business, the context of her life and how the loan(s) contributed to her business and personal ambitions. One of these topics is to gain some indication of growth: for example, was the business constrained before receiving a loan? And, how has financing boosted revenue and profit?
This was not my first day in the field, so I had some hint of what to expect. And this was not the first day the inspirational and heart-wrenching stories they shared with me of deprivation, sacrifice and hard work was tempered by some degree of disappointment. In a majority of the cases, the initial loan(s) did indeed provide an initial shift up in economic status, by helping to establish a business and get it to scale (eg, steady-state operations). But there is often little, if any, noticeable expansion that follows. Further, MFI’s don’t use growth as an underwriting factor when extending subsequent loans (although Pearl and others do have a compulsory savings requirement). Many micro enterprises receive loan after loan; yet never expand commensurately, if at all. At first blush, it appears to be an endless cycle of debt which leads to no measurable performance improvement.
The problem is that in the context of microfinance, scale is an irrelevant notion, especially in rural villages like this one that are very small, very poor and geographically isolated. This is not an expanding economy and likely never will be, and growing a market is therefore impossible. These entrepreneurs are merely servicing their friends and neighbors with inexpensive subsistence items, and there’s no room for competition, innovation or profit maximization. Money, then, is nothing more than a necessary medium of exchange, more convenient to trade or barter. It’s not an instrument of wealth.
Of course, metrics are not tracked in this sector of the economy. People don’t speak in terms of period-over-period performance, ROE or operating margins. They talk about well-being, happiness, health and self-sufficiency. As we bounced our way slowly back to the highway, I couldn’t reconcile my disappointment. Positive, beneficial things are happening in this remote little village. These women are proud and happy, and their children play as children do. They feel productive and useful and they are contributing meaningfully to their households. There’s dignity in that, and I felt it when we spoke. They talk about their shops, their customers, their loans, the business skills they’ve acquired, what they want to do with their next loan and their vision for their futures, all with great enthusiasm and passion.
So is microfinance working in this poor rural village? I can only speak anecdotally. Every borrower I’ve met so far has told me, in their own words, that they are better off now than they were before. They are happier and they feel more secure. With added income, their families are healthier, less hungry, better clothed and in school – some have graduated college. They’ve built homes and can afford medicines and the occasional luxury. Perhaps they will never climb another rung on the economic ladder and will forever languish level. Perhaps the loans they continue to use will do nothing more than sustain them at a marginally elevated plateau of subsistence. But isn’t that better than the alternative? Isn’t the world a better place because Pearl Microfinance endures the difficulty and cost to drive out to this little village every week to meet its clients?
A joyful...and successful Robinah
I’ve cast my concern and disappointment aside. In this charming remote community in rural Uganda, assessing impact and measuring success have nothing to do with the incorrect criteria I arrived with. I think the individuals themselves are the best judge, not me. I’m just some muzunga with an impossibly different perspective. Robinah summarized it best when she told me, her emotions palpable, wiping tears of gratitude from her cheek, “Pearl has helped me so much. I’m so grateful. For the first time in my life, I can see possibilities for my dreams.”
Manos Unidas (United Hands)
Yesterday in Chongoyape- a farming town one hour north of Trujillo, Perú – I attended the monthly meeting of Manos Unidas, the “United Hands” communal bank that serves the women of Congoyape, Lipote and Saucipe.
Our meeting starts at 3:00 pm sharp and Mara the loan officer is counting up the vouchers the women are turning in as they arrive—these vouchers serve as proof that the borrowers have gone to the local commercial bank to pay their monthly debt obligation. My MFI Manuela Ramos has deals with two national banks who will accept payments for them and in return will provide a voucher as a receipt to the socias.
After the roll call, Mara announced to the group that we had all vouchers turned in save one. Nevertheless, Mara led them briskly through the opening of the meeting and a short business practices session. She even had them act out a skit as though they were selling fruits to difficult customers! Everyone played along, although for the most part people chat and gossip and catch up through the beginnings of the meeting.
After the skits and discussion session, the banks books were opened and the treasurer of the group asked for names of women who would be requesting loans from their internal account.
***ASIDE – The communal bank’s internal account consists of the accumulated savings of all of the women. The internal account is vital because individuals in the group can “borrow” from their own savings at an interest rate set by the communal bank. In this way the women can tide themselves over month to month when their other sources of income (their businesses’ profits or Manuela Ramos loan) don’t cover their expenses. Also in this way, the bank earns money for itself by charging interest – albeit by the women paying to use their own savings.***
Almost everyone is raising their hand to draw from the groups internal account when the treasurer asks for new loan requests. Of the seventeen women present fifteen wanted the maximum they could withdraw. It will be two months before harvest time in December and this is one of the most difficult seasons of the year when people are saving up for Christmas festivities and school holidays. The women are allowed to withdraw up to 80% of their savings at a given time which must be repaid at 3.5% monthly interest and must be repaid within the same term of their Manuela Ramos loan.
Mara told the treasurer to take down the names and the amounts requested but also informed the socias that they were short one voucher and that they knew what that meant. There is one essential caveat to internal account borrowing that is about to make this meeting turn on its head: ALL vouchers must be turned in for the internal account to release new loans to the socias. If one person is late on paying, or even if she has paid but has not turned in her voucher, the bank closes without a single loan disbursal.
The women know this rule well, but they assured Mara that they knew the woman had paid, she is running late and she should be here any minute now. The treasurer went ahead and noted down the names of every woman requesting money; the amounts they wanted ranged anywhere from $30 to $250. For every name called the process was this:
Señora MaryLou, how much would you like to withdraw?
How much am I allowed?
80% of your current total is… 600 Nuevo Soles, señora ($200).
Yes, that then. Three months please.
Only one woman wanted 30 soles, less than her maximum allowed. She requested S/30.00 – the equivalent of $10.
When the list was completed the meeting was an hour and a half in and it was apparent that the woman was dangerously late. The socias, fearing for their loan requests, moved to action. They began to search for her telephone number. They called her mother’s house to see if she had a cellular number. They peered outside every time a mototaxi drove by to see if she had arrived in it. They sent a messenger to her home to see where she was and if she was on her way.
At her mother’s house the messenger was informed that she had gone to an Avon sales conference earlier in the afternoon but that she planned to attend the communal bank meeting. The socias asked the loan officer, “Señora Mara, please wait a while longer, she has made her payment and she’s coming any minute now.”
Mara agrees to wait another half hour but is worried that she will be late to her next appointment in Paiján. The time passes anxiously with everyone peering at the clock on the wall and whispering to each other about the woman’s tardiness.
But the half hour passes and she doesn’t appear. Mara and the treasurer start to count the currency in the lock box to prepare to close the bank. The room is silent and all you hear is the clinking of change and finally, the clank of the lock box shutting and locking.
Mara packs up her things and the women still peek out the windows at the passing mototaxis, hoping that the woman will appear in one of them. And as Mara picks up her bag to leave, she suddenly does appear!
Here she is, señora! Open back up the bank! Here she is with her voucher!
But no, it’s too late. It is ten minutes until her next meeting starts and Mara must travel to the next town and she will surely be late.
And the room is in an uproar: the woman are scolding Mara for her impatience and inflexibility, scolding the woman who came late, complaining to the bank president about what’s happening to them.
Why didn’t you send your voucher with someone else? We’ve been here waiting!
Why, señora, can’t you give us our money? We need it! We can’t wait another month!
Why didn’t you plan ahead, Nancy? This is your fault we are like this!
My father is sick, I couldn’t leave him for long and this other meeting I had was an obligation I could not miss… Here is my voucher here, take it, Señora Mara.
Excuses, Señora Nancy! You must not do this to us!
And,
Mara, por favor, open the bank it will only be five minutes, please señora.
But it is too late and Mara excuses herself rapidly with apologies and a final explanation: Understand my situation señoras; we must all be on time with our attendance and our payments. What would happen if I stayed to reopen the bank and was thirty minutes late to my next appointment? I’m sorry señoras but I can’t, that is my obligation and you must wait until next month.
The group spills out into the dirt road and there is a crowd around the one late señora who defends herself valiantly. Surely, they all have problems but she has hers too with a sickly father and her child here in hand that she must bring everywhere with no one to care for him but her.
…
I am traveling down the road to one of the señoras houses to see her business and the bank president Señora Elvia is walking with me too. With a sigh, the Elvia tells me this is the first time in eight years that this has happened to her bank. She had planned to take out money as well but she was stalwart in the meeting, holding firm with the women who complained to her. In the end it was she that dispersed the group and sent the señoras circling the delinquent woman home.
Elvia and the other señora and I talk about the meeting and the woman’s excuses as we pass the sugar cane fields towards Saucipe. It is a shame, but the women seem to understand that it must be the way it is. With nineteen women all relying on each other for 8 years it was bound to happen once, they say. Still, it will be hard this month, but to that end they seem resigned and accepting of it. As we go futher down the road the conversation turns to asparagus cultivation and life in Cuyuchugo and it’s really lovely with the setting sun. I love it, but it’s bittersweet too. I feel a tinge of regret that Mara couldn’t stay even if it would be an affront to the women I don’t know in the next meeting. But I suppose like the señoras I should accept the way things are. They are more stoic than I, and here I am feeling indignant even with my bus ticket back to my hostel and my life …
Here comes my bus and Señora Elvia is seeing me off and inviting me back the next time. And off I go and off she goes down our separate roads and I guess that’s how it will be – at least until next month.
——-
My name is Jenny Ballen, KF6. I´m working with Manuela´s Ramos CREDIMUJER in Trujillo, Perú. I arrived in Perú October 16th and have been very busy my first week. Would love to answer any questions any readers have. Also, check out my personal blog I update almost every day if you´re interested. Saludos, Jenny
A week of interesting events…
Tuesday was fairly eventful, I left my apartment by 6 am to meet Beatrice at the Mbengwi moto park on the other side of town. Within seconds of standing at the side of the road, a bike-taxi had stopped and we were haggling over prices. We agreed on 200 CFA (around 40 cents) for around a 15 minute ride. I met Beatrice at the park and we took another bike together to the GHAPE center. The center meetings usually start at 6:30 and run until 12:00 depending on how quickly the clients are able to organize their books and what not. It’s a pretty tedious process; however, it ensures that I’m given the time to do all my interviews.
