Archive for November, 2008
The Sari of Kerti Moses
Kerti Moses and his wife Endang had one of the biggest homes I had seen in almost fifty visits to DINARI Foundation’s clients. The exposed concrete foundation elevated the house above the nearby dwelling of one of the couple’s workers. The entire floor was covered in big ceramic tiles printed like green marble, and the white walls still had a lingering freshness in parts. Inside was a big room with high exposed rafters and smaller bedrooms adjoining it. The main room was empty save for a table in one corner and a TV against the far wall. Behind this wall was a dim hallway with a narrow kitchen at one end and a bathroom at the other with a curtain for privacy. I was surprised to find that it had a Western-style toilet and furthermore that it flushed.
The windows to the main room did not provide much light, leaving it cool and dark. We spent most of the afternoon sitting on the long patio outside, overlooking the yard where hens bobbed and clucked and roosters made insistent pronouncements. The couple had lived in that yard when they first moved to the village of Bunutan, in a hut made from bamboo walls and a thatched-grass roof.
I had first met Kerti Moses and Endang a few days before in the Foundation’s office. Ardi, a supervisor for DINARI’s loan officers, had asked me if I wanted to interview one of his clients.
“They are fishermen from East Bali,” he said. “Perhaps we go there someday, on a weekend, he takes us fishing.” Ardi had a way of raising one eyebrow when he spoke that made his faint smile mischievous.
I expected to encounter leathery skin and sinewy arms, weather-beaten faces expressing simple wisdom from years hauling fish from the sea. Instead, the couple looked like the proprietors of a bed-and-breakfast. They were short and squat, their skin was smooth, and their shirts looked fresh. Kerti Moses was thirty-nine years old and Endang was forty.
Kerti Moses and Endang at DINARI
Most borrowers reacted to me with amused bewilderment, but Kerti Moses and his wife stayed still and composed in their seats as I bounded down the stairs. Kerti Moses kept a serious countenance while I told him about my role interviewing clients for Kiva. His face was distinguished, almost handsome. Both he and his wife understood English, but Endang had a better command of the language and did most of the talking. When I introduced myself, her mouth was closed in a slight frown, but her words came out like a warm soft breeze when she spoke.
“This is first time I heard about joint business between DINARI and Kiva. I am happy for this.”
I learned that Kerti Moses was a fisherman without a boat. He fished every morning and afternoon, borrowing another man’s vessel and splitting the day’s catch. He was in the process of building two of his own boats and was seeking a loan of Rp. 27 million (roughly $2,700) to outfit them: Rp. 18 million for two motors, Rp. 4 million for each net, and a Rp. 1 million cushion.
The couple’s story intrigued me as we spoke. In one of my sporadic attempts to learn Indonesian, I had received a very helpful explanation of the word sari from Ferdinand, DINARI’s Kiva representative. The word in turns meant juice, nectar, pollen and essence. If you asked someone for the sari of their statement, it was a polite way of asking to get to the point. It signified the most important part of the noun to which it referred.
Most of my interviews with DINARI’s clients lasted about ten minutes, enough time perhaps to take an x-ray of their lives but not enough to really understand them. I wanted to spend time with Kerti Moses and Endang in their home in Karangasem Province, and I wanted to videotape them for Kiva’s media department. I hoped that by spending the day with the couple, their sari would be laid bare for me. We set a date for Saturday.
“Bunutan, it is not like this,” Ardi said as he pointed out the car window toward the lush dense vegetation. We had left the new coastal highway and turned north, and the road wound over several hills. In the valleys below sat the silver rectangular pools of rice paddies.
“By Kerti Moses, it is very dry.”
As we made our way down the last pass, it looked like the moisture had been sucked out of both land and sky. A few wispy clouds hung in the air, and corn had replaced rice in the grayish brown soil. The hillsides in the distance were covered with a thin dry scrub.
We drove along what was now the eastern coast, and Ardi pointed out men shuffle-stepping on raised wooden vats, breaking apart the salt produced in the region. I was disappointed to see a number of signs in English advertising hotel vacancies and villas to rent. I had wanted this authentic Bali all to myself.
Rice paddies on the way to Bunutan...
...and upon our arrival
Kerti Moses met us on his motorbike, and Ardi navigated the car across a dry riverbed. We parked, and Kerti Moses led us to his house where Endang greeted us and I met two of their boys. The couple, I learned, had seven children, three “original” and four adopted from the village.
Endang cautioned us to avoid the droppings one of the chickens had deposited on the tiles. She quickly scooped up the waste with a paper towel, and Ardi picked out a clean spot to lie down and nap while I stretched out my legs.
As I sat with the couple, two children came up the steps dressed in school uniforms, white shirts and maroon ties and shorts. I thought they might belong to the Kerti Moses clan, but they left after Endang gave them pink pills and soda to swallow them.
“We give the children in the village medicine,” she said. It was part of the couple’s Christian ministry work. Endang also taught English classes twice a week, and the couple distributed their well water free of charge. Before they built their well, they had collected rainwater.
For lunch, Endang cooked the customary nasi campur, steamed white rice with meat and vegetable dishes. There was also platter of grilled whole “small tuna,” which Kerti Moses had caught that morning. They looked delectable but were quite dry.
Eating their freshly picked papaya
After eating, Kerti Moses took me along a short path that bordered his field. In addition to fishing, he also farmed, and he pointed out the big leaves sprouting from his sweet potato plants and plucked a massive orange-yellow papaya from one of the trees. Further along were old sties where Kerti Moses had raised and sold pigs with his first loan from DINARI, and beyond was a small shed where he stored vegetables and bags of rice. It looked like a pigmy hut, and it was the original house and Endang had built when they moved to the village. They lived there for over a year, gradually constructing their present home when they could save enough to buy materials. They transplanted the hut after their new home was ready.
Kerti Moses was originally from Bunutan, but it had taken him sixteen tumultuous years to return. In 1989, while he was still a teenager, he was sentenced to serve nineteen years in prison.
“I was fighting my friend,” Kerti Moses told me. “My friend died.”
He said those three words impassively. I imagined he had repeated them countless times in the past twenty years. I wondered if their significance had gradually eroded, or if the words affected him deeply, on a level I could not see or feel. I did not have the courage to ask.
It was in prison that Kerti Moses met his future wife. Endang was a social worker helping to fulfill inmates’ requests, often seeking permission for family visits. Many of the prisoners were Australian, and she worked with an Australian pastor who befriended Kerti Moses. When Endang first met her future husband, she didn’t realize he was a prisoner.
“He was handsome and very clean,” she said. “My heart touched his heart.” He gave her a Kuala bear doll.
It was also in prison that Kerti Moses became a Christian. He came from a Hindu family, but he said that he had known nothing about his past religion. When the Australian pastor told him about Jesus Christ, Kerti Moses told me he believed. When he prayed, his prayers were answered. After serving just three and a half years, he was released from prison.
