Posts filed under ‘KF5 (Kiva Fellows 5th Class)’
Flying and Hot Buns
Dala-dalas are Dar es Salaam’s form of public transportation. They are buses that run all over the city, charging about $0.30 per ride. There is no set schedule, and they typically only leave once they are full.
Although several Tanzanians warned me about taking dala-dalas during rush hour, I figured it was no big deal. So I would be squished and sweaty, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. I took one from work to the city center and I even got a seat! At that point I was thinking, “Why did everyone make such a big deal? This is totally fine.” Then, as we pulled into the main bus station, I finally understood. A group of 20 people or so were running alongside the bus, hanging on by a few fingers and trying to squeeze through the closed door. Seeing what we were up against, everyone on the inside stood up immediately and headed towards the door. Once we finally slowed to a speed of 5 mph, the door was forced open and people pushed their way in as we attempted to push our way out. When it was my turn (and that’s all relative), I sort of leaped out of the bus. There were so many people trying to get on that I stayed perched in mid-air. One of my flip-flops managed to reach ground but I continued to float. A few words were thrown around, including Mzungu, and I finally managed to make a safe landing. But I wasn’t done yet. I was ready to do almost anything to get on the rare Masaki route dala-dala. When I saw it pulling in I ran with the rest of the crowd, throwing elbows and pushing my way through. I made it in the bus but wasn’t lucky enough to get a seat. I was told to sit on the ledge behind the driver, and with my leg in the crotch of the man across from me, I was feeling pretty comfortable and accomplished. But as the engine roared and we took off, I realized my butt was super hot. Not surprising considering I was sitting on the engine of a decrepit bus that my sister, Risa, wouldn’t dare enter due to safety reasons. It took about an hour with traffic, and although happily on the bus, sweat was dripping down my face and I worried my versatile gaucho pants were bound to be singed.
As I walked to work the next morning, I saw a fight go down on a dala-dala. People were yelling, punches were being thrown, arms were flailing – it didn’t look pretty. As men in collared shirts and ties climbed out of the windows, I realized my hot buns and flying experience was nothing in comparison.
To see loans currently being raised by Tujijenge Tanzania, click here: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=87&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb
21 Days on the Road (Part 2)
(To see what happened during the first 11 days, see Part 1)
Day 12 (Warning: slightly disgusting content. Do not attempt to read while eating):
I just finished rubbing my heels with sandpaper for the last hour. It’s a long story how I got to this point, but it involves exclusively flip-flops/sandals and very dirty/dusty/sandy roads for 6 weeks. Basically, I gave up trying to wash or in any way care for my feet a few weeks ago. They were just always dirty. Even when I get home there’s just dirt everywhere so I gave up on my feet. The plan worked out fine until yesterday my right heel began to hurt whenever I put pressure on it. A problem because I do a lot of walking. So I decided to look at my heel (probably the first time I’ve done this in 6 weeks) and saw not only tons of seriously dead skin but also some major cracks—I’m talking into the depths of my flesh—in my heel. There was one in particular that stood out—just a huge crevice where my skin broke running the length of probably a half inch. So today I go to a pharmacy having no idea what the word in English is for that thing you scrape on your feet (like a nail file for your feet) and certainly not knowing the Swahili word. All I have going for me was the Swahili word for “foot” which also happens to include the leg so it is sufficiently vague. When I walk into the pharmacy and decide to scan for an item in the same family as my desired object, to my glee, I spot just the thing I am looking for! Glorious! I’m pretty sure the pharmacist has never seen anyone so excited about a foot-scraper. So I just spent nearly an hour soaking and scraping away the layers and layers of dead skin in the hope that it will ease the pain that the cracks are causing me. There’s still much more work to do there, but a girl can only touch her feet for so long in one day before she has to call it quits. I’ll get back to it tomorrow and hopefully this new hygiene regimen will prevent future fault lines in my feet. (Be thankful I forgot to take a picture of my foot in its most heinous glory or else I’d be posting it right here.)