I interviewed thirteen clients, all with just wonderful stories. One man, Thomas, who is the General Center Chief for the area is phenomenal. He gave some of his last loan to his son to continue his business of window framing and iron door installations. He no longer has to support his son and spent the rest of his loan on a motorbike to use as a taxi. He is making enough profits from taxiing, palm wine, and pigs to easily make his minimum payments and contribute to his personal savings account provided by GHAPE. After my interviews, the meeting still had not finished. People were coming over to chat to me and ask me questions, mostly about whether or not I was married, haha. One woman sat with me for about an hour asking me about Canada and discussing Cameroon. She was pretty sweet, told me I was very pretty for a “white man” and began referring to me as “smiley-smile”–apparently I smile a lot.
Its funny, Cameroon is the first developing country I’ve been to where everyone, no matter how much money they have, is concerned with fashion and appearance. Older women are always wearing fancy African dresses, usually hand made, with gorgeous fabric. All the younger women look like they just walked out of a fashion shoot; new jeans, fancy tops, high heels, they have it all. A lot of the younger women also have children, which they secure on to their backs using a piece of brightly coloured fabric and wrapping it around their chest–kinda takes away from the model look.
After the meeting, one of the clients split her lunch with the credit assistants and I; it was a sardine sandwich–sardines on white bread. Yum. No, it wasn’t bad, but I hadn’t eaten yet, so, perhaps that had something to do with it. The three of us, two credit assistants and I, hoped on a bike to town to get back to work. Once again, fitting four on a bike, no helmets, and me on the very back because of my backpack. I think I’ll start bringing a purse instead.
I finally sorted out my phone issues, well, I realized it is broken and nothing I can do. I did, however, purchase a wireless ‘ctphone’ for my room. It has much better reception, and for 20,000 CFA per month, $40 USD, I can have unlimited internet between 6 pm and 7 am. Considering all the work I need to load on the internet and what not, I splurged. You can hook 5 computers up to the hub, so I think I will donate it to GHAPE when I leave. The internet in the office is so unbelievably slow, and around the same price per month.
Wednesday was excessively long; however, it was also pretty exciting. In the morning Loveline and I met Thomas from Center 06 to go to Belo for the General Meeting at the new Belo branch. Currently there are two branches: Bamenda and Belo. The Bamenda branch has 16 centers and the Belo branch now has 10 centers. Although there is a huge demand for more centers in the area, GHAPE is constrained by a lack of funds. They are unable to add any more centers until they find a new source of funding.
Every center has an elected ‘center chief’ and ‘vice chief’. Together, they facilitate center meetings with the credit assistants from GHAPE, help clients to understand GHAPE policies, give incoming clients initial training, help to resolve disputes within groups and the center, and in general ensure smooth and successful delivery of credit, training, and skills.
All of the Center Chiefs and their Vice Chiefs were present at the meeting from the 10 centers in Belo, as well as the two credit assistants from Belo, Loveline, the General Center Chief from Mbengwi (John Foriben), General Center Chief from Bamenda (Thomas) and myself. The meeting began at 9 and ended at around 4; apparently one of the faster meetings they’ve had in a while. Thankfully I did not attend the earlier sessions, some of which ended past 9 pm. At the beginning of the meeting, the credit assistant wrote the rules for the meeting on the board: no eating, no sleeping, no unnecessary movement, hand up to talk, permission to use toilet, and phones on vibrate. Each of the rules was associated with a fine, for sleeping you were fined and had to stand for the rest of the meeting. It reminded me a lot of middle school classroom, ha ha. The meeting was really interesting though; all of the center chiefs discussed some of the largest challenges they were facing in their new centers and exchanged ideas on how to overcome these challenges. Some of these challenges were things like lateness and absenteeism from clients, clients dropping out after having training and replacement members having no training, and more members wanting to join than the center can accommodate.
About half way through the meeting, people started to look a little tired; Loveline decided we needed some stretching to wake us up. After a few stretches, we started playing a game similar to “Simon Says”, only the leader sings “What I do” to which we respond “don’t laugh”. Some of the moves Loveline had us do with her were jumping and clapping, kicking your feet in the air, a dance move similar to get low, and spinning in circles. It was really quite strange. I was just trying to imagine this sort of break happening at an equivalent meeting in North America; I imagine that most board members at local credit unions in Canada do play active versions of “Simon Says”, just to help everyone stay focused. Maybe it should be implemented, perhaps in the Senate; I think it could really lighten things up. At first I was thinking what the hell is going on here, are they kidding? But after a few moves, I was loving it, ha ha, I thought it was great; it definitely woke me up. Another thing I found strange was one of the women who was a center chief would pick her nose constantly when addressing everyone in the room to discuss challenges or solutions to the topic. She would stop mid sentence to look at what she had found, and then continue where she left off a few seconds later. No one else seemed to phased by it, but this was every time she spoke, not just once. It was really strange.
After the meeting, I hung out with Thomas and John until Loveline was ready to leave. The Board member who lives beside the center joined us for a beer, Guinness Smooth is the beer of choice for most here, and it is paired with ‘coloured nuts’. Coloured nuts are one of those things that I have decided are impossible to explain. I suppose the best I can do is to say they are very bitter, in the shape of mandarin orange slice, hard, bizarre texture, and light pink. I also had my first guava today, I’ve eaten the inside parts of guavas, but here they just bite right into them. The outer shell is extremely bitter, reminds me lime peels. The inside was sweet though. Thomas, John and I then bought some bbq’d beef on a stick with hot sauce. It was the first time I’ve had meat or beer since I’ve been here, and I can’t lie, even though the beer was warm and the beef was cold, it was among the best beer and beef I’ve had. Ha ha.
Thursday and Friday have been spent working, a lot. The MFI I’m with does not have a Management Information System, all of their files are kept in little notebooks and written by hand. All of their transactions and calculations are done three times by calculator–it is extremely inefficient; however, they don’t have the capital to invest in any sort of technological improvements right now. It has made training on the new internet site extremely difficult; their knowledge of finance and accounting is also limited. On the upside, there have not been any problems with power struggles or control that we had prepared for in training. Loveline is more than happy to let me train her staff and assign them tasks in any way that I feel will help them to understand the processes best. She has also been asking lots of questions through our one-on-one training that we have been doing for the past week; a very good sign that she is retaining the information and trying to understand. Loveline does most of the Kiva work here, so I think she was excited when I suggested we delegate some tasks to the credit assistants, ha ha. On Monday I will train the credit assistants on the new site and also on journaling and business profiles; we are hoping to have each one of them upload a profile and a journal in the first week of the change over so that everyone knows how it is done. Because the Kiva clients at GHAPE are dispersed through all the centers and each credit assistant is responsible for certain centers, all 5 credit assistants have to understand the process.
Last night I did take some time for myself. I went to a shop next door with Vicky and purchased one litre of palm wine. Palm wine is extracted from the raffia bush and poured straight into a bucket, no distillation or refining process necessary. I bought one litre for 150 CFA, approximately 25 or 30 cents. It was pretty good. It is brought in fresh every morning and begins to ferment throughout the day; apparently by evening it is too strong for a lot of people. It tasted like grapefruit cider, if there is such a thing; alcohol and grapefruit soda. Delicious.
On a more important topic, I found corn flakes the other day in the market. This morning I was so excited to finally have a bowl of cereal; however, I made a major mistake in my planning–no milk. I knew there was some powdered milk in Mama’s house, but not wanting to borrow some at 6 am, I looked for other options. I decided not to use my water, because it has a bit of a chlorine smell and taste to it–didn’t think it would mesh well. Also decided not to use palm wine, too early to start drinking on a Friday. The only other option was tea. So, I added some tea to my corn flakes, knowing it wouldn’t be great, but hoping for better than just dry. It was foul–completely and totally disgusting. After a few bites I got used to it though, and didn’t mind it too much. My food quality control really is dropping quickly; Christmas dinner is going to taste so delicious.
I also learned today that many people keep what are called Kane rats in their homes. They catch them from the bush when they are young and train them to live in their homes; when a door is open, a trained Kane rat will remain in the home. Kane rats grow to about the size of a small cat (not kitten–full grown cat), and are just rats as we know them. You keep the trained one till it is big enough, then one day, you decide you feel like rat for dinner and hey, look at that, you have one right here at home. I think that is one item I will pass on if offered. I also passed on cow skin the other night; that was more because they only had a little to share between five and I knew I would not enjoy it as much as they would. Cow skin is about half an inch thick and purchased in sheets around 2 or 3 inches on each side. The skin is soaked and cleaned with a knife to get dirt and hair off, then cooked in soup. Vicky told me it is one of her favourite foods; maybe I’ll try it later this month. I must say though, this is the first trip I am actually considering passing on some foods, I must be maturing.
Anyway, this update is quickly becoming a novel, so, I will leave it there. I’m hoping to get out of Bamenda this weekend and see a few things; there are lots of mountains and lakes around here so I’d like to check out some of those areas. I’ll be sure to update this with what I find.
Mission…Possible
I promise I won’t let the Madonna/Guy Ritchie break-up news distract me from writing a great blog on the mission and values here at SMT in Sierra Leone. While I admit I’m grief-stricken, I need to move on. I’ll look on the bright side…Guy Ritchie can now go back to making fantastic movies (see Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels).
We’ve all been members of organizations during some part of our life – corporations, unions, schools, Tuesday night basket weaving, Guy Ritchie fan club, etc., etc. The one constant I’ve found in every organization I’ve been a member of is that they all have a mission statement.
To some, like Kiva employees and Fellows, the mission statement is powerful and engrained permanently in our memories (Connecting people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty). To others, the mission statement consists of empty words on a piece of fancy memo paper that we slyly toss in the recycling bin after a week of having it tacked up in our cubicles (I’m neither confirming nor denying I’ve done such a thing).
The mission statement at SMT is as follows:
To reduce poverty among the economically active
by providing sustainable access to financial services
Let’s break it down…
“…reduce poverty…”
There will be those who will be unsatisfied until the World is completely rid of poverty. I’m not convinced, however, that poverty has garnered enough attention to this point to be considered museum material. We’re only at the beginning stages of the global effort. We need a starting point and reduction is a more fair and suitable approach to our missions. SMT understands it’s a gradual process and maybe someday they’ll be able to change their mission to “eliminate poverty…”
“…economically active…”
SMT will help those who want to be helped, who thrive on being active in the market and in their community. Potential SMT borrowers are thoroughly screened to ensure they are capable of generating income to re-pay their loans. SMT does not do hand-outs. If they did, they would not survive as an institution. Furthermore, we should agree that poverty is a threat to peace. If microfinance can make inroads in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, then we are moving in the right direction toward peace and economic stability.