Kerti Moses and Endang married soon after and moved to Bali’s capital city of Denpasar. Kerti Moses began making woodcarvings that resembled antiques, and his business took off. He eventually had fifteen workers and owned two art shops in the tourist area of Kuta.
He made a hand gesture like a kamikaze airplane to demonstrate how the 2002 bombing devastated his business. He and Endang couldn’t pay their bills or the employees’ wages, and they were forced to sell their motorbike and home.
“We were bankrupt,” Endang said, shaking her head.
They stayed outside a friend’s house and tried to earn money as construction workers, but it was very difficult. One of Endang’s children was just a baby at the time. Endang asked her husband to move back to his village. He resisted, since she came from Jakarta and had no farming experience. But she persisted, and in 2005,after the second bombing, they moved.
Summit of Fishermen
Two years ago, they met some of DINARI’s staff doing ministry work in Bunutan. The couple took out their first loan of Rp. 5 million to buy pigs. The venture proved unsuccessful because the pig feed, made from rice husks, was very expensive. A year later, Kerti Moses decided to start raising cattle. With the deed from their land as collateral, he and Endang took out a Rp. 10 million loan from DINARI and bought three cows.
“After the cows,” Endang said, smiling and sweeping her hands upward, “Everything is changing.”
They bought each cow for between Rp. 3-4 million, kept the animals for a year, and then sold them at a market for between Rp. 5-6 million. According to Kerti Moses, the predominantly Hindu people in East Bali “eat everything,” including beef. The costs to raise the animals were low, since the cows ate the grass that grew on the land and never got sick. The couple’s house took shape, they were able to finance the purchase of a motorbike, and they developed their ministry. I wanted to see the cows, but they were in the hills.
The couple now has five cows, which provide a monthly income of Rp. 1.5 million ($150). This seemed quite modest to me, given the couple’s large family and their active ministry. A rubbish collector I had interviewed in Denpasar earned the same amount and was hardly thriving. But the couple supplements their income selling crops, fish, and the occasional rooster for cockfighting, and Endang told me that school costs were much lower in Bunutan than in Denpasar. Still, Kerti Moses told me he hoped to have enough cows to double his income.
At two o’clock, village children started arriving for their English class. Endang had told me she dreamed of opening a free school for the children, and she seemed like a natural teacher, even though her own education stopped when she turned twelve. The children called her “Mama Endang,” and she had an energetic, no-nonsense authority that spurred the children on through rounds of the alphabet and Christian songs. Kerti Moses watched on attentively.
I thanked the couple and told them that Ardi and I should be heading back. I was anticipating a hug from Endang, but she politely shook my hand and quickly returned to the class.
Kerti Moses offered to show us one of his boats before we left. We parked the car on a hillside overlooking the ocean and walked down a steep path through the brush to a stony beach. Kerti Moses’ boat had a long narrow hull, made of a single tree taken from his property. There were runners on both sides for balance, making the vessel resemble a waterbug. He showed me some secondhand motors under a lean-to that had Pinocchio-nose shafts leading to the propellers. Kerti Moses intended to buy new motors with his loan.
Boat motors on the beach
I thanked him again for his time, and he shook my hand briskly with a faint smile and took off on his motorbike before Ardi had started the car.
On the way back, I felt drained from the long day, dehydrated but also dissatisfied. The roosters had wreaked havoc on the audio of my recording, and Kerti Moses had been a difficult subject to interview on film. He fidgeted, slumped out of view of the camera, yawned while his wife spoke and sprung from his chair to answer phone calls and shoo away the chickens. But it was more than that. I was admittedly, guiltily drawn to their suffering, to Kerti Moses’ prison experience, his involvement in his friend’s death, Endang’s having to cook outside a friend’s house in the grime of Denpasar. It was not simply Schadenfreude, a morbid fascination with the couple’s past misery. To understand them now, I thought I needed to know what life had been like before. But they had given me only fleeting glimpses of their past struggles, articulated matter-of-factly.
Endang had told me that they were happy, that they loved their village and their work. Kerti Moses seemed far too industrious to spend much time dwelling on the past. Perhaps, as I found myself searching for the sari of my own experience in Bali, he had borrowed a boat and gone fishing.
Kerti Moses
A Parting Thought
As always, I would love to hear any thoughts, comments, or suggestions. I hope you check back in about two weeks, and in the meantime I 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
MDG3
Poverty is a riot of inconsistencies and mysterious shades of complexity. Today, after a long week in the field, I’m wondering how anyone could possibly work their way out of the despair they inherited with birth when so many forces conspire against them, especially women.
Poverty is defined as a condition of unacceptable material deprivation, according to a particular society’s standards of what’s acceptable and what’s not. Poverty is widely acknowledged to be a multi-dimensional condition; however most efforts to measure its extent and severity focus on income poverty. Income poverty is measured in relation to a level of income or consumption designated as the minimum needed by a household to avoid poverty. National poverty lines differ by country. Low-income countries like Uganda typically set their poverty lines at the estimated cost of physical subsistence – a bare-minimum diet, plus a modest addition for necessities other than food. The causes of poverty are numerous but a significant root cause is gender disparity; specifically the ability and access that women have to productive assets and services.
In 2000, every country in the world and all leading development organizations agreed to eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to halve world poverty by the year 2015. The eight MDGs are:
- Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Achieve universal primary education
- Promote gender equality and empower women
- Reduce child mortality
- Improve maternal health
- Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
- Ensure environmental sustainability
- Develop a global partnership for development
Many believe MDG3 – equality for women – is the most important MDG. Empowerment of women is not just about justice or being nice (which I naively assumed). All other MDGs depend upon MDG3: unless the situation of women is purposefully and radically shifted, achieving the other MDGs will be impossible. Women are the key to reducing poverty. World Bank studies show that agricultural production would increase by 20% if women had the same access to resources as men. Investing in women makes economic sense and is a prerequisite for development.
Uganda experienced rapid economic growth over the past two decades. Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased an astonishing 6.5% per annum on average since 1990. Yet, over the same period, 32% of Uganda’s households remained in poverty and 20% are chronically poor. Moreover, 11% of the poorest households moved into poverty for the first time, and there was no measurable increase in the middle class. The country’s population has doubled to thirty one million since the mid 1980’s, the median age is fourteen.
The national planning framework that guides public actions to eliminate the incidence of poverty in Uganda, consistent with the MDGs, is called Poverty Eradication Action Plan, or PEAP. Among a host of human and economic development strategies, PEAP acknowledges the strong correlation between gender disparities and economic progress, and sets forth policies to eliminate gender gaps under the Uganda Gender Policy (UGP). In addition to PEAP and UGP, the national government has enacted strategies to perpetuate its growth and economic development with programs to empower women, improve transportation infrastructure and utility services, and promote rural access to financial services.
