Author Archive
Bienvenido a Chile, Kiva!
By Suzy Price Marinkovich, KF9 Chile
If the video above doesn’t show on your browser, here it is at this link: http://vimeo.com/8899555
To see & read the bios of all the loans Fondo Esperanza has uploaded to Kiva to date, click here!
Check out all fundraising loans from Fondo Esperanza by clicking here! Also, feel free to share that link with everyone you know in a fun, cute, and easy to remember form: http://bit.ly/KivaFE
Suzy Marinkovich is currently on her last placement as a Kiva Fellow — and she is training Fondo Esperanza, a brand-new Kiva partner in Chile! Suzy has a wholehearted passion for microfinance, social justice, and poverty alleviation; what she enjoys the most is listening to the incredible stories of Kiva borrowers in South America.
Climate Change hits Kiva Borrowers in Bolivia
By Suzy Price Marinkovich, KF9 Bolivia
“In a world that is hot—a world that is more and more affected by global warming—guess who is going to suffer the most? It will be the people who caused it the least—the poorest people in the world, who have no electricity, no cars, no power plants, and virtually no factories to emit CO2 into the atmosphere. Many of the 2.4 billion people who live on $2 a day or less reside in rural areas and depend directly on the soil, forests, and plants in their immediate vicinity for subsistence.” –Thomas Friedman, “Hot, Flat, & Crowded” (Pg. 158)
What I have learned the most since I arrived in South America as a Kiva Fellow seven months ago is that, not only is climate change real – it is making the poor poorer faster than we can create infrastructure to accommodate it. Bolivia has been devastated by heightened temperatures melting glaciers around La Paz, for example, which have in turn dried up rivers that irrigated entire mountainous communities who are now going from poor to extremely poor—and dangerously fast. In Cochabamba, the drying up of rivers can not only be felt but it can be seen nearly everywhere, in old riverbeds now littered with trucks filling up with gravel. Even worse, these trucks are loading up gravel in the middle of “la epoca de lluvia,” or the rainy season, which now feels very much a misnomer for Cochabambinos.
Kiva’s newest partner in Bolivia, CIDRE, is by far most proud of its potable water and irrigation projects – and once you hear what they are up to, you will understand why.
CIDRE approaches agricultural communities with recently dried-up river beds or nonexistent irrigation systems and arranges a community-style loan at very low interest. I say “community” and not “group” loan because the loan is taken out for one purpose, to build a well, and then is repaid by each household as part of the larger sum. I had the opportunity to attend the 6-year anniversary party of a CIDRE-funded community well in the rural area and was astonished at the overwhelming pride the community had for the well. CIDRE’s veteran loan officer Juan and I were treated like the guests of honor; we were even asked to bless the well, give speeches, and shake hands with every single member of the community. It was extraordinarily humbling. I particularly loved Juan’s speech, as he introduced me by explaining Kiva to the community, and telling them how it will help CIDRE bring more wells to dry Cochabamba farming communities. Seeing the joy in their faces at the potential impact this could have for their neighbors was my absolute proudest moment as a Kiva Fellow and it brought tears to my eyes.
Rigoberto, the president of the community’s agricultural cooperative, took me on a tour to tell me why exactly they were so proud about this well. (more…)
Cocaine and Microfinance
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9
“Coca is green, not white like cocaine.” – Evo Morales
The Chapare, the Yungas, the DEA, USAID, cocaine, drug trafficking, alternative crops, forced eradication, Evo Morales.
These are the buzz words constantly attached to Bolivian articles on the both domestic and foreign-aided drug war against cocaine production. While tough to get the facts on cocaine production by country, suffice it to say Bolivia is one of the world’s biggest cocaine producers along with the likes of Peru and Colombia. To put it in perspective, Bolivian police discovered one cocaine lab this year that, by itself, was capable of producing 220 pounds of cocaine a day. In the US, the street value of that amount equals approximately five million dollars.
The welcome sign in Villa Tunari, Chapare, which translates to read: "Land Free of USAID."