“…sustainable access…”
Charity is not sustainable, particularly in the fight against extreme poverty. Giveaways and handouts take away initiative and responsibility from people. Handouts encourage dependence rather than self-help and self-confidence. The poor that SMT serve have a chance to participate in decision-making that affects their lives. SMT empowers its borrowers to control their own destinies. This way, they can achieve a lot more, a lot faster. It’s a philosophy that can be continued over multiple loan cycles.
“…financial services”
The focus of SMT remains on offering a premium micro loan product to their clients. They offer four micro loan products, which I will discuss more extensively in a future blog: (1) individual (2) group; (3) salary; and (4) agriculture. As mainstream microfinance evolves to include other products such as micro insurance or other products, SMT, in collaboration with their parent organization, Christian Children’s Fund, will assess the opportunity and determine whether a foray into the new product is prudent.
Well, I hope this posting has given you a better understanding of SMT’s mission and values. In the brief amount of time I’ve had the pleasure of working with SMT, I can unequivocally say their mission is possible.
SMT
Adam Grenier is a member of Kiva Fellows Class 6 placed in Makeni, Sierra Leone. When he’s not wondering how on Earth the Tampa Bay Rays (!!) beat his Red Sox to get into the World Series, he can be found meeting Sierra Leone borrowers and supporting SMT and Kiva’s missions.
Peace, love and under ‘stan – ding
Mosque Near Panjshanbe Bazaar
Tajiki ‘standing, that is. If I’ve learned anything in my 36 hours in Khujand, Tajikistan, it’s that trying to understand the local culture, language and history is like drinking from a firehose. The challenge is muted, however, by the extreme kindness of the people here and their willingness to make you feel at home. Here at Microinvest the feeling is that of a family more than a workplace. This morning my desk was graced with a platter of cookies and candies and friendly faces greeting me in proud English. At noon yesterday we all took lunch in the dining area – a hearty borscht of meat, potatoes, cilantro and carrots along with fresh bread and the ubiquitous cup of hot tea. Last night I was treated to the Tajik national dish of Pilaf with green apricots and a tomato salad mixed with conversation on topics ranging from the economy to religion to family. Clearly food is the social lubricant and I’ve been more than content to sit, talk and eat for hours on end.
Tomorrow I’ll journey to Asht which is a district in the north bordering Uzbekistan. Once out of the city, the roads here are peppered with wandering cattle and donkey carts. Occasionally there will be a man on the side of the road selling gasoline from glass jars or a small stand with fruits for sale. The craggy mountains are a striking backdrop to the vast cotton fields where students are now spending a two month ‘vacation’ from school where they each pick up to 60kg a day of the national crop. Many adults in Tajikistan have left the country to find work in Russia or the US and so students are conscripted to supplement the local labor pool. I’ve already heard many stories here of educated people who are unable to earn a reasonable salary as nurses or teachers. Instead they have found it is more lucrative to be a business owner or entrepreneur rather than rely on meager government wages. There is reluctance by some to borrow money and they try to avoid having their neighbor merchants know about their loan. But I’ve already heard many ‘rakhmats’ (thank you) for the opportunity Kiva lenders have provided to business owners.
A Kiva entrepreneur conducts her business in the bazaar
There is an interesting mix in Tajikistan between local traditions, Muslim religion, the legacy of having been a Soviet state and the influence of more modern (‘western’) conveniences and customs. In Tajik homes, meals are traditionally taken seated on the floor cushioned by a korpacha - a colorful blanket filled with local cotton – but some have recently purchased sofas and kitchen tables. Russian language is becoming less prevalent and Tajik is now emphasized as is English among the younger generation. Daily prayer is common yet so is alcohol consumption. Many marriages are arranged and the expectation is that one should have a spouse and children before the age of 25. Television seems to be predominated by music videos. I caught some Justin Timberlake the other evening but mostly it’s Tajik performers in traditional dress. There seems to be more awareness sometimes of current events outside of Tajikistan than inside. I was asked whether the US economic crisis had affected me. In turn, I asked what the feeling was regarding the IMF’s commentary on Tajikistan’s misstated finances. Nobody really knew much about it. It seems like nationalism is making a comeback and the Russian influence is waning, but there’s no clear direction on how the country will evolve from here.
Overall, there is an overt sentiment among most people that it’s a hard life in Tajikistan and the debacle of last year’s electricity shortages is still fresh in their minds. They frequently talk of moving to America or other countries as nearly 1 million Tajiks have already done. Yet they retain an ability to distinguish government from nation. Tajikistan has its history and traditions and customs which are worthy of their pride despite the shortcomings of its infrastructure, leadership and economy.
Rob is in Khujand, Tajikistan working with MLF MicroInvest. You can also join the Tajikistan lending team at http://www.kiva.org/community/viewTeam?team_id=1317
Victory is Mine! . . . or is it?
I’m going to make a bold statement: microfinance is the land of minute incremental change, and joy resulting from massive professional achievement is rare here. Afterall, one loan of $125 does not take a family from impoverished to middle-class, and three months in the field does not illuminate the solution to eradicating global poverty. As a result, any goal achieved feels like an immense victory, and yesterday, victory was mine.
Several weeks ago I spent three weeks traveling north to train 7 of BRAC Tanzania’s branches on how to implement Kiva (for a synopsis, see summaries, part 1 and part 2). Yesterday, I finally saw the fruits of my labor. Allow me to give you some background:
BRAC Tanzania has more than 65 branches throughout the country, and that number is constantly growing. Right now, only a handful of those branches actually “do” Kiva. What that means is that only a select number of the branches have been trained on what Kiva is and how to produce the business profiles that are found on the Kiva website. When I travelled to 7 of the branches in September, I did so to train the Community Organizers and Branch Managers at those branches so that they could begin to produce Kiva business profiles. The goal was that after I left, they would be self-sufficient in the Kiva process and able to complete business profile templates with their groups and take the accompanying photo. An added bonus would be if the pictures were interesting and the forms contained more detail.
For those of you unfamiliar with BRAC on Kiva, a picture like this has been the norm:
Typcal BRAC Kiva Business Profile Picture
In addition, the descriptions are historically brief and lacking in colorful details. After arriving here I realized there’s very good reason for that: BRAC has more than 100,000 clients throughout the country, and more than 2,300 groups on Kiva. The staff is extremely busy and has a lot of paper work to fill out, of which the Kiva Business Profile Template is just one piece. When I first arrived here, I spent quite a bit of time ascertaining how l could create a template that produced more interesting profiles for Kiva lenders without demanding more time from the BRAC staff.
What I came up with were a few multiple choice questions and a bit of clarification on existing questions. I tested the forms in the field to see where the staff got confused (the forms are in English but the level of English spoken by each CO varies), which questions clients had difficulty answering (for example, listing the ages of their children is no easy task), and which blanks were likely to be filled by something generic (i.e. the loan will be used “to expand her business”). I revised the BRAC-Kiva template based on all of these observations, and I still consider it a work in progress.
Waiting to receive the first batch of profiles from the branches I trained has been like waiting to receive exam results; I was dying to know how I’d done. To see their finished forms and photos would be my only guage of success or failure. Yesterday, my waiting finally came to an end as I received profiles from 2 of the 7 branches. The elation I felt at seeing pictures like this made those three weeks on the road fully worthwhile:
A new-and-improved Kiva Business Profile picture from BRAC Tanzania
Look at the depth, color, and action!
As I hurriedly looked over the forms they completed I was happy to see very few questions left blank (possible if the staff forgets what the question means) and a lot of great, thorough information. I left the office eagerly looking forward to coming in this morning to begin adding them to the Kiva website.
Unfortunately, the pictures above will never make it to the Kiva website. What I viewed as a major professional accomplishment turned into a disappointment as I made a frustrating discovery: many of the pictures were not correctly matched with their accompanying form. During training I tried to convey to the branch offices how important it was that we know which picture goes with which form, but it remained a difficult task. I explained how to find the picture number on the camera and there were nods of understanding all around, and even demonstrated understanding as I stepped back and watched the staff complete the Kiva process on their own. But alas, I now have brilliant photos and thorough templates that will never see the light of day.
For an evening, I thought victory was mine, but it seems I did miss something afterall. This is not a fatal error nor is it irreconcilable. After a few hours of trying to make sense of the picture numbers, I admitted that I’d have to chalk these ones up to a loss. I got on the phone with the branch and tried to re-explain the picture number concept, and this time I think I got some traction. Happily, not every business profile had this issue and I’m hopeful that the next batch I receive will not have this same problem. To see if my optimism paid off, check out Kiva’s currently fundraising BRAC Tanzania loans. Now, if I could just find out what happened at those other five branches . . .
The Global Financial Crisis in Ukraine
On a recent trip into the Ukrainian countryside, I spoke to a woman named Yelena. She’s a Kiva client who sells office supplies to local businesses, and has been in business for herself for nine years. The top worry in her mind, she said, was the global financial crisis.
This woman was confident, well educated, and witty. She spoke of her business with pride and determination, and joked that she’d allow me to film because it gave her free marketing in the USA. But when I asked Yelena about the hardships she’d had to overcome in order to make her business as successful as it is, she got serious. “Economics. It’s always economics and stability.”
Ukraine has called for an IMF bailout for their crisis. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, said Friday, “Many countries seem to be experiencing problems because of the repatriation of private capital by foreign investors or the reduction of credit lines from foreign banks.” This is basically what caused the Asian Economic Crisis of ten years ago. It is a very dry way to report the fear and hearteach of millions of entrepreneurs and private citizens.
A brief parable, to explain the economics jargon:
Imagine that you live in Ohio, and want to buy a little summer home on the beach in Crimea. You give the current owner US Dollars, and she gives you the deed to the property.
During the winter, you rent out the little home to locals while you have family holidays back in Ohio. The locals give you UAH (“grivnas” in local slang) and you give them a place to stay.
Now there’s a wad of US Dollars sitting in a bank in Ukraine, and a wad of UAH sitting in a bank in the US. The Ukrainian bank can use these US Dollars until the dollars’ owner goes to the ATM and wants them back. Likewise, the US bank gets to use the UAH until its owner wants them back.
Now, imagine a few million of these little retirement homes (or businesses, factories, apartment buildings, stocks, etc) have been purchased by people sitting in the US. There’s now a great big wad of US Dollars sitting in Ukrainian banks.
