Archive for 19 June 2009
New Paradise: An Adventure in Finding New Borrowers
By Courtney Kemps, KF8 Peru
Earlier this week I accompanied Maribel, director of Manuela Ramos’s Pucallpa office, and Liz, one of the loan officers, to an informational meeting for a new group of borrowers that turned out to be more of an adventure than any of us had expected. We rose early Monday morning to take a long wooden boat from Pucallpa’s port up the Ucayali River to a tiny town called Nuevo Paraiso (New Paradise). It was Manuela Ramos’s first visit to New Paradise, a town populated by indigenous Shipibo-speaking people who had heard about the possibility of receiving loans from Manuela through a radio advertisement put out by the Pucallpa office last year. The town of New Paradise, consisting of a series of wooden homes which line a single wide dirt road, is accessible only by boat and will soon be the furthest community served by Manuela’s Pucallpa office.
The adventure began with the harder-than-expected task of simply trying to figure out how to get to New Paradise. Liz and I walked up and down the mud banks of Pucallpa’s incredibly dynamic, chaotic port asking which boat would take us there. Each person we questioned pointed us in the opposite direction of the one we had asked immediately before. After half an hour of this, we finally managed to find the right boat. Once on board, every time the boat stopped at some point along the river we had to ask if we had arrived at New Paradise. Four hours after embarking we pulled up to a completely nondescript riverbank, unmarked by anything that would indicate a nearby settlement. Upon leaving the boat we discovered that we still needed to walk 45 minutes through a series of banana plantations to reach the town.
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Pucallpa's port
The Power of Education and Collaboration
As I described in a previous blog post, EDESA (Kiva’s field partner in Costa Rica) works with a network of Community Credit Enterprises (ECCs by their Spanish acronym). To reiterate a bit, the ECCs are small, grassroots microfinance organizations formed by rural community members. FINCA Costa Rica provides extensive training in these communities to teach members how to work together to create and run a profitable business that provides financial services among other things. I recently visited one of the oldest and largest ECCs, La Asociación de Productores de El Sauce (The Association of Producers of El Sauce – El Sauce for short).
This ECC is a phenomenal example of what people can do with just a little money, a little training, and a lot of motivation. The El Sauce ECC started about 17 years ago with only 13 members and no money. They quickly grew to 23 members and Finca provided them with their first loan: just over US$1,100 to invest in farming projects across all the members. Over the years they have grown steadily and currently have 136 members holding 531 shares and have given a total of 2,062 microloans.
The beauty of the El Sauce ECC, however, is not just the manner in which it has provided financial services to the community, but how it has used the foundation of the ECC to expand in many ways. (more…)
Where are the S’mores?
Athan Makansi – KF8 – Apia, Samoa
Jump on the Samoan time machine and watch as a few neighbors help prepare a delicious meal of taro, breadfruit, coconut cream, potatoes, chicken and tuna in a giant fire pit as Samoans have for many, many years. But no, Samoans don’t make s’mores.
Talofa (Hello), from Samoa. I arrived last Friday in the glorious sunshine of Samoa, eager to start my fellowship with SPBD, Kiva’s partner in Apia, the capital (and only) city. Very quickly I became aware of a remarkable generosity between Samoans. My landlord offered to cook for me, a taxi driver gave me a free ride, and all types of Samoans generously flashed a toothy smile my way. In every instance of generosity I can’t help but let a smile sneak out in return.