When I arrived at my first Kiva placement in Ayacucho, Peru, the region where the vast majority of Peruvian cocaine is produced, I learned about the ancient cultural ties between the Andean people and the coca leaf. It’s a part of everyday Andean life and the leaf itself is considered sacred; it is most often chewed and used in tea. There is something so strange about juxtaposing the image of an elderly Ayacuchan beggar chewing coca leaves against the image of a rich 20-something snorting lines of cocaine inside a VIP section in a Los Angeles club. I realize that sentence is very blunt, but it helps to highlight the reality that coca and cocaine are definitively worlds apart despite being of the same root. (more…)
Kiva Update from PBS Frontline World
Suzy Marinkovich, KF8 Peru & KF9 Bolivia
One of the most exciting things about being a Kiva Fellow is the opportunity to tell the untold stories of those so remote, so rural, and so ignored by the media. When there are six billion humans sprinkled across the world, the media has the unenviable task of (more…)
Why Me?: A Post about Bolivian Women
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF8 Peru & KF9 Bolivia
Twisted twining vining metal unrhythmic untamed unkempt and in comes the dust sweat and sticking to me tires thumping each rock unsettled plastic bag squeezed empty tossed out the window just a drop of papaya juice leaps back clings to the dirty car door parting from the white stretch of plastic mangling on wire scraps whose posture, never organized (more…)
Why We Should Debate Loan Expiration
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF 8/9
As you may have seen, over the past couple of months Kiva has seen its first loans expire on the site. Currently, I am in my eighth week of working with a brand-new Kiva partner, CIDRE, an MFI specializing in agriculture and livestock loans in Bolivia. I mention this because I’ve noticed a significant portion of the loans that have expired or are close to expiration are from MFIs in Bolivia. I realize my opinion is skewed by having spent only a handful of days at Kiva headquarters followed by 5 months at two Kiva partners in South America. As a result, I don’t have really have a great vision from the top – I don’t understand all the organizational elements in place to keep Kiva sustainably rolling. I am just going to call it like I see it now, sun-drained from a long day spent on grueling rural roads, visiting incredibly inspiring Kiva borrowers and successful social projects CIDRE has had a hand in.
My understanding of the premise behind loan expiration is that it allows for Kiva to be more of a marketplace – where instead of making decisions on the end of Kiva, they are made on the end of the MFI and the funding choice is up to the lenders. Thus, the website itself is designed to be like an Ebay for microloans, an intermediary between funders and the funded.
Here is my reasoning for why I personally believe the expiration of loans on Kiva could be detrimental:
1(a). To make an analogy with the child-sponsorship model (please bear with me as it’s stretch): imagine a marketplace for sponsoring children’s school loans, with the exact same design as Kiva. At this hypothetical site, lenders like us could lend to cover school fees for children that would pay for middle or high school (in many countries, attending said schools requires paying school fees). Children’s photos and biographies are thus posted to this hypothetical site, and we treat it like a marketplace. Then, as the site expands and more loans are posted, certain kids aren’t being funded – their loans expire on this site. Then, you pull up the pages of all the children whose loans expired, and they are all kids who aren’t cute or aren’t fitting our notion of how a needy child should look. As you can see, this is unfairly discriminant.
No Time For Romance
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9
“Gender-based violence … is ubiquitous in much of the developing world, inflicting far more casualties than any war. Surveys suggest that about one third of all women world-wide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined. A major study by the World Health Organization has found that in most countries, between 30 and 60 percent of women experience physical or sexual violence by a husband or boyfriend.” – Nicholas Kristof
When my husband and I were making our way overland to Bolivia, we took a ferry across a small part of Lake Titicaca. On the other side, we stood around some market stalls waiting for our bus to come off the ferry, and all of a sudden we heard yelling behind us escalate to screaming. We spun around to see two female market vendors arguing about one encroaching on the other’s selling space. The words quickly turned to blows, and in a matter of seconds the women were in the dirt, punching each other and ripping each other’s hair out. People just stood around, even smiling as if being entertained. Before long, I screamed for someone to break them up. A foreign traveler next to me whispered in English one of those sentences that rings in your ears for a long time because, at the time, you are so stunned you can’t think of a genius rebuttal fast enough. He said, “let them fight, that’s just how it is down here.” (more…)
Women in Hats
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9 Bolivia
We can’t get enough of them. We love them so much that they even have their own lending team of fans and a discussion on KivaFriends. Whether they are made of straw or soft fabric, bowler, flat-brimmed, or a tiny saucer looking thing on our borrower’s heads – we just love them.