Until two weeks ago, when one of the biggest and most established Ukrainian banks went under.
You won’t hear about this collapse on the news. It’s been officially called a re-structuring, just as Washington Mutual went through this past summer. The bank still exists, and the buildings are still there, but all of its activity has been shut down. For the past two weeks, the ATMs have not worked. Businesses who bank there have been unable to send out payroll checks; they can see the money sitting in their account, but cannot access it. The bank’s customers have been told that they will have access to their money sometime in December.
There is no FDIC in Ukraine. People who put their money into a bank here must trust that the bank is stable, because if it collapses, they lose everything. That has happened here, not once but twice in a generation.
This is understandably scary, and it’s not widely reported in local news media. People here learn the financial news around the water cooler, playing an intricate and country-wide game of Telephone to figure out what happened to the money and what might happen next. There are major industrial cities in the country that have cut back to entirely part-time labor; factories have told their employees that they cannot afford to pay for more than 4 workdays per week. Whispers up and down the chain of command seem to say that the extra money is being used for the 700 million UAH “emergency election“ fund, called for by the President apparently out of political spite. “We don’t want another election,” I was told. “We want the financial crisis averted and unemployment lowered.”
Now you sit in your chair in Ohio and watch the news about banking and political crisis in Ukraine, so you decide to sell your little vacation home and get out of Dodge. You also don’t want anything to do with the grivnas you’ve got sitting in the bank, so you convert them back to US Dollars. This is a perfectly rational thing to do, from your perspective. You pull out and put your money at home.
So does every other person in the world, at the same time.
Suddenly, everyone in the world gives Ukraine back their grivnas, and takes out their dollars, pounds, euro, and yen. Ukraine already has grivnas in its local money supply, and the addition of a such huge amount of it drives the value down overnight. Inflation skyrockets, and keeps going up as the foreign investors keep pulling out.
And that big, shaky Ukrainian bank gets even shakier, so none of the other banks in the world want to do business with it; the bank cannot trade, get loans, or get a stable supply of foreign currency. The other banks all take their football and go home.
And Yelena is watching the news and the stock tickers. She goes to the ATM to get money to keep the lights on in her store, and the ATM doesn’t work. Her employee may not get a paycheck, because it’s siting in limbo somewhere as useless 1s and 0s. Her Kiva loan through HOPE Ukraine has already been used to purchase the inventory she’d specified, but Ukrainian banks have been known to call loans immediately when they get into trouble, and so she does not entirely trust HOPE’s reassurances. She is very nervous.
“I am confident that God will see us through, and will take care of His people,” a HOPE staff member told me in a quiet and wistful voice, looking at the floor. “But what will happen… I don’t know.”
Ingrid’s House cont’d: Video clip
For anyone who wanted more visuals, I edited some short video clips from last week’s project…enjoy!
Asking Kiva Entrepreneurs Questions From Lenders
Last Wednesday Phanith, the AMK Kiva coordiantor, and I were very eager to head out into the field the next day to ask two Kiva entrepreneurs, the Siphat Yang Village Bank and the Chon Erm Village Bank Group, questions that I had gathered from lenders. Unfortunately, when we called the loan officer she told us that she got the dates mixed up, and that she had visited those clients the week before for repayments. Phanith and I knew that we couln’t let you Kiva lenders down, so we weren’t going to let this stop us! We decided to try to find the villagers ourselves… easier said then done.
We went to the Kandal branch office the next day. An area manager agreed to show us the entrance to the village on his way to a disbursement at another village. He drew us a little map and dropped us off at the entrance. Phanith and I hopped onto a moto and headed into the village, only to get lost very quickly.
Phanith tries to decipher the map that was drawn by the AMK Area Manager.
We started asking villagers for directions, but most of them had no idea where these clients lived and tehy mistakingly sent us off in the wrong direction. Finally we found a villager who knew these clients, HURRAY! He hopped on our moto and took us straight to them. Unfortunately, he took us down a road that was in horrible shape. Phanith tried to navigate the large puddles, but then we got stuck in one. Our moto started to lean to the left. Our navigator was smart enough to jump off, but Phanith and I were still on the moto. My leg was holding the weight of the moto and the two stranded passengers. After a minute, my leg gave way and down we went into the puddle. My butt went straight into the puddle. We decided to walk the rest of the way and we eventually reached the house of Siphat Yang.
White Pants, Brown Mud
Here are the answers to the questions asked by Kiva lenders:
Mary Larkin asked:
“Where do the business people get the goods in the first place? Are the goods sent in by mail? Do the business people have to travel to a larger city to buy the goods?”
Siphat Yang gets her goods from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, which is about a 45 minute drive on moto from her village. She buys her clothes from Olympic and Chbar Ampil markets.
Yusuke from Japan asked:
“How much does their per day income increase because of loans so far? and why?”
Before Siphat took out a loan she was making about $1.75 a day. Now she makes $2-$2.50. She said that the loan allowed her to buy more clothes to sell. It also allowed her to sells her clothes to factory workers on credit. The workers would then pay her back when they receive their monthly pay.
Yusuke also asked:
“How do they cooperate with each other in the village after getting the loan?”
According to Siphat, whenever a group member cannot make a payment, the other group members must cover the difference. The group member who wasn’t able to make a payment is expected to pay back the other group members when he/she can.
Ms. Siphat Yang and her neighbor check out the Kiva business descriptions of the two loans.
We weren’t able to find Mrs. Chon Erm, so instead we posed our questions to Ms. Taing Im Sum who is another member of Mrs. Chon Erm’s group.
Dan Landrum asked:
“Is it at all a hardship to pay back or does the benefit of the loan truly make for increased profits, so it is easy to make the payments as the plantation grows?”
Ms. Taing Im Sum and Mr. Som Yang, another villager who is a farmer, agreed that the loan terms offered by AMK are very reasonable. They pay 2.8% interest monthly, which according to them is the lowest interest rate available. Mr. Som Yang stated that if AMK didn’t offer loans at interest rates this low, then they would not be able to borrow any money. He also joked that he wouldn’t mind if the interest rate was even lower.
Dan also asked:
“Would it be useful for Mrs. Chon Erm’s group to receive some exchange or training in the various aspects of their business, farming, marketing, etc.?”
According to Mr. Som Yang, an organization called IPM has come to his village to train farmers. They showed the farmers new fertilizer techniques and to limit the amount of chemicals used as fertilizers and pesticides. Before he received the training from IPM, he was able to grow one ton of food per hectare. Now he is able to grow four tons on his hectare of land.
Finally Dan asked:
“Is there anything else we might do to help them prosper?”
I didn’t ask this question to the villagers directly, but I told Ms. Taing Im Sum and the other villagers who gathered around about Kiva. I explained that thanks to Kiva, AMK is able to keep interest rates low. (In the picture below you can see them checking out their Kiva business description and photo). So Dan, one of the best things you can do is to keep loaning on Kiva and supporting other organizations that are not only do good, but also to make a sustainable change.
Ms. Taing Im Sum looks for herself in the photo of her group loan. (She's in the second row, third from the right)
Despite all the difficulty in getting out into the field, this was a lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed reading this! For those of you who were wondering, I have washed those pants three times with all types of detergents and bleach, but the stain is still there. Any suggestions? 
To see a list of all the AMK loans that are currently fundraising on Kiva, click here.
If there aren’t any AMK loans on Kiva, you should check out the AMK Fan Club instead!!
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I had the pleasure of meeting Yusuke a few weeks ago. Yusuke was in Cambodia to promote Kiva in Japan through the Kiva Japan Project.
Working with GHAPE
Well, after a long first week of work, I think its safe to say that I am completely in love with GHAPE. The way that they operate just amazes me. I have now been to 3 different centers, the ones today were over an hour and a half on less than optimal roads, and interviewed 15 clients. Every client is so appreciative and excited about the future, it has been extremely inspiring. Especially when you take into account the conditions that most of these clients are living in; most of them during the interview complained of serious theft or illness. Yet, every one of these people managed to have their payments in on time and attend all the meetings. I was surprised at how many activities these clients use for income generation; a pig farmer will most likely use the manure for her garden where she grows coco yams, cassava, potatoes, green spices, cabbage, or other vegetables. She will sell these products as well as make some staple foods from them and sell them on the road or at the market. She may also be making hair nets at night to sell. The list goes on and on, it just depends on how many questions you ask.
At the second center I met a man named John Foriben. He started as a farmer in cabbage, plantains, green spices, and maize. He began to take out loans from GHAPE and was able to invest in water pumps and a tractor. He requested a grant from the UNDP last year and was given 5,000,000 CFA (around $11,000 USD). He now employs 12 people on the farm, all GHAPE members, and pays them in kind. They are allowed to take crops from the farm both to provide for their families and to sell in the market. He now has 4 customers who take his products to Gabon. He makes around 800,000 CFA ($1700 USD) per month—a huge amount in this area. His wife and children were there, cracking open palm nuts to make palm oil, and for a snack. The daughter, who was just a baby, maybe 10 months or so, was cracking open the nuts with a rock and giving them to me to eat. It was quite cute. I really enjoyed interviewing all the clients and learning about their lives. It truly was interesting to get to know the everyday lives of people, to understand their hopes for the future, and to see their high level positivity and appreciation for their loans. They sing three times a session, and I just love hearing the last song, the GHAPE anthem. Its all about raising themselves out of poverty, becoming educated, and maintaining healthy lifestyles—very holistic approach.
The GHAPE Anthem
All around the Nation
All across the World
The poor are longing to be free
Chorus:
Free from chains of poverty
Free from ignorance
Free from chains of HIV/AIDS
Strategies must be adapted
To lived realities
For the empowerment of the poor
(Chorus)
With GHAPE EC formula
A source for Liberation
The poor shall be set free
Say goodbye to poverty
Goodbye to ignorance
Goodbye to HIV/AIDS
It is unquestionably one of the more inspiring jobs I’ve had in a while. Kenya and Tanzania were great, but not like this. It’s different when a woman tells you that simply having access to credit has completely changed the status of her family. That a loan has created enough extra profit to pay for her children’s school fees, medical expenses, and provide balanced meals; three expenses that many families are unable to afford.