The challenges are immense. Take infrastructure as one obvious example. Traffic control systems are non-existent and the roads are very poor – only main roads are even partially paved. Most roads even in the capital city of Kampala are dirt and driving on them is difficult and slow. Traffic is constantly choked and frequently stopped motionless in utter logjams (which, incidentally, seem to always occur at the apex of the day’s heat). Traveling even short distances often seems like an odyssey. Many of the borrower groups we meet are in villages that are only ten or so kilometers outside the city limits, but visiting them can take well over an hour even in a private vehicle and much longer on public transportation. In Uganda’s non-urban areas, the supply of electricity is fragile. There are no ATM’s or Internet. No running water or sewage systems. At night, its pitch dark except for the ambient light of kerosene lanterns and cook stoves. Imagine the effort required just to go to the bank each week, as MFI borrowers must do to safeguard their earnings from thieves and inflation. Transportation and infrastructure are obvious impediments to economic development.
The statistics on gender equivalency are even more disturbing and consequential:
§ Sixteen percent (16%) of women are married by age 15 and 53% by age 18. The average Ugandan woman is married at age 17.
§ Sixty percent (60%) of women aged 15-49 experience physical violence and 39% suffer sexual violence. Sixteen percent (16%) of the violence occurs during pregnancy. Over 40% of women have suffered domestic violence.
§ Social norms and values condone gender discrimination, perpetuated by low levels of education and limited access to information. Abuse of rights is socially acceptable.
§ Fifty five percent (55%) of MFI borrowers are women; yet women constitute 72% of commerce. More men than women are successful in credit applications and women usually receive smaller amounts, restricting their ability to acquire and control livelihood assets and resources such as land, information and technology, business skills and financial capital.
§ Thirty two (32%) of the overall population lives below the poverty line. Higher proportions of women-headed households are chronically poor and more move into poverty than male-headed households and are more likely to sell assets to avoid moving into poverty.
§ An estimated 13%, or 1.8 million children, are orphans. Forty percent (40%) live in poverty.
§ Eighty three (83%) of women are engaged in agricultural production, yet only 25% control the land they cultivate. Women own only 16% of the registered land. The majority of women only have use rights determined by the nature of the relationships they have with a make land owner – her father, husband or brother.
§ Women suffer very high time burdens in pursuing their livelihoods. Women work an average 15 hours a day compared to men who work only 9, and women bear the brunt of domestic tasks. The time and effort required for these tasks, in almost total absence of even rudimentary domestic technology, is immense. This has negative consequences on food safety, household income, children’s education, participation in community life, health and productivity.
§ The overall illiteracy rate is 32%; 24% of men are illiterate compared to 38% of women.
Clearly, women in Uganda are at a measurable disadvantage. Fortunately, Kiva works with three exemplary partner MFIs in Uganda that are attacking poverty using methodologies consistent with the MDGs and PEAP. BRAC Uganda, Pearl Microfinance and MCDT Sacco each employs an entirely different approach, but they share three common and significant distinctions: (a) focusing on the lower half of the economically-active poverty spectrum, (b) delivering financial services to rural areas, and (c) providing programs designed predominately for women.
Their programs are working. With the help of Kiva and its local MFI partners, some remarkable people somehow find a path to prosperity, despite overwhelming and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Meeting them is like receiving a gift. Magdalena is one such person. The enormity of her disadvantage and the context of her life are difficult to comprehend, but it’s impossible to not be amazed and inspired by what she’s accomplished.
Magdalena grew up in an orphanage, abandoned by her biological parents at birth. She lived there until she was 14, when she was required to go out into the world on her own. Imagine being alone in the world, penniless and partially educated, at the tender age of fourteen. Not long after leaving, she was married and starting a family of her own. When asked about her husband, she replies only that “he’s around somewhere”. She is reluctant to share more. He seems to be an uncomfortable topic for her, so I don’t inquire further. In addition to her other hardships, could Magdalena also be a victim of domestic abuse? It’s statistically probable.
A typical boy's quarter
Ten years ago, she lived in poverty in a small, cramped “boy’s quarter” with her four children. To make ends meet, she rented space in a friend’s nearby clothing boutique, and offered alterations and tailoring for the shop’s customers. Her dreams at the time were to complete her children’s education, establish a business of her own and build a family home. They would seem like pipe dreams, given her situation.
Around that time, Magdalena took out a small loan from Pearl Microfinance and a purchased a used Singer sewing machine. Soon, using her savings and another loan, she opened her own small studio. Over the years she steadily built her business and today has established herself as the premier clothing maker in her village. Her studio is attached to her home and is stocked with a wide selection of fabrics, patterns, buttons and threads. She has four sewing machines, two employees and a large and loyal clientele that she has earned through superb craftsmanship and her friendly, honest customer service.
Some of her clients come from as far as Kampala for her fashion designs. Magdalena’s studio is not easy to find, despite sitting less than a hundred yards off the main highway. It sits on a narrow, rutted dirt track, tucked behind a primary school, and there are no street markers or signs advertising her business. But that doesn’t impede her customers from finding her.
Magdalena at work in her studio
She proudly shows me a Gomese, a traditional Ugandan dress, she recently completed and explains the profit model to me: the fabric costs about 35,000 UGX, the buttons and thread another 10,000 Ush (in total, about $23) and requires over 4 hours to make. Her profit margin is 20,000 Ush ($11). Not all her items are this expensive. Her typical profit is 5,000 to 7,000 Ush for everyday garments like school uniforms and skirts. Her backlog is extensive. She keeps a ledger for each order, accounting for costs, fabric, style, materials, client name, measurements and completion date.
In the ten years Magdalena has been a microfinance borrower, she has never missed a single loan payment or failed to pay school fees. She borrowers between 400,000 and 1,000,000 Ush ($216 – $541) depending on the current business cycle, and invests her loans in materials, fabrics, thread, machine repairs and maintenance, employee salaries and improvements to her studio.
Magdalena's beautiful new home
After years of dedicated hard work and vision, and with the loyal support of Pearl Microfinance, Magdalena has achieved unprecedented happiness, pride and success in the face of a lifetime of adversity that would render most people hopeless. All four of her children have completed their college education and are working professionals. Magdalena now cares for two disabled orphans, giving them the loving, nurturing childhood that eluded her. Her clothing business is thriving. She has money in the bank. And, her dream of building a lovely new home where old one-room buy’s quarter once stood is now a reality.
Magdalena embodies entrepreneurial and microfinance success. Hers is a story about the delicate balance between triumph and tragedy. She proves that hope, persistence and a helping hand are common threads that connect us all, and that lead us to our dreams. Magdalena’s life has woven through extremes in suffering, adversity and achievement. For me, she is an enduring symbol of inspiration on the sublime tapestry of humanity. For all of us, Magdalena illustrates the significance and importance of MDG3. She helps me see that the friction which opposes my life’s ambitions is insignificant by comparison and thus gives me the perspective to find my way forward. That is Magdalena’s gift to me, for which I am thankful.