Day 14:
After a 2.5 hour bus ride from Shinyanga, I arrive in Mwanza and decide to walk around the city. I turn onto a street that is amply occupied with other pedestrians only to have a man walking towards me reach for my face to rip off my sunglasses. Some would let it go at that (afterall, I really don’t even like those sunglasses) but unfortunately my animal instincts kick in and without thinking I begin fighting back for my glasses. We have a standing tussle during which he scratches up my arm and I commit to crushing the glasses in my grasp so long as it means he doesn’t win. All the while, the crowded street freezes to watch the muzungu woman wrestle her attacker. No one steps in to help, but they all watch. In the end I do win and walk away with all of my possessions intact (my brute strength didn’t even cause me to crush my glasses) and only minor injuries to my right arm. As strange as the attack is, so is the reaction I receive from local people to whom I mention it. One accuses me of lying, telling me that the city is safe and that would never happen. Another says that if a thief is caught in the act, everyone in sight will pummel him or her and retrieve the belongings then continue beating the culprit perhaps until death. I ask why, then, did no one step in to get him away from me after he grabbed my face. Unsure how to answer, he says that the man is probably a known drunk or crazy person who does this type of thing all the time so no one wanted to bother. Comforting. I decide not to mention the incident to any more locals.
Day 15:
Today I learned the effect that isolation has on me. Though there have people around me all of the time and I’ve met different BRAC staff every day, it wasn’t until today when I reunited with a fellow Kiva Fellow here in Mwanza that I realized the hole there had been in my communication. Glorious friendship, camaraderie, English language, and mutual understanding. Thank you, Nabomita! To celebrate, we are eating the biggest tilapia I’ve ever seen straight out of Lake Victoria (the source of the Nile River). I’m barely able to stop talking long enough to get the food to my mouth, but when I do it’s well worth it. I’m now fully convinced that the only way to eat fish is with your hands. As a person who never ate fish prior to my move here I don’t think I’d know how to pick out the bones (or eyeballs) using a fork and knife.
Day 16:
I’ve spent each of the previous two weeks training two branches in each region on how to begin using Kiva and generating Business Profiles for the Kiva website. In Mwanza, I am to train three branches in five days. I’ve gotten into a training rhythm and like the two branches in five days regimen, but I’m a little worried about how I’ll pull off three. What I’ve been doing is spending one day with a branch to go to the field and get to know the COs and branch manager. In the afternoon, once everyone has returned from the field, I launch into a presentation and training discussion on Kiva. Then the next day I go into the field with as many COs as I can and visit as many groups as possible to begin filling out business profile forms and taking pictures for the website. I plan on spending two days like this at each branch and then I have the fifth bonus day to spend a little more time with whichever branch I feel needs it. Part of the struggle this week will not only be making it to each branch on two different days (at the very least one afternoon to do the training followed by one morning to go to the field) but also locating the three branches and getting from place to place, as the three branches are spread out on all different sides of the city. It’s doable but there’s not much of a buffer should one of the mornings or afternoons not work out. If I weren’t in Africa the schedule I’ve created for myself would be totally doable, but it turns out I am in Africa and timing absolutely never works out a) as you expect; or b) as you need it to. In my perfect world, my week will go as follows:
Monday—morning: Branch 1; afternoon: Branch 2
Tuesday—morning: Branch 3; afternoon: Branch 1
Wednesday—morning: Branch 1; afternoon: Branch 3
Thursday—morning: Branch 2; afternoon Branch 1
Friday—morning: Branch 3; afternoon: Branch 2
The way I see it, if the week even goes 80% as planned I’ll still complete all of the trainings. Fingers crossed.
Day 17:
A car wearing a bumper sticker declaring, “This Car is Protected by the Blood of Jesus” is simultaneously driving straight into opposing traffic at full speed and coming within inches of hitting multiple pedestrians. It is as though his faith that he is protected by Jesus permits him to drive recklessly, as no harm could find him. What about the pedestrians? What if they’re not protected by Jesus’ blood? Faith is one thing but watching it embolden this country’s drivers is a scary incarnation of religious devotion.