The cost of living here is really cheap. I think its fair to say that I am living on less than $2 a day right now. I bought groceries yesterday, enough for 5 meals or so, it cost me two dollars. That included a whole fish, a bag of yams, 6 tomatoes, onions, bag of beans, bag of corn, bag of plantains, and jalapenos—pretty cost effective. I’m hoping to upload some photos tonight, but in a lot of them you’ll see my ‘mama’. We were making achu last night, you cook cocoyams and plantains, then grind them together and mash them. Cocoyams are….like a potato…but….have more flavour….I suppose. Hard to describe. They are good though. After you make the mash, you cook a yellow soup from beef broth, spices, palm oil and, get this, cow skin. Yea, she was cleaning cow skin with a knife, oh it made me cringe. Its a delicacy over here, gross. And in case you are wondering when looking at the photos, yes, mama is wearing a Britney Spears t-shirt, but its from her early days, ha ha. Palm oil is the main cooking oil here, they make it from palm nuts, which I was able to eat more than enough of today in the field. I met a woman who makes palm oil, and her daughter decided it would be fun to crack them out of the shell and keep giving them to me to eat. When I refused one after about the tenth, she started crying. So, I kept taking them, filling up my pockets with all these palm nuts, ha ha. They are pretty good though.
A Problem of Success
We went to interview 3 of the 5 Kiva clients at this brand-new office. They’ve been in business for 2 months and have gathered 11 clients total. The loan officer, Vitalik, took us through a marketplace that looks just the same as cloth-covered market kiosks around the world. You could see it at a farmer’s market in Seattle or the Chatachung Market in Bangkok. (The knock-off Prada handbags were, I admit, more reminiscent of Thailand than of Washington. None of the Kiva clients were selling such things.) All three clients had opened two locations and had at least one employee, two were widows who had raised children by themselves, and all of them originally went into business because they lost their jobs during perestroika and had no way to feed their families. All had been in business for more than 9 years.
The interviews were quick, painless, and eye-opening. It really did give me a good sense of what kind of entrepreneurs microfinance works with, and what kind it doesn’t.
Yet her loan, for purchasing several months’ inventory in bulk, was for only $1200. That’s a substantial amount of money in her town but is too small for most banks, and thus she qualifies as a microfinance client and has been able to really benefit from loans. She started out from scratch, twice, being an unemployed widow with kids and grandkids. At one point her store was robbed of everything, and she had no insurance. Through microfinance loans she rebuilt her business and now has ambitions of opening a while network of stores. That’s absolutely a success story of microfinance substantially improving someone’s life.
I also saw little old ladies that lay out bedsheets on the sidewalk and pile fruit on them, and sell it with the help of a small, old scale. They are too poor to be microfinance clients, because they live so close to the edge of poverty that they’re not generally able to repay loans. Which is a smart decision on HOPE Ukraine’s part; the bank has to be self-sustaining in order to be able to continue their work, and so must select their clients carefully. Because the loans are not collateralized, the loan officer must spend a good deal of time assessing the business. He checks through the entrepreneur’s inventory to ensure that the business is stable and active, visits her home to verify that her standard of living supports business expansion, speaks to her neighbors to gauge her credibility. One loan officer might serve up to 150 clients this way. It’s an enormous workload. And it keeps the microfinance bank – indeed, the entire microfinance industry – afloat.
This system still leaves a whole class of poverty totally unaddressed. I knew in advance of coming here that microfinance is applicable to only a particular subset of the poor. At risk of belaboring the obvious, microfinance only works with business owners. Even more precisely, it works with business owners who are successful enough to want to expand their business. Just subsisting is not enough, any more than it would be enough for a small business owner in the States. A homeless, destitute, starving person is not a microfinance client. A wealthy business owner in a developing country is not a microfinance client. Rather, a lower-middle class to middle-class entrepreneur in a developing or former communist country is a microfinance client.
The answer is that she was poor in the way we think of abject poverty, and is now a member of the middle class. The exchange rate means that she’s still qualifying for loans that are very small by Western standards, but her lifestyle takes her out of the standard mission of “eliminating poverty.” We have already eliminated her poverty. She’s the “after” picture.
But she is still working and expanding her business. She is still too small to interest an international bank, or even a national bank headquartered in an expensive capital city. A little bit of money still goes a long way, and her alternative is still local moneylenders who vastly inflate interest rates.
A business owner in her position, a success story such as Galena, is now living in a gap in the system. Too wealthy to qualify for international aid, too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans, too successful to utilize the social safety net (even if it existed in her country), too struggling to enter the global business class – she is the perfect microfinance client. And yet as philanthropic Westerners, our first instinct is to look at Galena and think, “She isn’t poor enough to need my help.” I had this thought upon meeting her, and I’m sure I’m not alone, so I’ll reiterate the thought:
We want to help eliminate poverty. That’s what I’ve dedicated a year of my life to doing, and what many people have dedicated vast sums of their own money to doing. But once we’ve done that, the very people we’ve helped become, somehow, less deserving than they were when we started. Because microfinance works, because we have succeeded in our task, Galena is now less deserving than the little babushka who sells fruit off a bedsheet. So what is she to do? If we turn away from her when she has entered this gap in the system, we risk letting her slide back into poverty.
Where do the boundaries of poverty begin and end? And within those boundaries, where does our reponsibility lie? Once you have helped someone overcome one obstacle, do you abandon them before they encounter the next? At what point does Kiva, as midwife to small businesses, step back and let them succeed or fail on their own? When do we tell Galena that we’ll no longer be a partner for her?
I have no answers to this, only more questions. But if the questions serve to spark debate, perhaps the community can find answers. When you speak to friends about poverty and microfinance, please remember Galena. She is real. Your answers affect her life.
Trust As A Foundation
If ever there was a time that underscored the importance of trust in economics, now is it. Readers of this blog from the United States can attest to the financial ruin that awaits us when banks suffer not only from a deficit of wealth but also a deficit of trust; it turns into a vicious circle with declining returns for all. Likewise, theoretical people stuck in a theoretical game like the Prisoner’s Dilemma favored by political scientists, real people in real marriages, parents sending children to summer camps, etc. can all point to the necessary foundation of Trust for successful relationships and beneficial outcomes. Bereft of trust, vicious circles of unwanted yet nonetheless bad outcomes await everyone involved in that particular relationship.
It has long been noted that poverty exists as a vicious circle. Forced to work as children to support their families, children cannot get an education; forced to rent cars/wheelbarrows/storefronts they cannot afford to buy outright, entrepreneurs are stuck in a rut of paying rent but gaining no equity; forced to live in abject living conditions because they cannot afford to move, people get sick more easily and miss work and are condemned to low wages; the circle gets more and more vicious. One of the goals of microfinance is to help those entrepreneurs escape their particular vicious circle of poverty by offering loans to those people when no traditional banks would do so.
So while the great Indian, Mahatma Gandhi, had his satygrahas or experiments in truth, then we may say the great Bangladeshi, Muhammed Yunus, conducted his experiment in trust when he started microfinance. At its core, microfinance is simply a manipulation of common financial practices to suit the needs of the poor. Each of the adjustments to traditional financial practice is meant to overcome some market failure or to adapt banking to the realities of poverty. The most basic of these adjustments is the substitution of reputation for physical collateral. To cover themselves in case of a borrower’s default on a loan, banks disperse loans only if the borrower provides a substitute item that the bank can claim as ‘payment’ for the loan – collateral. The poor do not have many items available as collateral; hence, banks balked at loaning to them. Due to their exclusion from the financial world and their continued lack of physical collateral, Dr. Yunus decided that a ‘banker to the poor’ could use a borrower’s reputation and continued access to credit as a substitute for collateral. Microfinance builds trust as the cornerstone of its loaning structure as a result. The poor borrowers meet the trust MFIs initially displayed by lending without requiring collateral, and thus a virtuous circle of continuing trust begins.
Like Dr. Yunus’ Grameen Bank, my host MFI (microfinance institution, aka banker to the poor) relies mainly on group lending to distribute their loans. The basic framework is this:
A group of women in a neighborhood come together and form a group of eight to ten entrepreneurs; the MFI then offers the group a loan. Each person receives a pre-agreed portion of the total loan. The loan cycle lasts either four or six months. Once a month, the women gather at the MFI branch office in their neighborhood. People who do not come are fined a small amount. At these monthly meetings, the women have elected a treasurer, secretary, and president. They collect all their repayments and pay the MFI a lump sum (the aforementioned absentees can send their repayment with another group member if they wish…if they miss and don’t send their money, they have five days to pay or they are fined 5% of the loan). The individual portions of the total loan can vary significantly; for example, one group I sat in on had one member with a loan ten times the size of another member.
The actual loan has a fixed interest rate and each monthly repayment is equal repayments of principal, interest, and voluntary savings. Members have the option at the beginning of the loan to add a fixed percentage to their loan as voluntary savings. If they select this option, they will pay a little extra each month for the term of the loan and receive it all back at the end. One interesting manipulation to this model is that at my host MFI, they teach the women how to loan these savings to each other on top of their formal group loan. Thus, if one woman makes Christmas figurines and she wants even more money in November to prepare for Christmas, she can ask the group members to loan her the group’s savings which she would pay interest on. Thus, the women not only learn how to pay back loans, they learn how to distribute and manage loans themselves. Plus, the accumulated interest from these loans from their savings goes back into their group savings, helping all involved.
So how does this explanation fit with the opening salvo on trust? The group loan mechanism has a powerful effect on creating trust within neighborhoods. Last week I spoke with three groups in three different stages of their loans (receiving the loan disbursement, paying back month two of four, and finishing their loan and getting their savings) and they all had the same refrain: We have more trust in each other now than before. Imagine cross-guaranteeing other people in your neighborhood. Every month that passes with successful repayments (and in microfinance, this figure is at 96-98%!) is a month of trust built. Also, as mentioned earlier, this is the first time that a financial institution has placed their trust in these women entrepreneurs. To be able to match that trust with on-time repayments is an honor for these groups (one group in their ninth loan cycle received a cake and a congratulatory speech from the branch manager) and one every woman told me: I am a punctual payer. This virtuous circle of trust is repeated with larger and larger loan amounts until one day the women can go directly to the traditional banks with equity in their businesses, savings, knowledge of the loan process, and a long (almost always perfect) credit history.