I encourage you to look at Kiva’s partner page to learn more about Pearl Microfinance, BRAC Uganda and MCDT Sacco. You’ll discover amazing organizations staffed with teams of intelligent, purpose-driven, devoted people who are attacking MD3 and truly changing the world. Like Magdalena, they inspire me and give me hope that poverty will one day be a human condition of the past.
Kiva in Cambodia: The Comic Book
I’m a new Kiva Fellow volunteering with Maxima, a microfinance institution (MFI) headquartered in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. I arrived in Phnom Penh about three weeks ago, and had the luxury of a week to acclimate before starting at Maxima.
My arrival coincided with a visit to Cambodia by Kiva co-founder Matt Flannery and Kiva Chief Software Architect Zvi Boshernitzan, who were making a field visit to see how Kiva works in the field for partner MFIs and for Kiva borrowers. I went straight from the airport to a dinner at a Phnom Penh restaurant with Matt, Zvi, and other Kiva Fellows serving in Cambodia.
(And what does a new arrival to Cambodia eat, fresh off the plane? Tarantula. Deep-fried, with a side of minty dipping sauce. Tarantula is among the edible insects not uncommon in Cambodia. I’d say it has a nutty flavor, but I’m sure the others who ate it that night have a different opinion.)
During their visit, Matt and Zvi paid visits to all four of the MFIs that Kiva partners in Cambodia. Maxima became a Kiva partner in May of 2007, and is the smallest of the four Kiva partner MFIs in Cambodia. I got to accompany Matt and Zvi on their visit to Maxima, which involved a stop at headquarters, and a trip out to the field to meet Maxima borrowers that were funded through Kiva.
For me, it was a fantastic orientation, an orientation that Kiva Fellows are rarely afforded when they land at an MFI. I took a lot of photos the day of our visit, and once I got back home I found a program on my Mac I didn’t know I had — Plasq’s photo “comic book” generator. I spent a few hours playing around with it, and realized it would be a great way to tell the story of our day visit with Maxima. After a day or two (or three?) or working on it, I finished Kiva in Cambodia, a nine-page photo comic.
Once I’d finished, I was excited. I showed it to Maxima staff, and they liked it (or at least that’s what they told me). I wanted to post it to this blog weeks ago, but ran into a problem shared by almost all Kiva Fellows working in the developing world: limited Internet access. The photo comic isn’t big by broadband standards in the U.S., but in Cambodia, it’s a small giant.
More often than not it can be a huge challenge to upload or download things when connectivity is spotty, dead slow, or both. For anything Internet-related, Murphy’s Law is a constant here: everything goes wrong. (Kudos to all Kiva Fellows who have posted video from the field — you are patient, persevering people!)
In a bind, I turned to Kiva Friends, a diehard group of Kiva supporters. I posted a message on their site asking for Web hosting help with Kiva in Cambodia and my plea was answered by one Fred Isler from Virginia. Fred (of 579 loans, and counting, to Kiva entrepreneurs) graciously agreed to host the comic on his personal site.
Thanks to Fred, I present to you… Kiva in Cambodia, the comic. Click on the image below to view it at Fred’s web site, or click here. Let me know what you think!
Kiva in Cambodia
The Lights Went out (for a walk?)
Santiago, DR
Romance languages are famous for invoking visual imagery, symbolism, and subtlety in phrasings and word choice. In the Spanish-speaking world, the language maps out like a watershed: tributaries flowing from Spain to the Caribbean, from California to South America, and everywhere in between. The bedrock of European Spanish has long since been covered and mixed with “New World” sediments; verbal gems from New York City, Santo Domingo, Boston, San Juan, Miami, Havana, and Los Angeles streets have nestled themselves into daily Latin American lives. A casual “hello” today in Mexico may be meaningless (or perhaps offensive!) in Honduras. The art of cussing would make a fabulous encyclopedia series.
A Santiago Monument-I wonder if these lights are always on!
Learning Dominican Spanish means developing an ear for its accelerated tempo, truncated invocations, vague generalities, and regular references to God’s will. Need directions? Forget landmarks and right-left-north-south. It is hard to get beyond “back there,” “up there,” “nearby” “sort of nearby” and “ up there, far.” Similarly, many things happen “soon” but when, exactly, remains unknown.
When the lights go out here at the Esperanza-Santiago office (almost every single day)—we all chime in with “se fue la luz” the light left (went out). While in English we also employ “the power is out,” “se fue la luz” uses the same phrasing as to say that a person has departed. This always leaves me with the sense that the light left on its own accord—you know, it decided to take a break. It wasn’t “shut off,” or lost. It just, left.
The reality is that power problems are chronic in the DR. The power plants and other infrastructure is insufficient. To keep the Santiago office running (or a similar enterprise), it is necessary to buy a set of back-up rechargeable batteries (inverters) to make up for power deficiency. Of course, the back-ups will fail too. The Esperanza office manager and I are often up to our ears in delayed data-entry and email tasks.
The streetlight lets us know if we have power...if not...protestors might burn a tire or two
Almost everyone here in Santiago is vulnerable to power outages, whether you pay your bills or not. In a few neighborhoods, local tigres “street guys” will occasionally light afire a tire or two in frustrated protest. They and the police will also sometimes exchange gunfire, on particularly caliente days.
For Esperanza clients, electricity—lack of it—is part of the status quo. Microfinance businesses are adapted to the circumstances—I have yet to meet a client who needs regular electricity to do business. Entrepreneurs sidestep the risk of relying on the unreliable—and its monthly cost. Women who sew clothes do it by hand or with non-electric machines, women with colmados (small food stores) do not invest in fridge-needy inventory. Beauty product peddlers, shoe sellers, and the women with home hair washing salons—they don’t require electricity either.*
While the micro-businesses mostly keep electric problems at arm’s
A home based nail salon--no electricity required!
length—it also becomes clear that electricity is like a “limiting nutrient.” How far can a personal colmado grow before it needs to sell cold beverages? Or a food vendor needs to buy refrigerated goods? Ice? Of course, Esperanza and other microfinance organizations prove very effective at these critical points—poised to provide the extra $500-$1000 for the backup batteries, freezers, and refrigerators via the microloan process.
office inverters, aka backup batteries. Pricey.
Having a business that does require a significant power supply—is quite a statement. Having more than backup inverters, and consistent funds to pay the electric company. The only places that seem to operate with 100% reliable electricity are places such as commercial banks, large supermarkets, and Santiago’s fully-loaded mall. For everyone else, improved infrastructure and power plants are also somewhere in the government agenda— perhaps something will improve “soon.” Until things get sorted out, the light leaves when it pleases.
That’s all for now!
Questions? Comments? Post ‘em!
Up Next: Stories from San Pedro de Macoris!