Day 18:
It’s a rainy day in Mwanza and I need to get from one branch to another to begin training another office. Rain wouldn’t be catastrophic except that the Regional Manager is here today and he’s offered me a ride to my next location on the back of his motorbike. We wait for the rain to pass enough for us to be able to take to the streets and after two hours we decide to go for it. We make it through ten minutes of the 30-minute ride when he pulls over and tells me he’s going here (as he points vaguely at the nothing that is next to us). By now it is raining again and we are well outside the city. In shock that he would leave me on the side of the road in the rain in the middle of nowhere I hesitate. Does he really intend for me to get off the bike? He does. He quickly pulls away further off the road and I have no choice but to begin walking in the general direction of the city. I look down to realize I’m covered in mud and filth that’s been kicked up by the motorbike and I’m getting even wetter as the rain comes down harder, but there’s no where for me to take cover. Eventually I make it to a daladala stand where a man ushers me under a shelter and asks me where I need to go. Thank you, my Swahili, for being advanced enough to allow me to talk about directions and destinations fluently! He gets me onto the proper daladala and tells the driver where I need to go. I hate being helpless but my dejection at my soaking state and abandonment allow me to resign myself to it and follow instructions. We reach a stop at which point the daladala driver tells me I should get off. He points to two students whom he says will lead me to my next daladala. In the end it takes five people and one hour to get to the branch. It would all be worth it if it weren’t for the fact that by the time I reach the branch, the staff has gone home as the work day is nearly over. All for naught.
Day 19:
As I said, I need the week to go at least 80% as planned. I knew that something would go wrong but there’s always a strange excitement as I wake up each day not sure exactly what it is that will disrupt my attempt at a plan. The good news is that if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that I need to remain only loosely committed to my plans, as any greater attachment will result in frequent disappointment. Today, Branch 2 is a problem. The Branch Manager has resigned so the branch is in turmoil. I’m wondering if I’m bad luck, as last week both a Branch Manager and a CO resigned on the day I was to train the branch. The Area Manager tells me I should not take it personally as turnover is not uncommon. It’s amazing the difference a solid Branch Manager makes. Without that authority figure to impose a sense of order and routine, things falls apart. COs still attend their meetings and collect their payments but air in the office is more chaotic. Clients coming to receive disbursements get into yelling matches with each other and the COs. The flow of the staff in and out of the office is constant so no one ever knows how to find anyone else. When I try to locate a particular CO, inevitably I am told that “there is a problem, she had to go.” I don’t even know what this means, but I’ve heard it numerous times. Of all of the things Branch 2 has to worry about, I’m not convinced that I can elevate Kiva on their list of priorities. I’m worried that the situation here might consume more than 20% of my plan and leave me unsuccessful, with perhaps 2 or 2.5 branches trained.
Day 20:
“What do you think of the way we collect loan payments?” It feels like a loaded question so I pause. I say something vague to which the Branch Manager responds “do you think it’s safe?” Ahh that’s what she’s getting at. And she has a good point. The method that BRAC employs to collect installments on loans is through weekly meetings at the Group Leader’s home that the CO attends. There, she collects payments—sometimes more than 1 million Tanzanian Shillings in a single day (equivalent of $1,000—a lot of money by local standards)—to bring back to the office. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the COs are women between the ages of 20 and 30 (per BRAC policy) and they make these collections alone. For the Branch Manager to bring it up echoes the concerns I have had as I repeatedly watch COs roll up wads of cash and stick them in their purses, in plain public view and seemingly vulnerable to any bystander should he or she decide he/she wants that money. In addition to safety concerns, the Branch Manager points out that these women do not make in one month nearly the amount of money they collect in a single day. What is to stop them from running off with it?
Day 21:
I am beginning this 16 hour bus ride with a woman more or less sitting on top of me. This would be totally predictable (afterall, what’s an African bus ride without a stranger sitting on your lap?) except that the seat next to her is empty. Why, I beg of you WHY, do you insist on sitting right up on me when there is a perfectly good and empty aisle seat right next to you??? Two hours later, we make a stop and someone sits in the empty seat which finally stops me from gazing longingly at the empty seat trying to will this woman to move. Every 4-5 hours we pull over on the side of the road in the middle of no where. These are bathroom breaks. As one may expect, it’s almost exclusively men who take advantage of these rests (the terrain is desert with no trees or high shrubbery to shield a person) with only the occasional extremely desperate woman partaking. Me, I strategically drank no water for two days so as to avoid this very situation. Wildy unhealthy? Perhaps. Was it worth it? Definitely.