In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma (two people being questioned: if one rats out the other he gets 5 years while the other gets 15 years; if they both rat each other out, the both get 10 years; if they both hold out, they get out free), an absence of trust in the other person leads to selfish behavior and a less than ideal outcome (10 years each instead of both out free). This vicious circle can be overcome if somehow, through many iterations of the game trust begins to form between the two prisoners. Poverty is a veritable maelstrom of vicious circles. Microfinance offers a mechanism of injecting trust into this Charybdis. MFIs step into the gap and offer trust in poor entrepreneurs. Poor entrepreneurs have overwhelming matched this trust to the tune of 96-98% repayment rates. However, the group mechanism created by Dr Yunus and mimicked in my host MFI stands to build trust outside of mere financial services. Women from the same neighborhood brought together for loans grow to trust each other in their endeavors. Now we see poor neighborhoods with trust growing as a firm foundation for their economy. And if the last month in the United States has shown us anything, it is that Trust is the foundation for economic growth. Poverty exists in many vicious circles and microfinance is not a cure-all. I do believe, however, that if a vicious circle infects other areas of life and drags them down with it, then virtuous circles like trust can infect other areas in a similar manner and drag them up with it. I am a fan of microfinance yes because it is a vehicle for the creation of wealth but more so because it is a vehicle for the creation of trust.
To view fundraising clients of EDAPROSPO on Kiva’s website, please click here
Here are some pictures I took of the three groups I met with last week:
First Impressions
8 days and 4 continents later I find myself in Tanzania as Kiva’s newest fellow in the field. Previously I was doing a 3.5 month work rotation in Australia, followed by a 1 week long whirlwind trip home to North America prior to disembarking to Africa via Europe.
I am here in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to be one of the fellows working at SELFINA (Sero Lease and Finance Ltd.) which was founded by Dr. Victoria Kisyombe in 2002 with the goal of providing Tanzanian women, many of whom are excluded from land and asset ownership due to local customs and traditions, with access to micro-credit.
After a 24 hour journey from San Francisco to Heathrow to Nairobi to Dar Es Salaam, I am greeted by an unfamiliar humidity, but more importantly the also unfamliar but friendly face of Daudi, SELFINA’s driver. I am actually pleasantly surprised to be met by a neatly dressed man wearing a collared polo and a warm smile with a computer printed sign with my name on it who greets me and guides me to a nice 4wd vehicle. In all honesty if Freddy Kreuger was waiting for me with a scribbled sign and a broken down car I would have more than happily jumped in after such a long journey. But I discovered later that the “Freddy greeting” was how it used to be just 2 months ago (minus Daudi looking anything like Freddy Kreuger!). It is with the help of another volunteer, Claude, that SELFINA is going through some change management to make SELFINA a more welcoming place for customers and visitors. This is just one of the many changes that SELFINA is working on and I am hoping to learn more about these changes/goals and help in any way I can.
After my bags were placed in the car, we drove through what is to be my new home for the next few months. Dust, dirt, and dilapitation are prevalent but more surprisingly are the people. People are everywhere!! From men seeking refuge under the shade of the trees to brightly dressed women carrying baskets of bananas on their heads alongside the road to children patiently waiting by the corregated metal bus stops to women sweeping the dust on the road with no more protection than the bright orange vests they wear to boys selling everything from water to newspaper to machetes at every intersection to seeing daladalas (mini buses) shoved to the brim with people. Like I said…people everywhere!
During the “drive,” which really seemed to be a dodging game of sorts from potholes to the crazy daladalas that cut every which way in traffic, I kept mostly quiet as I was transfixed with my new surroundings. Daudi would interrupt the silence every so often to point and teach me a new word in Swahili. Our communication was a bit limited as he knows only a little bit of English and I basically only know hello, thank you, and goodbye. But my favorite interuption was when he asked me if I liked music. After I replied yes, he more eagerly asked if I liked Ken Rodgers. After I replied sure, he excitedly popped in a Kenny Rodgers cd and started to sing along to it. I couldn’t help but smile as I listened to Kenny Rodgers and Daudi as I gathered my first glances of Tanzania, my new home.
“For a Woman, this Floor is Everything”
Thursday, Oct 16th
Ingrid's House
Santo Domingo
At 2:30pm yesterday I watched the Caribbean ocean rush past the airplane windows as we descended towards the Santo Domingo tarmac. After a quick bustle through customs, an exchange of US dollars for pesos (oh and no lost bags!) I was quickly collected by two Esperanza International employees. Tricia, (Esperanza intern coordinator), had housing, dinner, and a stop a the supermarket already planned out for me. She and I went off and ate burritos, talked about college experiences in the DR and US, and compared notes on what we are thinking of for grad school (Tricia, by the way, speaks English rather flawlessly, has an undergraduate law degree, and plans for further studies of international trade).
Tricia drove me around part of Santo Domingo (SD), accurately noting that the city offers pretty much the similar amenities you’d find in a US city: KFC, TGI Fridays, Kia/Honda/Mitzubishi dealerships, gyms, overpriced gas, supermarkets, an Apple-affiliate store, an upscale mall, and very nice housing for $550/month. Unsurprisingly, SD has wealthy , poor, and middle-income neighborhoods throughout.
To my Boston and New York friends, and even those who have seen Italians drive; Dominicans in Santo Domingo are in a whole other league of… well…let’s call it, “traffic navigation techniques.” 1) Flashing headlights means “you better know that I am NOT stopping for you, under any circumstances” 2) Merge now, look later 3) use your horn like your voice box (they are cheery sounding for the most part), 4) the police at traffic lights might as well be on their lunch break. 5) Using your brakes is very wimpy. Anyway, as far as driving goes, I give WORST or maybe MOST TALENTED award to the Dominicans. I am not sure which to call it…
Flash forward to 6:00am today, Thursday. I get together some outdoor work clothes–jeans, sneakers, t-shirt. Tricia has arranged for me to go out of the city and see an Esperanza project in action. Co-worker Pablo (an Argentinian, previously with Habitat for Humanity) picks me and Mark (volunteer from Seattle) up by 7:00am, and we head out for a day of floor-building.
We drove about an hour outside of the city, to a small underdeveloped community where we met Ingrid: an Esperanza microfinance client (but not specifically a Kiva.org borrower). Esperanza has just started to explore housing loan products within their micro credit operations. Mark, who has been here for about two months already, explained that Esperanza’s most creditworthy clients (those who have regularly paid back different loans over several years) are now able to request housing-improvement loans. These loans can be more risky for clients, since they do not add to small business profits. However, these improvements are vital to family well being and health.
It is important to understand the state of housing in poor communities, such as Ingrid’s. First, the “best” accommodations, (and she described this to me) what one would aspire to, is made of concrete blocks, solid roofing, a cement floor and a small cement patio in the front. Forget multiple stories, doors between rooms, indoor plumbing, or glass windows. A good house is shelter, in this context, a shelter that will last and that can be cleaned at will. No cement flooring means a dirt floor-for bedrooms, kitchen, and the infant who wants to crawl around. Cement, by contrast can be readily scrubbed, swept, and cleared of bugs and chicken poop. As for concrete blocks, these are much more durable than the cheap alternatives: tin siding or wooden board siding. Both tin and wood slats do not endure over time. I recall how on my first trip to the DR, my host mother and daughter cleaned the floor eight to ten times a day–it was an amenity not at all taken for granted. That family also had over time upgraded from tin siding to half-concrete block (bottom) and half wooden slats (top). The roof, as I recall, was tin, and any rain that fell echoed like cascading gravel over our heads.
Ingrid explained that she feels cautious about the housing improvement loans–her past success with micro loans has meant quite hard and dedicated work. She cooks and sells local fast food. For her to now cover both her current business loan and a housing loan will mean a constant and careful consideration of her finances, and of course, lots more hard work. She explained her vision as “paso a paso” or step by step–doing what she can as her means allow, and being careful. Eventually, she hopes she can improve all aspects of the house, but for now, the floor takes priority.
Making the cement
Anyway, the floor construction began very quickly after our arrival. A local mason, Ingrid, her husband, and between three and four of Ingrid’s fellow community bank members (all women) came to lend a hand and provide moral support. Then three more Esperanza volunteers arrived (American) with two more Esperanza employees. Esperanza volunteers worked in front of the house mixing sand, concrete dust, and water together for the there rooms inside–where Ingrid’s husband and the mason dumped and smoothed the mixture. All the commotion in front of Ingrid’s house made for a constant stream of neighborhood visitors–most notably the local children who alleviated our down-time with dancing lessons and clapping games.
Smoothing the Concrete
At one point, an older grandmotherly woman also stopped by, and offered me her story with microfinance. Unlike Ingrid, this woman had not been able to continue beyond one micro loan (with a different organization) because her sister (and business partner) had fallen too ill to work, and soon after she herself had suffered thrombosis in her left arm–which now hangs useless at her side. She told me that there was no way for her to ever return to a microfinance program, because it is impossible for her to work. This woman watched the floor construction for a while longer, and then told me that with all her difficulties, she prays quite a lot. Prayer, she said, is her lasting comfort.
What a view!
The floor work was done by 3:15, we had started at 9:00am. As we said goodbye, Ingrid took the time to thank all of the Esperanza volunteers and employees. She asserted, “It is just a floor, but for me, for a woman, this makes all the difference.” I believe her words reflected an important observation in the microfinance communities around the world–women will work for the whole family, for meaningful and long term visions.
In all Ingrid’s project took only a few days to complete: Mark and Pablo had discussed the loan with her on Tuesday. She had received the loan, moved her furnishings to a temporary location; the work was started and completed three days later. Tonight, she and her family will let the concrete dry, and they will move back in tomorrow. Imagine if remodeling your own kitchen only took three days and less than $500.…I guess you just have to say “context is everything.”
As for me, I head out tomorrow (Friday the 17th) for Santiago. I’ll be staying there and initiating my Kiva work at the Esperanza-Santiago office!
More to come soon!
Cuidanse, que vayan bien
Kalie
Ode to Veronica
Veronica was more than just the small provisions shop owner across the street from where I used to live in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. She was more than just a woman full of life and smiles who I would often visit with on my way home from work. She was a friend, one I even visited at home to say goodbye to when I left. So when I spend my first five days in Ghana back in the neighborhood where I lived for two months last year while working at a popular Ghanaian newspaper, one of the things on my to-do list was to see Veronica.
I walked down the street where I used to live, down the entire neighborhood spanning about six blocks that I called home. The salon that a good friend of mine owns is the same, but many of the faces inside have changed. The pharmacy I frequented after falling over a random step in Ghana (which left permanent scarring) has been remodeled and my confidante Alex who used to work there has moved away. Further down, many of the same families and shops look almost exactly the same—the way I realize that I wanted them to look, which is funny considering I came here to help effect change. Other things changed drastically, such as the former trash pile that has now become a taxi station. And then there was what used to be Veronica’s shop, missing from the mix as if it had never been there in the first place. When her shop closed down, she left as well, where to I may never know.