There is an old English adage that says, “If you want to get ahead in life, you should get yourself a hat.”
I like hats, and I’ll wear one every now and again – maybe for Opening Day in Del Mar or during a long hike to beat the heat (and, of course, during San Diego Padres baseball games). But down here, it’s an essential part of your everyday cholita’s wardrobe – it’s her piece of flair, her fashion statement, and it’s also almost always a statement about where she comes from. Her hat may very well give away her hometown – and whether others see her as a Cochabambina or an Ayacuchana, for example.
When I saw our “Women in Hats” lending team, I was in love! I promise not to get all deep on you, but I thought it was such a cute, simple way that cultures across the world can come together through Kiva – by celebrating even the simplest of accessories. It also conveys why loaning on Kiva is so fun (and addictive) for us!
So, I decided to do a little light research into this hat phenomenon. Since I arrived in Bolivia from Peru, the hat styles have definitely changed. These ones are usually small bowler hats and I cannot for the life of me figure out how they seem to defy physics by not flying off their owner’s heads. Sometimes they are tilted off to the side, sometimes they add a solid 10 inches to a woman’s height – which I guess lends itself to the aforementioned English adage.
I began by Googling “bowler hats Bolivia” and soon found out that they’re called a “bombin” down here. When I Googled that however, all I got were a bunch of articles on bombings (since Google was certain I made a typo) and some Wu Tang Clan lyrics about “bombin’ buildings.” I take it that bombin hats aren’t a typical Google search. Regardless, I dug a little deeper and here’s a synopsis of what I found:
The bowler hat – or bombin – has been worn by Quechua and Aymara women in Peru and Bolivia since the 1920s, when it was introduced to Bolivia by British railway workers. Rumor has it that the hats were found to be too small for their intended recipients, so they were then distributed to the locals. For many years a factory in Italy manufactured the hats for the Bolivian market. Now, however, they are produced internationally. This seems to be the most popular theory of bombin origination. (Main source: Wikipedia.org)
Another rumored and uncorroborated bombin hat theory involves an over-order of bowler hats by an enterprising salesman, who supposedly convinced the Bolivian locals that the wearing of hats would increase their fertility. Whether that was once the belief or not, you may be relieved to know that this rumor certainly isn’t prevalent today.
Cochabamgringa en el Hospital
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9
My husband walked in to the CIDRE office this Tuesday around 5pm, smiling big but smelling awful. Everyone crowded around and asked, “Mateo! Como le ha ido?” – “How was your [first] day?” I could tell they were worried all day when they had asked me if I heard from him, but I knew he was fine. They may worry that this gringo from the States, who is still very much learning Spanish, can’t hang in ‘el campo’ (the farm). But Matt loves that kind of stuff.
My husband is a veterinary technician back home, and is currently applying to veterinary school. When he agreed to come join me on this 8-month adventure, both of us worried about what it would look like for him – as we had zero plans and no idea where I’d even be come second and third placement. But the experience has been as remarkable for him as it has for me. At CIDRE, the loan officers set him up with the very veterinarians who take care of the CIDRE borrowers’ precious bovine. I’ll discuss his dirty work with more detail in another blog post – but let me just give you a taste… his first day involved delivering a baby calf and neutering pigs. Just another day at the office, right?
Click the pic: it's a shameless plug for CIDRE's new lending team!
CIDRE is one of Kiva’s brand-new Latin American partners, and is extremely well-respected here in Bolivia. The founder, Alvaro, does a wonderful job operating the business and his plans for CIDRE’s growth are both tangible and exciting.
Hours after I arrived here in Cochabamba last week, I began mysteriously throwing up over and over again. In a delirious state and in the hands of my husband, I made it to the hospital – where I was promptly hooked up to fluids.
Just want to be starting something
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF8
I remember when I was a teenager, I’d awaken in the middle of the night and meander to the kitchen for a glass of water and my dad would be perched there in his chair with a yellow notepad, writing madly about some scientific revelation. He was always so quiet, and his presence would catch me by surprise. The way his hair was completely messed up and his eyes scarily determined, I could swear in these moments he was a mad scientist. He was coming up with a new theory, some new protein to test for in his lab. I always felt that surely, by the aura of madness accompanying him, he was writing down information that would lead to finding a cure for something that I was incapable of understanding due to his annoying inability to use layman’s terms in explanations.