Cuidanse, take care,
Kalie Gold
Kiva Fellow, KF6 Dominican Republic
To fund Esperanza International Loans on Kiva.org please go to:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=44&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old
* Postscript: Much more than electricity costs are out of reach for other Esperanza clients. In La Chichigua (the Kite) I met a brand new Esperanza village bank—who have named themselves Fey y Amor (Faith and Love). The community is planted in a verdant Santiago hillside—and is neighbored by a few luxurious suburban mansions. But La Chichigua remains outside of government oversight, the electric grid, and the city water pipes. According to a loan officer, this is one way to live cheap. La Chichigua residents risk mudslides and flash floods in order to live on squatted land, with a free hillside stream, and the “security” that they will be left alone.
Universal Language: Obama
Just shout it out: Obama! On the streets off Kenya, this gets you cheeers and hoots and offers off friendship and prayers…a good word, indeed.
It is good to be American in Kenya, that much I can say. Nairobi was not totally wild, but I definitely got shouts from buses and Matatus all day long. People were happy: Obama T-shirts, Obama buttons and stickers…good vibes all around.
This is absolute bliss compared to 2004, when I had just arrived in Germany and had to answer for the re-election of Bush…regardless of my opinion of the man, I felt that I alone had to act as his and America’s spokesman; I had to answer for his deeply unpopular foreign policy…as if Iraq was my call…I had to answer for the all American people, and this is difficult…I am from Rhode Island and there is much more to America than the smallest state (with a great big heart, mind you)…and I was doing this in my (at the time) sad, sad German…no fun in 2004.
But those days are over, folks!!! It is a new day, and one can feel the energy here. The Kenyans are happy, and I think that they are hopeful; this somehow vindicates their own troubles after the election in December here.
Obama is a Kenyan today (and will be for the next 4 years, at least). And that gives this country hope: hope that a black man can be the most powerful man in the world, hope that America will give them more attention, and hope that anyone can become anything they want to become.
Whether or not Obama Fixes All the World’s Troubles, he has inspired people at least. For the Kenyans, he has shown them that politics can be positive and that politics can heal a nation instead of just dividing it.
Tomorrow I head to Kisii, in the west, towards his father’s homeland, and closer to where the violence in January and February almost tore the country apart. I will report soon on how exactly Hope has arrived in Western Kenya.
Ukrainian Perspectives on the US Presidential Election
The top news story today around the world is the US Presidential Election. Here in Ukraine, the banner headline on the English-language newspaper Kyiv Post is “US Voters Go to the Polls.” Ukraine has its own specific interest in the election results; the citizens here believe that the next President can either save or damn their country – and will probably do so without him ever even noticing it.
Ukraine has two major issues: the economy, and Russia.
Along with the rest of the world, starting in September 2008 the Ukrainian financial sector suffered major shocks. One of the largest banks was turned over to a rescue administration, and many deposit accounts were frozen or withdrawls capped. This resulted in many companies being unable to access their funds, including operational capital, payroll, and accounts receivables/payables. Many individual depositors were similarly affected. Many banks have followed suit and limited withdrawls, and some assets are still frozen until roughly February 2009; as there is no FDIC in Ukraine, this measure was intended to prevent rampant bank runs.
Consequently, the value of the grivna fell from 5.05 to $1 to a low of 7.02 to $1 – in less than a month. After the IMF announced a $16.5 billion bailout, approved by Parliament last Friday, the currency stabilized around 6 to $1. The country’s primary export, steel, has also been in a drastic decline since 2007, leading to increasing unemployment and unrest. Repeatedly in international headlines for the past month, the countries shown as most dramatically affected by the crisis are Iceland, Hungary, and Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia has been encroaching on territories it lost in the collapse of the USSR. The conflict over neighboring Georgia is watched closely by Ukrainians, as a bellwether of Russia’s goals for expansion. The West-leaning Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, has openly pleaded with the EU to check Russia’s power. “The West must seek to create counterweights to Russia’s expansionism and not place all its chips on Russian domestic reform,” she wrote last year. As a neighbor to Russia, home to a sizeable Russian population, and possessor of tension-filled state of Crimea, Ukraine is in all too vulnerable a position.
There is an underlying sense of unease in this country. I spoke to a humanitarian worker in Crimean Simferopol who lived through unannounced practice bombings and urban warfare taking place outside her apartment building last month. Russia was reportedly issuing Russian passports to citizens there last week. The Ukrainian economy is walking a tightrope between politics and solvency, and is dependent upon the US-funded IMF.
Today, as November 4th began here 7 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, many Ukrainians were informally polling their friends about the US election. The news coverage was reporting and translating every political and polling story. Despite Obama’s campaign slogan, there seems to be more fear than hope.
I spoke to a staff member at HOPE Ukraine, Kiva’s field partner in this region, about the information she’d gathered from friends, family, and coworkers that morning. (HOPE Ukraine is an evangelical Christian organization, which uses the proceeds from its microfinance mission to fund Tomorrow Clubs children’s ministries.)
“Neither is a good candidate,” she said, summarizing the conversations. “Obama supports abortion and gay marriage, which we oppose, so we would never vote for him if it was our country. But John McCain’s policies on Russia are so militaristic and so dangerous. He wants to try to isolate Russia, to kick it out of G8 and to take a hard line. But Russia will not react well to that. That is the spark that could start a war.”
A war that would play out right here in Ukraine.
A war that the West, busy with its own troubles and perhaps hoisted by its own petard in Georgia, might either ignore, or (diplomatic assertions aside) be too weak to fight. And if that happens, what’s to become of Ukraine?
Economically, my Ukrainian friends have been tight-lipped. The US is the major backer and brain trust for the IMF. Ukraine is widely believed to be financially devastated if not for the IMF bailout, so Ukraine (like Iceland and Hungary) need the US to still be in enough of an economic and superpower position to keep funding and sinking brainpower into it. But the candidates’ specific economic policies haven’t been discussed in any news that I can read, or talked about in any conversation I can access. When I ask I get almost no answer at all, perhaps because I am both an outsider and an American.
The fear of further economic, diplomatic, and even military strife has most Ukrainian news sources watching the American polls with a wary eye. Their lives depend on a future most American voters won’t consider when they cast their ballots today.
Ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille
I am a little nervous. Not for myself, but on behalf of some of our Kiva clients. The reason? We are heading out to Bac Ninh ( the small town where Kiva’s Vietnamese micro-finance partner has a regional office ) to film some clients. Kivab2b is making a short film about Kiva and the engaging dynamic duo Rachelle ( Canada ) and James ( US ) are here in Vietnam to interview and film a few Kiva clients. They have already criss-crossed the US filming Kiva lenders and now it’s the turn of the borrowers. We have chosen 10 clients who we think will be comfortable being filmed. I am fervently hoping that the cameras, microphones and not least the legal form giving consent ( of which the English version confuses the hell out of me! ) do not prove to be too intimidating.
