In Barranquilla you have to seriously reevaluate your plans when it rains. Or as a friend nonchalantly told me: “Unlike other cities where rain means ‘don’t forget the umbrella,’ here in Barranquilla it means don’t leave home.” Arroyos. The word means “stream,” or at least that’s what I thought when I arrived here on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. But people kept mentioning how these arroyos pop up any time it rains, how big they get, how they have their own names, how they can carry off buses, how they kill people. None of that fits my schema for “stream.”
Fundacion Mario Santo Domingo (FMSD), Kiva’s first and only (for the moment) field partner in Colombia, is celebrating 50 years. To help them out, I’ve planned a short series of blog posts highlighting a few of the many projects and programs the Foundation has undertaken as it’s spanned 5 decades, 3 cities, and somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000,000,000 Colombian pesos* working to strengthen communities and alleviate poverty in Colombia.
Blogging in from Barranquilla, Colombia. I plopped down here just a bit over a week ago and right near the end of the Colombian national football* league’s season-ending tournament.Now, this entry doesn’t have anything to do with microfinance, but since the mission of our blog is “to allow Kiva Fellows to have the opportunity to share their experiences living and working abroad,” I thought I’d share some local color, especially what I encountered here last night.
I recently finished up in Ica, Peru and moved north to start my second fellowship in Barranquilla, Colombia. After I left, I combed through everything I grabbed over 12 weeks with my Kiva issue FlipCam to make a little going away video that I thought I’d share on the Fellows blog.
I have a hunch that most lenders on Kiva don’t pay to much attention to field partner profiles. It isn’t hard to understand why: they’re long on text and short on story. Folks looking for a nice, “soft-touch” way of putting their money to good use are happy to trust that Kiva only posts worthy profiles from worthy places. And that’s OK. Kiva does carefully vet its field partners. Skip out on those details, though, and you lose a bit of your voice. From Accion USA to Zene za Zene, each field partner has their own approach to microfinance and their own specific role in their community.
On August 15th, 2007 Ica, Peru was hit with a major earthquake measuring at 8.0 on the Richter scale. The city was left in shambles. In the affected region, 519 people were killed, 1366 injured, and some 76,000 homes collapsed. After two and a half years, Ica is still very much recovering. Walk the streets and you can’t help but see the scars and occasional open wounds.
The Fellows’ Blog is fast approaching its 1000th entry. With fresh updates posted multiple times daily, even the most dedicated readers can’t help but miss some real gems. With that in mind, I’d like to shine a light on some of the great work done by recent fellows in Peru. (more…)