Apparently Veronica had taken out a loan but was unable to pay back for some reason. I don’t know the specifics of what happened, but I was told that she had made some bad business decisions and got herself in over her head in debt and was unable to handle it. It was hard for me to hear considering the reason I came back here and chose to work in microfinance was to make a difference in the issue that for me was the greatest difference between people here and people back home—lack of resources. I hate seeing the economic divide that sometimes fills the air while walking down a busy street. I can see it in the eyes of those who pass me. I can hear it when children ask obruni to give them money (Obruni means foreigner but is often used to say white foreigner, which is obruni co-co). I can feel it when I receive compliment after compliment on my slippers (flip-flops) even though they are just like theirs but with a Nike swoosh. The fact is that people in Ghana can’t readily access resources the way people in the United States can. You want a house but can’t afford it, so you take out a loan. If people in Ghana want a house but can’t afford it, they save up until they can and then start building until they run out of money. Then they save up some more and keep working on the house. There aren’t nearly as many scholarships or educational opportunities, and even if they get an education, the Ghanaian people say there’s no place to go with it. There are a lack of jobs, and even a good job at a bank pays about $350 per month—not bad money for Ghana, but how can people compete and take care of a family in a global economy—imagine saving up to go on a cruise if you only earn $350 each month and have a family to take care of; it is simply not an option
I think about my life and about how hard I have worked for everything I have, be it the clothes on my back or the laptop that I am typing on. I feel as if I deserve these things because I worked so hard to attain them. But then I look around me in the office I share with Ghanaians—who earn about $210 each month– and wonder what my life would be like had I been born Ghanaian. What if, no matter my profession, I never had the opportunity to earn a comfortable lifestyle. It is a scary thought for me growing up as an American where I consider my college years and post-college years of constant lack of money the character builder that I will remember throughout the rest of my life when I do have money. It is a means to an end, but people in Ghana never have that comfortable end in sight. Some do, of course, but it is a much smaller pecentage than those that reach such a place in the United States and with much less stuff. The family that I am living with here in Ghana is relatively well off. They have a big house, running water, a toilet, a television even—but you can’t help but to notice that the walls are empty. I think of my own house covered with photos, knick-knacks, and the like. Money only goes so far in Ghana, and photos are a luxury item. With a 4 by 6 costing the equivalent of $1, such items are scarce here.
It reminds me that nothing in this life is promised—that picture-perfect future that I still hope will happen is not certain. Because even if I work really hard to make it happen, the same thing that happened to Veronica could happen to me. I could fall on my face, and no one may be there to help pick me up. I think maybe hearing about Veronica should have depressed me, but it made me want to work harder. I want to make it so that people have a place to access resources, so that when the economy deflates or when a crisis occurs people can take care of themselves through it.
The goal of Kiva is to alleviate poverty by enabling and empowering the poorer people in the world to pull themselves out of poverty in order to create a sustainable and better life for themselves. My goal is to do the same but on a more micro-level. I can only do so much here at Christian Rural Aid Network, but if I successfully do so along with the other Kiva Fellows, then I believe we can do so much. Maybe I have to have this faith because otherwise how will I ever be doing what I am doing.
I end this first fellows blog with my favorite quotes by one of my very favorite authors, Arundhati Roy, because it is everything I am thinking about as I am about to finish my third day of work.
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty in its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget….another world is not only possible, it is on her way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully, you can hear her breathe…Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”
Tupac, Akon and Sierra Leone
After weeks of mental and physical preparation, I have finally arrived in Sierra Leone. My Kiva Fellowship brings me to Salone Microfinance Trust (heretofore referred to as “SMT”). Over the next few months, I will share on-the-ground insight of Sierra Leone, educate on SMT’s business model and convey stories about SMT’s wonderful employees. But first, I’d like to share a story about my arrival to Makeni.
I can immediately feel comfortable in any setting when music becomes the topic of conversation. Upon arrival to my apartment in Makeni , I was greeted by Tunkara, Ibrahim and Sheka – all SMT employees or helpers. As soon as they saw I had brought a guitar with me, I knew I had struck a chord (pun intended) with my new friends and colleagues.
Within minutes, I was teaching Ibrahim (SMT’s Kiva Coordinator) how to hold the guitar and play a C-to-G-to-C chord progression. By the end of the Fellowship, I promise him, I’ll teach him how to play one of his favorites – Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Meanwhile, Tunkara (SMT’s Senior Finance Officer) was flipping through my copy of the recent Rolling Stone. After discussing Alicia Key’s beauty and Akon’s falsetto crooning abilities, we concluded (with a big laugh) that Tupac was dead.
The people of Sierra Leone have all made me feel very welcome this week. They’ve helped me overcome any anxieties associated with being in a very foreign place. It is clear now that, as Mr. Marley eloquently sang, “everything’s gonna be alright, everything’s gonna be alright…”
Adam is a member of Kiva Fellows Class 6. When he’s not sweating profusely and being eaten by mosquitoes while sleeping, he can be found writing journals on Sierra Leonean borrowers or promoting his Kiva Lending Team, “Sierra Leone Supporters.”
First week in Bosnia
I am living in the attic of a blue house, which I share with fish farmers in the Bosnian countryside. I have a small kitchen (with a tea kettle and 6 espresso cups), a living room decorated with antique dolls, and a bedroom that smells like the suitcase of a grandparent. It is a musty and warm oasis. Behind the house are vegetable gardens and pools of fish and a guard dog (named Garo) who no longer pulls on his chain. There is a dirt path that I can follow for hours, past sheep and cemeteries and forgotten homes.
"Brijesnica Mala" translates roughly to "Small Place of the Fog"
I arrived in Bosnia last Thursday, so my experience at Zene Za Zene (“ZzZ”) has been an introductory one. ZzZ was set up in 1993 to provide the female victims of the war with financial assistance and job skills training. A micro-credit program was set up at ZzZ in 1997, and the organization started raising money through Kiva just 9 months ago. The women at ZzZ wear leather jackets and have aggressively highlighted hair. They are smart and talkative, and gaze at me curiously as they smoke their cigarettes. I have a hard time explaining that I am here on a volunteer mission to help capture the stories of their borrowers. I still have not met any borrowers, but I have been promised several trips into the field later this week.
These older ladies seem to run the show.
The Bosnian people are kind and insist that I eat. Constantly. At all times, I am either eating ‘burek’ (a meat pastry so greasy that its grease absorbs through my fingertips even before it reaches my lips) or sipping espressos, whose loose coffee grains stain my teeth black. I think I’m going to be happy here. Happy and fat.
Even when Sarajevo was under siege, people still came to this square to share their bread with the pigeons.
I spent the weekend with a girl my age, Emira. After hours of conversation about boys and school and our shared crush on Obama, I thought that I could ask her about the war. Wrong. She was 6 when the war began, and she says that she remembers everything. She changed the subject quickly. “I can’t let myself think about it. We live side-by-side with the Serbs today. I don’t want to think about how my neighbors tried to kill my family.” I stopped with my questions, and offered to buy her ice cream. I guess I am already learning the Bosnian way: when in doubt, offer food.
The Sarajevo Roses are concrete scars from mortar shell explosions during the war that were later filled with red resin. Each Sarajevo Rose shows a spot in which a person was killed. I found this one in front of a coffee shop.
I shall write more soon! Thanks for reading. 
My first week in Tajikistan
I have to be honest, I was slightly terrified to become a Kiva Fellow, to travel halfway across the world to a place I had to look up on a map. Don’t get me wrong, I signed up for all the right reasons: I really believe in the way that Kiva operates, I wanted to delve deeper into the world of microfinance, and I thought that a three month sabbatical might help me gain some perspective.
But I also had a lot of little voices building up in the back of my head that didn’t think this was such a good idea. I felt uncertain: I don’t speak Russian or Tajiki, I’m not too familiar with this part of the world and, the last time I checked, the winters can be pretty harsh in Central Asia (I live in Seattle – the heaviest coat I own is a fleece). I felt selfish: I have a lot of responsibilities, including a mortgage, that don’t go away just because I do. And, I felt scared: I’m really happy with my life and where it’s headed, so why would I want to leave it behind?
So it is still amazing to me that I am here…. in Tajikistan.
And I’m happy to report that after a week on the ground I am glad that I followed my heart and not my fears, because I’ve already had some pretty beautiful experiences. The kind of experiences that tend to happen when you’re in a new environment and more aware of what’s taking place around you. And, the kind of experiences that make it worth traveling half way across the world to a place you have to look up on a map, no matter how scared you might be.
My Tajik Suitor
I have found that sitting in a main plaza is one of the best ways to pass time in a new city. You get a birds eye view of the culture and might even run into a future friend. But this past Saturday I was there mostly to enjoy the sun. It was a gorgeous 70 degree day and the plaza was bustling with strolling young couples, children playing with soccer balls, and old men telling stories to each other.
I was writing in my journal when an older gentleman sat down on the bench next to me and immediately started talking, undeterred by my inability to participate in the conversation. When I tried to explain that I am American and don’t speak Russian or Tajiki, he became even more excited. In an almost theatrical performance of full body gesticulations, he began relating an apparently epic story about the United States. Seriously, this story had everything: airplanes, people dancing, and quite possibly a love interest, it’s hard to say.
He kept asking questions and I kept apologizing for my language shortcomings. Eventually he realized that we would never be able to communicate with words, so he reached into his bag and pulled out a bundle of roses. He slipped the flowers into the front straps of my backpack, smiled, and walked off.
My Tajik Mother
For the first few days after I arrived my apartment didn’t have much water and by the weekend it had none. So when I came across an old woman resting on the platform outside of my room, I decided to jump right in and get to the bottom of the situation. I tried miming a faucet and then a shower, both to no avail. Frustrated, I ran back in to get my Russian dictionary, realizing too late that she had taken this as an invitation to come into my apartment. Oh well, I thought, run with it. She vigorously nodded in understanding as I showed her the dry faucets in my shower and sink. She too broke into pantomime, describing how they were working on the pipes and that the water would be back on tomorrow.