We arrive in Bac Ninh in relative luxury in a small mini-van we have hired for the occasion. It makes a very nice change from the local buses and hair-raising motorbike taxis I usually take! The mood is a bit like heading to summer camp, as we have myself, Rachelle and James with associated equipment, a translator and a couple of interested head-office MFI staff all coming along for the ride. It’s early as we depart Hanoi ( 6.30am ) and the street markets are at their busiest as vendors sell all manner of fruits, vegetables, breads and meats for the day’s meals – I am sure you can buy virtually anything you desire from a Hanoi street vendor!
We were given strict instructions by Mrs. Lan – the Bac Ninh branch manager – to be there by 8am sharp. I always tell Mrs. Lan that she is the boss and I will do whatever she tells me to, so the early start is to ensure we uphold our part of the deal. Mrs. Lan is impressed to see us already there enjoying a morning cup of Vietnamese tea when she arrives at 7.45am. Introductions over, we depart for our first client, with SEDA’s neighbours curiously observing this motley crew.
The villages around Bac Ninh have not seen many mini-vans and we gingerly progress down tight alleyways and over mud-tracks, Mrs. Lan navigating for the city-slicker driver. We arrive at the home of our first client. She has been expecting us and warmly invites us into her home. I have met most of these clients before and they greet me like an old friend – it’s very heart-warming. Some of them chastise me for not yet providing them with the photos I took of them during my earlier visit – I try to tell them I am waiting until the very end of my stay – and make me promise that I will bring them with me next time. Some of the clients are exactly as they were the first time I met them and have obviously not allowed the fact that they will be filmed intrude on their daily routine. Others however have clearly made a special effort to look a little special for filming and I detect a bit of make-up, some nicer outfits and hair neatly tucked away in elegant buns.
Another notable observation is the stronger presence of the husbands during these filming sessions. SEDA works with the Vietnam Women’s Union and as such well over 90% of their clients are women – as you would expect! Sometimes a client is taking out a loan on behalf of herself and her husband for their joint business but in most instances the wife and husband have separate jobs so as to maximise the family income. Here I must digress slightly to express my admiration for the strength and resilience of Vietnamese women – they really are the back-bone of this country. I am certain that official statistics would show they are key contributors to the nation’s gross domestic product. They do all manner of jobs – I have seen female construction workers, mechanics, garbage collectors – you name it – while also bearing the greater load of the family and household responsibilities. Getting back on track….The husbands are not usually present at the repayment and loan disbursement meetings at which I have previously met the clients, but now that the cameras have arrived they take a more active and visible role, proudly being the man of the house.
James and Rachelle immediately and easily place the clients at ease and scout for a suitable location. These are not closed, controlled film sets – they are people’s homes and businesses – and we are often disturbed by tractors and harvesters passing by, children and neighbours wandering into the midst of filming, ubiquitous mobile phones ringing ( the Vietnamese love to have cutesy pop songs as their mobile phone ring tones) with the call recipient loudly answering and chatting away. Luckily the clients are wearing microphones, which when first shown to them draws the identical response of “I have never worn a microphone before”. Kudos must be given to Mrs. Lan who quick-smart became an expert at discreetly disguising the lapel microphones in the client’s clothing.
If more cameras were available, it would have been fascinating to film “a making of” as word spread and curious neighbours sit, stand and squat at the edges, fascinated by what is occurring. For some, bravery and curiosity combines and they approach the camera lens and peer through it. A special treat awaits me at one of the villages which I have visited many times and has become a bit of a favourite. I always draw a crowd, but it’s the warmth as opposed to the quantity of the people which has left the greater impression. In particular I have been enchanted by these 3 magnificent grandmothers. The first time I saw them there were sitting outside a house that was about 25 metres away and they kept their distance. The next time they were sitting outside the same house but got up and pretended to casually walk by, when in reality they were intently watching what I was doing. This time they had no qualms about coming directly coming over to us and asking what we were doing. “We have seen you here before” they stated and I finally got my longed for interaction. Upon spying my camera, one of them asked me to take a photo and I was extremely pleased to oblige.
But back to the interviews… As previously mentioned I was a little apprehensive as to how comfortable the clients would be, but it turned out to be needless anxiety as many of the clients comfortably and confidently answered the questions. Responses were direct, succinct and matter-of-fact but also peppered with laughter. They were often puzzled at the question “what was their happiest memory?” but all of them were easily able to answer the question “how long do you expect to have to work for”? The answer – “forever”. When asked “How does it make you feel to know that strangers thousands of miles away want to help you and your business” they become a little emotional and thanks and gratitude are demonstrated in their individual ways.
Our client’s businesses and their specific skills continue to fascinate me, be it rice noodle production, silk production right at the source from silkworms, breeding said silkworms, making roof tiles or making specialty cakes. Tremendous pride is evident but never explicitly stated when we compliment them on their output.
When we finished filming after 2 very successful days, I returned to Hanoi feeling yet again privileged and humbled to have had this unique glimpse into our client’s homes, businesses and indeed lives. Memories I will cherish for a lifetime.
To make a loan to a SEDA client similar to the ones we filmed, please click here: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=85&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb
“Is That Mayonnaise on the Couscous?” and other Tales from Freetown
Do you remember the scene from Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson’s character was stupefied by the French’s fondness for putting mayonnaise on their french fries, as described by John Travolta’s character? I was equally stupefied when I received my first meal made in a Sierra Leonean restaurant this week. I ordered the chicken. What I received was a concoction beyond my wildest expectations. On the bottom of the plate was couscous covered with mayonnaise followed by a sprinkling of lettuce and a slice of cucumber covered with more mayonnaise with a single chicken wing on top. Mmmm…like a little mayonnaise sundae with a chicken wing on top…finger lickin’ good!
It was in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone, where I consumed my first restaurant meal since my arrival. I’m extremely fortunate to have home-cooked meals made for me in Makeni by the talented Sheka Turay, but we were out on business today, so eating out was our only option. In Freetown, we visited the national office for the Christian Children’s Fund (SMT’s parent organization) and the Microfinance Investment and Technical Assistance Facility (MITAF) office. I want to tell you about these meetings because they will give you an idea of how SMT is doing today and where we might expect SMT to be in the future.
The first meeting was with Daniel Kaindaneh, National Director for CCF in Sierra Leone. Madame Regina Sulla, Executive Director of SMT, gave Daniel an update on the business and some of its challenges. Overall, the individual loan product offered by SMT is doing very well while the solidarity, or group loan, product is having its difficulties. I provided comments on the strength of the relationship between Kiva and SMT.