Writing this post was the first time I felt a little of my Dad’s madness, because I wrote this post quickly with just a pen and notebook in hand and a bad case of writer’s cramp. As I wrote it, one of the loan officers asked to borrow my pen four times before I noticed she was speaking to me. I am sure I looked insane to her. I just feel very occupied by this issue, as I am sure a lot of the other Fellows, Kiva staff, lenders, and borrowers themselves feel.
When your heart is invested in someone, it feels instinctive to look for dangers in their path to warn them. I do the same thing for microfinance; I am always pining around our borrower’s stories to unearth obstacles to its success. I’ve come to believe microfinance’s first and most formidable threat is living without ever having had instruction in economics.
By removing certain variables we can make sense of at least a part of this problem.
When small loans don’t work, let’s assume that means one of two things:
A) It didn’t help the borrower financially and they are about the same.
B) It financially hurt the borrower.
Let’s go ahead and remove all extraneous factors – e.g. political strife, health, personal problems, weather, etc. I am aware that presently, it’s virtually impossible to bar these factors in the developing world as we know it. However, for all intents and purposes, let’s work with variables we might be able to control.
As I write this blog post in my notebook, I am seated in the back of a sea of white plastic chairs that hold the many socias (borrowers) at FINCA. We are all watching a Power Point presentation on the subject: “How to know if you are winning or losing in small business.”
FINCA organized this talk because of the following statistic:
The average life span of small businesses in Ayacucho is 18 months.
FINCA Peru lecture on fostering successful business
the Artist and the Artisan
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF8 Peru
What is an artist? What is an artisan? Are they different?
The debate caught my interest when I was walking away from Ayacucho’s Ex-Carcel, a former prison now converted to an artisan market where many of our Kiva borrowers at FINCA Peru work. As I chatted with Jen, a friend of mine and herself an avid student of language, I couldn’t shake something she said. She noted that the term ‘artisan’ often seems more related to poverty or developing nations, whereas the term ‘artist’ seems more attached to an upper-crust society, or simply put, wealth. Her insight got me thinking and researching.
I do not believe the terms have anything the least bit inherent in them that pulls one to poverty or wealth; but it may be a consequence of how we define the terms more generally. Artisans often produce functional goods, and produce a large quantity of the crafts they are good at. Artists, on the other hand, are considered to be those who produce one-of-a-kind-pieces; their livelihood also does not necessarily depend on the production of their works.
I know I can. Be what I want to be.
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF8 Peru
When did I begin to learn about savings? I can’t say I’m any good at it, but at one point far and long ago, I know I learned about it.
I suppose it was simply modeled to me by my parents, dedicated savers and cautious spenders. For many of us, saving seems so natural a concept that it’s hard to climb outside of our nutshells to see the rest of the world’s reality. Banks are readily available to many of us, and they often shell out incentives for us to save with them – collecting interest, investing, and the like. It seems like everyone is telling us to save.
Yet, from interviews I’ve conducted here in Ayacucho, I’ve noticed the importance of saving is something many of our borrowers really come to value only after joining FINCA.
FINCA requires its borrowers to deposit into a savings, which they get at the end of their loan cycle. Loan Officers also lecture the borrowers on the importance and value of saving at their weekly meetings, and encourage them to voluntarily contribute additional savings through FINCA as well.
The last question on my journal interview questionnaire for Kiva borrowers is also my personal favorite, and I made it the last one because I look forward to the response so much I make myself wait until the end. (It’s like in college when I would allow myself to eat candy only after I finished my homework.) The question is: what do you like the most about borrowing from FINCA?
I love it because it’s the one question I almost always get a unique response from. And yet one of the most resounding responses is, “because they taught me how to save!” One Kiva borrower said, “They force me to save. At first I hated it. But now I understand it and I love it! I’m going to start construction on my home soon. The savings are my favorite part.” I definitely saw myself in her.