She then proceeded to walk through the rest of my apartment, approving of some things (like my mini fridge) and questioning others (like my tv). Her last stop was my eating nook, where I had collected all of my market finds: rice, garlic, fruit, tea, and nuts. She started fiddling with all of the bags, which took me by surprise. My first thought was that I had offended her by not offering her anything to eat. But I quickly realized that she wasn’t helping herself to my food, she was simply arranging it in a way that would best preserve them. She wrapped the nuts up tightly, opened the bag of dried apricots so that they could air out, and put the bread in a bag. We introduced ourselves a little more and then “Tuitja” smiled, patted me on the arm, and headed home.
My Tajik Friend
On Saturday night I discovered that women don’t really hit the town after dark. After 20 uncomfortable minutes walking around by myself, feeling like a woman of ‘loose morals’, I turned back and went home. Which is why, when Sunday night rolled around, I was happy to settle in early to read and knit.
The sounds of horns and drums from outside my window quickly distracted these efforts. I tried to ignore them but it wasn’t long before they were joined by loud chants and I was forced to investigate. I threw on a coat and practically ran downstairs where, to my surprise, I ran right into a wedding procession in the courtyard.
As I stood watching the group of revelers loudly escorting the new couple to their home, a young girl approached me and asked me in clear English if I would like to go closer. I explained that I didn’t know anybody and would prefer to stay back but she grabbed my hand anyway and took me to a small patio where we could watch the men sing and dance around the fire. When the party started to die down she took my hand again and introduced me to her best friend and five younger sisters.
It wasn’t much. The whole event didn’t last more than a half hour. But she was so kind and reassuring, that I immediately felt more confident in my prospects for fitting in here.
I’m sorry for the lack of pictures. I mistakenly brought the wrong camera cord but hope to have some pictures on the blog by next week. Thanks for your support.
Carrie Ferrence, working with IMON in Khujand, Tajikistan
Impressions…
People always use toothpicks after meals…you don’t “get off” a bus or Matatu, you “alight” (I have actually never heard this word before)…people make “blunders” instead of “mistakes”…Kenya produces great coffee, but since the domestic demand is rather for tea, most places serving coffee here are surprisingly bad…people love eating meat…when I ask people for directions, they assume that I am utterly helpless and may not make it to where I am going…if my colleagues give me directions, they want me to send them an SMS once I arrive, so that they know that I made it safely…everyone carries little plastic bags with them wherever they go…the growing middle class is obvious, even just by looking around at the massive billboards, which are designed to be more vertical than horizontal, and the endless commercials hocking a consumer lifestyle to Nairobians…the word “gay” was censored out of the Ugly Betty episode I watched after dinner last night, as was the word “sex” on an episode of “Shark”, an awful American TV series I have never heard of…the Swahili news will show interviews with people in English without subtitles…the English news will show interviews in Swahili without subtitles…men walk down the street holding hands, because they are friends…my frequent “Thank you” or “Asante” (thank you in Swahili) to whoever has helped me are always met with “Welcome” or “Karibu” (welcome in Swahili)…people are proud of Kenya and are slightly ashamed about the post-election violence; they hope that is not all I know about their country…if I walk into any eating establishment that is not an almost exclusively white hangout, I will be watched by the other customers the whole time, from ordering to eating to paying: it seems to me that they are in total disbelief that I am sitting there, drinking coffee and eating a donut (good donuts here)…handshakes can be an extended affair, and vigorous…people speak English to me, but the accent can be impenetrable, the words unfamiliar and unexpected, and when coupled with the accent: impossible to understand…
NAIROBI: It’s a mad, mad world…
Nairobi is a mad, mad place for the unfamiliar visitor. Traffic, pollution, swarms of people…
The simplest, most convenient way to get around is on a Matatu. A Matatu is a little van, almost like a VW bus, except outfitted with seats for 14 people…and sometimes a flat screen TV and Pioneer speakers, which are always pumping some kind of reggae or American hip hop through the little van.
Matatus rule the road, or at least they think they do. The sliding door is almost always open, with the “Matatu Manager” hanging out of the van for the whole ride, shouting where the Matatu is headed, how much it costs, etc… once you are in the van, the open door policy provide a nice breeze as you weave your way through the other cars and around the brave individuals trying to cross the street. But once you are in, you barely notice the world whizzing by around you, or how close you come to smashing into another vehicle. Usually I am so consumed by the deafening music that there is nothing else to do except bob my head to the beat and leave it all up to some higher being…
The music, the chatter, the entire vibe of the Matatu wraps you up and dumps you out somewhere down the road – which really feels like the past few months of my life…
Being a white man here is interesting. Either no one bothers you, no one cares that you are there….or you become the center of attention in any situation. You can swarmed by people, all wanting to know where you from, your marital status (disbelief follows my answer of “27 and single, no children”) and how you should follow them to the nearest store, market stand, restaurant, etc…
Thankfully I do not have to deal with all of this on my own: I have the honor of living with David Kitusa, Kiva’s Partner Development Specialist for East and Southern Africa, and his family. This makes my experience extra special, as I come home every night to a family. Their warmth and hospitality cannot be overstated – in the past 7 days I have learned so much from them about life in Kenya and Nairobi. Staying with them has added an extra dimension to my visit, certainly, as well as that intangible feeling that comes with being part of a family. Living life here with them is something I will never forget.
Let’s start from the beginning…
My name is David Stewart and I am the Kiva Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya. I am working with Opportunity Kenya, part of Opportunity International. Opportunity just bought Sunlink, a small MFI here in Nairobi. I am here to help the transition and get all of the Sunlink staff on board with this thing from the US we know (and love) as Kiva….but before I got here….
It was virtually impossible to write anything before leaving the States for Nairobi. There was simply too much movement, too much momentum to stop and capture my thoughts.
For starters, I spent almost 5 months backpacking through the mountains of California, Oregon and Washington on the Pacific Crest Trail. Most people have heard of the Appalachian Trail: the PCT is its longer, slightly wilder cousin in the West.
It is a 2,600 mile long continuous footpath through the mountains, starting at the Mexican border east o San Diego and ending 8 miles inside of Canada. There are virtually no shelters to sleep in (bring your tent!) and one must go into town every 5-8 days in order to buy food and supplies for the next leg of the journey. It runs along the eastern edge of California, through the Mojave Desert, and then up into the majestic Sierra Nevada mountain range, where you live like a mountain goat for several weeks, climbing up and over and down 11, 12, even 13,000 foot mountain passes. It then winds back to the middle of California and takes you up through the center of Oregon and Washington along the crest of the Cascades. All told, the trail passes through 7 national parks and countless national forests and wilderness areas.
Along the way, I managed to apply for the Kiva Fellowship, conduct a phone interview (early on a Sunday morning in Ashland, Oregon) and get hired (which I found out by checking my e-mail on another hiker’s IPhone, high up on a ridge in Oregon, where he happened to have reception).
Originally, I thought I was headed to Azerbaijan; this was right around the time that Russia invaded Georgia. This lead to mock “Good luck out there” wishes from other hikers and suggestions that it might be safer to sleep with candy bars in my tent in bear country than to go anywhere near Azerbaijan. It was also discussed at length whether or not I should shave my beard before leaving…this, however, was all for naught, as I found out soon afterwards that I would be headed to Kenya, instead. I was pleasantly surprised…
My hike lasted from April 25th until September 11th. The timing worked out perfectly, as training for the Kiva Fellowship began on September 25th. I still had to get to San Francisco, though. How did this work?
At the northern end of the trail, in a provincial park in Canada, there are buses running into Vancouver. Vancouver was a beautiful city, a great way to come back into civilization…unless you take a wrong turn and go down East Hastings Street, on which you can find countless people shooting heroin and smoking crack in broad daylight. I am not exaggerating about this; my friends and I made the wrong turn and watched people shoot up on street corners. Less than 100 yards away, people were shopping at American Apparel and enjoying the finest raw oysters that the northern Pacific has to offer. This passes for normal in Vancouver.
I jumped into the northern Pacific, by the way. In a word: cold.
A few days later, upon arriving in San Francisco for my Kiva training, I witnessed a shooting. I called 911 and described to them everything I had seen, which was not all that much. I simply heard the shots, looked across the street, saw a hooded figure fall and another hooded figure run off with a gun in hand. It all happened so fast….tragic, sad, scary…
Such was my reintroduction to society.
At least Kiva was uplifting. Actually, it was downright inspiring. After one short week of training, I left San Francisco feeling that I was truly a part of Kiva and that I could actually contribute to the cause. It was not an abstraction; indeed, as a Kiva Fellow I am on the ground, in the country, seeing how loans are disbursed and how those loans affect people here. The positives, the negatives, and all the concerns and issues surrounding microfinance as it relates to real people who are simply trying to get a leg up in life.
I can say now that the effect of these loans is very real – for the Microfinance Institutes that grant the loans as well as for the borrowers who use them to grow their businesses.
Oh, wait: before leaving Boston for Nairobi I attended a wedding in Delaware, swam in the roiling Atlantic Ocean (thank you for the waves, Ike) and found some time to sleep somewhere in between all of this…
Have you ever wanted to ask a Kiva entrepreneur a specific question?
Well now is your chance!!!
I will be visiting the Siphat Yang Village Bank and the Chon Erm Village Bank Group this Thursday. If you want me to ask the members of the village bank a question, send me an email with your question: sanjaya.punyasena AT fellows.kiva.org
This is the first time I’m trying this, so I might run into some problems. I want to apologize in advance if I am unable to ask your question.
If you could send me your questions before October 15th, that would be great!
Also, if you haven’t voted for Kiva on the American Express Members Project, do so now!!! You only have 10 hours left and Kiva needs 400 more votes to reach second place!!
Happy New Year!
Hello Kiva Fans,
A little more than a week ago I was sitting on the plane for the last hour of what had been a 36 hour journey – Boston, New York, Zurich, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam. I watched as the computer generated plane tracker moved across the Kenya/Tanzania border and tried to steady myself for the new circumstances I was about to enter.
This week, I want to share some of the pleasant surprises – of which there are many. One of the unfortunate unintended consequences of the dogged, and at times heroic, efforts of many to highlight to suffering on this continent is that it has come to define the African brand. This is not in any way to minimize the hardships of many, indeed witnessing and hopefully beginning to understand their struggles is in large part why I am here.
The first surprise has been how safe I have felt. Considering I was dropped quite literally half way around the world, with no arranged ride and only the address of a hotel from a guidebook – this was a welcome discovery!