Daniel was familiar with the Kiva site and the Fellowship program. He was pleased to hear how well SMT has done on the Kiva site in a short period of time ($530K raised in 17 months). I also added how Kiva hopes to expand their presence with SMT, but must do so responsibly, underscoring the 30% rule – Kiva funds cannot attribute for greater than 30% of a MFIs gross loan portfolio. We are meeting the 30% limit with relative ease today and an increase in their portfolio can be matched by an increase in Kiva funds by our amazing lender community. It was at this time we talked about development opportunity in the town of Kailahun in eastern Sierra Leone.
Kailahun, ravaged by the civil war, is rebuilding itself as a strong agricultural region. Microfinance is in high demand in Kailahun, particularly with agriculture loans. Estimates have SMT’s portfolio increasing by as much as $200,000 in a years’ time in Kailahun. I did the math for you…a $200K increase in SMT’s gross loan portfolio could increase the monthly Kiva limit by about $6K. A $6K increase in Kiva loans could benefit anywhere between 5 and 30 new borrowers on the Kiva site. That’s pretty significant in the microfinance space. Over the next several weeks and months, SMT could begin operations in Kailahun. We are in position to take advantage of a neglected market in the east thanks, in large part, to the support of the Kiva community and CCF.
At MITAF, we met with Chief of Party, Pearson Kalungulungu. MITAF serves as a consultant for SMT. Among other services, they connect SMT with donors and investors looking to spread their capital amongst legitimate microfinance initiatives. MITAF and SMT are currently working to obtain the second round of funding from donors and investors. This second round will be used specifically in the agricultural space, which will help our efforts in Kailahun.
After giving Pearson a five minute overview on Kiva’s impressive statistics and operations, we talked about the status of microfinance in Sierra Leone in general and SMT’s ambitions. He informed us of the imminent arrival of a new BRAC office in Freetown. BRAC’s presence in Sierra Leone underscores the tremendous demand for microfinance services in Sierra Leone in a post-war era. To capitalize on the Freetown market, SMT is looking at starting operations in nearby Waterloo.
I hope this blog has provided you with insight on the SMT’s future and their ambitions. With continued support from Kiva Lenders, MITAF and CCF, SMT is positioned to take advantage of these incredible opportunities and assist larger populations of a rebuilding and hopeful Sierra Leone.
For more on SMT and the loans currently being funded by SMT, go to http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=57&status=All&sortBy=New+to+Old
Buses and Productivity
When you spend 7 hours a day on buses to visit only a handful of clients, an over-ambitious Kiva Fellow may start to feel like his dream of unprecedented productivity is slipping through his fingers. Sometimes all it takes is a 30 minute conversation with a kindly grandmother to change that misperception.
I visited EDAPROSPO branches in Huaycan and Vitarte today. Huaycan is off the Carreterra Central about halfway between La Molina and Chosica. To get there, I left my house in Surco at 7.30am, caught a bus at the corner, rode said bus all the way up Avenida Ayacucho and Av Aviación for forty-five minutes to Javier Prado (a main thoroughfare that runs through the center of Lima and out it’s northeastern corner, aka La Molina), switched buses to one going out Javier Prado, through La Molina and out to the Carreterra Central which runs out to the provinces. Huaycan is about an hour further out once you reach the Carreterra (Vitarte is only thirty minutes out on the same road). Seeing as the day before I traveled 7 hours in buses to interview 6 Kiva clients, I think you can begin to appreciate how much time I spend on buses, mototaxis, and walking around interviewing a handful of clients a day. One of the unexpected pleasures on these long bus rides is when a conversation can develop despite the blaring music, insistent and high-pitched honking, jerky stopping and acceleration, yelling by the cobrador (guy who hangs out the window and yells where the van is going, hopes to hear a pedestrian yell back or wave, opens the sliding door, collects your fare, jumps out sometimes and smacks the side of the van, and immensely enjoys the words ‘sube [get on]’ and ‘baja [get off]’), and movements of your twenty fellow passengers in your 10-passenger van.
Today I had the opportunity to talk to a grandmother (probably in her early 50s) holding her baby grandson while we haltingly made our way from Huaycan to Vitarte. And what made the talk even more amazing than the fact that we could hear each other was what she had to say. As Hernando de Soto describes much better (and in more depth) than I in his book The Other Path, this is how a typical land invasion works: a group of people usually from the same province decide to move to an empty piece of land. They form an invading committee, divvy up the land into plots, and decide on a night to move in as one. There is strength in numbers and if they hold firm, the government will willfully overlook their presence and after several years of successful occupation, grant them titles to the land. Like almost every suburb of Lima, Huaycan began as a land invasion in the 1980s. This grandmother had been a part of the first group of people to settle in what would become Huaycan. She told me that she had lived in Huancayo (a town in the Sierras about 6 hours away from Lima) and her cousin had told her about a community of people that were preparing to invade some empty land northeast of Lima. On the night of the invasion, she received her plot and moved in. For three days she had no shelter at all and shivered the nights away sitting on her piece of land (coming from the sierra, I think she didn’t expect it to be so cold). Little by little, she and the rest constructed dwellings of thatch. These thatch roofs and walls are replaced by plywood when there is money. Plywood gives way to better wood which gives way to adobe bricks which gives way to concrete which gives way to adding a second story of bricks, etc. People create terraces where once only uneven rocky hills lay; staircases first of shifted rock and dirt then wood then concrete are put in the hillsides; roads develop between blocks of lots, first made of the misshapen terrain then of flattened dust then of asphalt. Markets form in much the same way as vendors start with a dollar of inventory walking along the road then get a bit more and cart it around in wheelbarrows then build a community of thatch stalls which turn into a market of tin stalls then a market with walls and hired security and concrete floors. Over time, a city is formed where once there were only rocky desert hills.
Thus over twenty years time, a gringo like me could find a two-storey building housing EDAPROSPO off a split four-lane paved highway surrounded by markets and next to houses on a hillside with staircases for me to climb from house to house and then return on a bus driving the same road and talk to a grandmother with her grandson about her participation in the invasion of empty desert and about her daughter who is married to a German and now living in Finland studying English in German. After our thirty-minute chat, I disembarked and went on my way to interview women like this one who literally turn nothing into something, little by little, every day.
On my Kiva lender page (which all of you should get one now if you don’t have one already), I say that my occupation is traveling the world collecting stories and friends. While my job as a Kiva Fellow is to collect the stories I garner from interviews with Kiva clients, it is the talks with people like the grandmother today that make me reconsider the interim time I spend on buses not as a drag on my productivity but rather a fulfillment of my self-professed occupation.
-Josh Bull, Kiva Fellow to EDAPROSPO
If you want to lend to currently fundraising EDAPROSPO entrepreneurs, click here!
If you want to see a collected list of journal updates on EDAPROSPO clients, to get a feel for their lives and businesses, click here.
A Party and a Funeral
I take a break from my normal broadcasting about microfinance to discuss a special event. This weekend I had an invitation to attend a funeral a couple hours away in a part of the country I have never been to. I was invited by my friend and co-worker Lawrence, but I live with Lawrence’s mother’s twin sister and her family. Lawrence’s grandmother had died at the age of 86, so it was going to be a family affair.