For these women, the loan itself is not their ‘favorite part’ about borrowing from FINCA. It’s learning about savings! As if I wasn’t addicted to Kiva enough, now I have another reason to be: it’s not just about borrowing for the present, it’s about teaching the women to save for their future. Our microfinance partners that stress saving—and most of them do—are passing a great test of sustainability.
But these days, it’s not only the women that learn how to save at FINCA Peru.
What if microfinance really does work?
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF8 Peru
As I sat this morning, drowning in over 50 borrower interviews I’d done that need to be typed and uploaded, I felt overwhelmed with bureaucracy. Our Kiva Coordinator then walked in to let me know we had five more community bank meetings – FIVE – meaning I had a ton more interviews to do. For a moment, I actually thought about turning her down so I could catch up on typing up the previous ones. Regardless, I picked up my scrappy notebook and pen and ran downstairs to meet with the first group of women.
As I interviewed, I laughed with them, listened closely to them, hugged them, told them I admired them, and made sure to hang on to every word. I was beside myself that I almost turned them down to do paperwork. I’d gotten so used to the importance of paperwork at my last job in the US, it had actually pained me to ignore it.
At lunch I walked (more like trekked) to my apartment and took a seat on my fluorescent green plastic chair, took a long stare at the wall and began to think about the phrase “ignorance is bliss.”
Let’s pretend that its converse is “education is cynicism.”
Criticism abounds for Kiva, and more noticeably, for microfinance in general. In fact, criticism pervades international development. When one thing goes wrong, one borrower gets deeper into poverty, suddenly microfinance is moot. If 99% of stories we hear are positive, we play extra close attention to that flaw. And suddenly, every attempt at tackling poverty is debunked or worse yet, accused of worsening the situation.
This is an enormous problem with the way we look at poverty.
We sit comfortably at cafes sipping lovely lattes, pondering life.
Myself included, we look at certain international crises and we debate over what the solution may be – then we conclude there is no solution. “Man… that’s a crappy situation. Let’s talk about something else now. So… the Chargers are totally going all the way this year..”
Then we move on with our night.
Thomas Pogge says it beautifully.
That we are naturally myopic and conformist enough to be easily reconciled to the hunger abroad may be fortunate for us, who can ‘recognize ourselves’, can lead worthwhile and fulfilling lives without much thought about the origins of our affluence. But it is quite unfortunate for the global poor, whose best hope may be our moral reflection.
Okay, moral reflectors and idea-debating post-graduates… I’m about to drop a bomb.
Ayacucho’s voice in Peru’s Amazon conflict
¡La selva no se vende, la selva se defiende!
“The forest is not for sale, The forest we defend!” shouted the community of Ayacucho while pumping their fists in the air. Sweat dripped down their foreheads in the midday sun and not a soul was dressed for a day at the office. The spirit of the crowd was overwhelming, as if every person had their heart invested in the political crisis unfolding in Peru, no matter its geographic distance from here.
Hours after my arrival in Ayacucho on Tuesday, while I was still entranced by the cultural beauty of the place and struggling for air due to altitude, I was told the roads into the town were to be closed at midnight, and water and electricity might be shut off. The other volunteers at my MFI and I joked that the Peruvians were hazing me – the newest guerita in town.
In the Bagua region of Peru, an area where life is sustained by the Amazon’s great forest, live many indigenous people who have subsided on local hunting for generations. Far away in the urban metropolis of Lima, Peruvian President Alan Garcia has been coming up with a plan for Peru to have freer trade and more room for foreign corporations, at the request of the U.S. Two bills were created that would allow thousands of square miles in a formerly protected area of the Amazon rain forest to be for sale – which could indicate logging and/or a foreign oil company.
The indigenous have been rioting. They feel that their rights are being ignored, as this is an area they consider their own. The other side, including many urban dwellers, see the indigenous as unfairly resistant to change and purposefully difficult to negotiate with.
Another chant begins.
“Pueblo Amazona, Ayacucho esta contigo!”
Amazon region, Ayacucho supports you. Ayacucho can relate to the plight of rural farmers and indigenous communities often ignored and forgotten by the national government. And once they heard of the violence from the conflict last Friday – over 30 indigenous killed and hundreds more missing – it became a personal call to action. Further fanning the flame is a rampant rumor that the missing indigenous were killed and thrown into the nearby river by the police in order to cover up their deaths.