At first I was really excited about going—I had gone to part of a funeral once but knew there was much more to it than I had first experienced in the few hours I had spent before. I did have one big worry about going—I just pulled my calf muscle and could barely walk. I was worried about going, but I was more worried about being stuck in my house in Cape Coast alone all weekend with no access to food or water—since I don’t have any food in the house and am almost out of water. I figured that I might as well go, rest my leg as much as I could, and experience something new.
Lawrence, his Aunt whom I live with, her 7-year-old son Francis, and I left Friday at the end of work to drive what was supposed to be two hours. I brought pillows to elevate my leg on and was excited to enjoy the view. About two hours in, however, we picked up a woman who I learned was Lawrence’s older sister. The car was at that point full of people and luggage. I had my bag with my laptop and my purse on the ground at my feet and was holding two pillows and a blanket on my lap. My legs were squished together, and I knew that this wasn’t going to be good for my calf. But, hey, we were close so I could do it.
Two hours later, we finally arrived at our destination: a city in the Central Region of Ghana called Breman Asikuma. It turns out that we had taken an entirely different road to pick up his sister and had gone quite a bit past our destination. We then had to turn around and go back south and quite a ways more east. Most Ghanaians are not the most explicit of people, and on top of that they don’t usually speak in English unless they are speaking to me, which makes it difficult for me to know what is going on. I have learned a lot of basics, and as I learn them I can question Ghanaians on what they are saying, but otherwise everyone just keeps speaking different languages (there are many that are spoken). By the time we arrived, I could barely walk. My calf was so swollen and cramped I literally stumbled and needed someone to hold my hand to walk.
I quickly hit the couch and elevated my leg, but everyone else wasn’t so lucky. They began getting dressed for the wake, a ceremony that involves a service and seeing the deceased one last time. It starts around midnight and goes on until daybreak—this one in particular ended up going until 3 a.m. Because of the shape of my leg, I decided not to go and rested instead.
The next morning, I woke to the sounds of voices—many voices. I went to the backyard and saw about twenty women cooking all sorts of dishes. I watched for a while and then they put me to work. I saw that some women were preparing the meat—fried fish and chicken mostly along with intestines and other meats that were meant for their soups. I also saw them making giant bowl after giant bowl of one of my favorite dishes in Ghana: Jollof Rice. Jollof Rice is a dish similar to (and thought to be the origin of) the dish called Spanish Rice in the United States. The women were pouring the sauce, which they had previously made, and then added rice and water to the mix. The giant bowls were on small outside ovens consisting of charcoal and at times rocks that they took from the backyard. My job was simple: fan the ovens. It was pretty easy, but it was much more work than we have when we use an oven in the United States. In the meantime, I got to spend time talking to all the women, which was really fun despite the language barriers (English is the official language in Ghana, but that just means that only officials speak it and only when they are at work. Anyone who has gone to school speaks it, but there are quite a few people who don’t know it.)
We made giant bowl after giant bowl of Jollof Rice, and after we finished one bowl it was dumped into a cooler and the bowl was washed so we could repeat the process. As we finished the rice, others had already started making the stew, made with fresh vegetables and lots and lots of vegetable oils, that we would serve with fufu and preparing the cassava to make fufu with. Fufu is made by boiling cassava and plantain and pounding it into a glutinous mass. It is served with a soup or stew and meat. Others boiled yam, a food similar to a potato that is served boiled and with meat and palava sauce (a sauce consisting pretty much of oils, vegetables, and sometimes meat. and still others cooked the plantain, a food very similar to a banana but less sweet that in its boiled form is eaten with the palava sauce as well.
Fufu being served with stew and meat
By the time all the other foods were finished, it was fufu-pounding time. Pounding fufu takes hours and is not for the weak at heart. It involves one person using a large thick stick with a wooden masher at the end to repeatedly pound on the cassava while another person continues to add more and more cassava, constantly putting their fingers in danger of total havoc. I have no idea how long it took them to pound as much fufu as they were making (enough for at least 100 people and probably more than that), but pounding fufu for one person usually takes about 15 minutes.
Each piece of cassava in the bowl gets pounded one at a time
I guess I should step back and say that all this food the women were making was for guests of the funeral—and it was more food than I have even seen at weddings that I have attended in the United States. In Ghana, when someone dies, people are expected to come and pay their respects—and usually they leave after having eaten and danced. In front of the house, there was a large sitting area set up where people, clad in traditional black and red African clothing to properly mourn the death of Auntie Dadzie, aged 86—people also wore black and white to celebrate her old age, something guests can do if the person who died was more than seventy. Various people were on hand to serve a variety of drinks filling two refrigerators to all the guests along with the food that we had slaved over all morning.
At about this time, we headed over to the other part of the funeral in a large outdoor area that included three large seating areas complete with canopies all facing a canopy under which the band was playing. In between all the canopies in a center area was a dance floor, at times aptly inhabited by numerous Ghanaians strutting their stuff, sometimes too much stuff for the many men who had simply had too much to drink.
When we arrived, people in t-shirts with the deceased women’s photo on the front and the words Demirefa Due (Respect is due) sprawled across the back. Some of them handed out small pieces of paper with Lawrence’s grandmother’s photo and information on it along with pins so guests could pin it on their bodies. In the center of one of the canopied seating areas was a donation table where guests could give back to those who planned the entire day and who had paid for the band, the food, the drinks, and the renting of the chairs and canopies among other things. I gave the equivalent of $5, and in exchange for my donation I received a keychain of the woman along with her information and when she died.
I couldn’t help but to thinking in the midst of all the chatting and planning that if Ghanaians could organize such a great party, they surely have what it takes to organize revolutionary change at great magnitudes—aren’t the two always related?
Despite my injury, the weekend was full of learning new words in new languages, learning to make new foods, learning to live with a family very different from my own, and learning to see a funeral as more than just goodbye. Next month, I will be going to another funeral (this time the funeral of a chief and one of my friend’s fathers—it is planned out so far in advance to allow ample time for people to prepare to come and attend the event, not to mention ample time for the family to save up enough money for the event)—and I am excited for the chance to learn more. In Ghana, funerals are more than just a funeral or a party or a gathering; it is Ghanaian culture. Ghanaians love to dance, party, and relax, they have a culture that is very hospitable and caring about others, and they strongly believe in taking care of their children. And once children are grown, they have the responsibility of taking care of their parents, even in death.
Dancing the day away
The next day was Sunday, and although I spent the day at home resting my leg some of the others had another event to man. After church, there was another celebration that lasted for many hours—the final in a weekend ode to a woman whom I’ve never met but whose family made sure I would never forget.
Sassy Sheep Farmers in Bosnia
I made a video to capture a borrower visit in Bosnia. Learn about sheep reproduction AND witness an attempted dog attack!