As the clock strikes ten the bus enters familiar terrain. Dar es Salaam is upon us. After 16 sweaty hours, 2 of which were unpaved, and no real food or drink to speak of, we arrive at the bus terminal. As I disembark, to my shock and amazement two of my friends with whom I live are waiting at the door and waving and yelling excitedly. What a fantastic homecoming!
Microfinance In Cameroon – Ten Years On
One of the most inspiring things I have seen in Cameroon is the progress made by many GHAPE borrowers over the years. GHAPE is the local NGO where I am working during my time as a Kiva Fellow in West Africa. Their aim, like many of the other hundreds of microfinance organisations around the world, is to combat poverty by bringing capital to people who have none. GHAPE sow these funds with a good handful of business advice to ensure their borrowers’ ventures grow tall.
I spent my second week visiting the small town of Belo, which is frontier territory for microfinance. Just under a year ago GHAPE chose Belo for the site of their second office, with the express purpose of reaching some of the remote villages in this lush but poor hilly district.
Under the impressive stewardship of GHAPE staffer Kenneth, capably assisted by credit assistant Miranda, the Belo branch is now meeting the needs of nearly 500 borrowers in six rural communities. I had the privilege to attend one group’s first proper meeting, a few weeks after their initial GHAPE training. As the chairperson checked his notes to ensure the procedures were being followed, the members hesitantly completed the small green slips used to record their savings. They will graduate to become borrowers only after attendance at a few more such meetings. Their first loan – they call it ‘empowerment credit’ – will be fixed at 40,000 CFA Francs ($100 /£55), which most, at least in these parts, will use to make modest investments in their farms.
Back in the town of Bamenda, I made the journey to Centre 1, in the village of Alabukam. Many of Centre 1’s borrowers were among GHAPE’s very first, taking their initial loan nearly 10 years ago. And they are justifiably proud not just of this, but also of the progress that they and their families have made. From modest beginnings, many now have empowerment credit of 500,000 CFA Francs ($ 1,250 /£700) or more and are making monthly repayments greater than their first year’s total loan amount. While many have continued to expand farm output, several borrowers have progressed to other ventures. One I interviewed had just set up the village’s first pharmacy; two others earn money by renting motorbikes to the young drivers who ferry goods and passengers to and from town.
Of course things don’t always go swimmingly, even when some British chap from Kiva is attending your meeting. One recently dragged on for four and a half hours. A group of borrowers had failed to bring any money, meaning the centre’s repayments were short by 43,500 Francs. When this happens, the rest of the centre is expected to make up the difference, which is no laughing matter when it’s a big sum like this. Cue much grumbling and discussion. But eventually a resolution was found which kept everyone fairly happy and made sure the meeting met its obligations.
Microfinance may not be a panacea, but years of hard work from GHAPE have brought results in Cameroon which are tangible. And from new groups to old I have been struck by the borrowers’ infectious enthusiasm and their genuine desire to help each other help themselves.
Click here to see if any GHAPE borrowers in Cameroon are currently fundraising on Kiva.
Alternatively click here to view other African loans you can support.
Micro-finance in Post-Conflict: Meet OI-Wedco
It has been sometime since I’ve updated for the Kiva Fellows blog. As cliché as it is lots has happened and I’ve promised a more in depth description of the impact of the post-election crisis on micro-finance. So in baseball terminology I offer a double header (or double-dip in the vernacular of the dugout). I wanted to separate the entries. This one is about my field partner. Below is an entry more specific to the violence and its impact on three remarkable women.
I’ve been in Africa for two months and I thought I’d finally share more about my field partner, Opportunity International-Wedco. As a fellow you are caught working for two organizations simultaneously, although the missions typically align there are still interesting challenges when the organizations differ. Thankfully it hasn’t happened too much.
OI-Wedco's Main Office
Over the last several weeks I’ve been primarily working from the OI-Wedco headquarters office on the outskirts of Kisumu. My main contact has been Kimberly, an American who has been working here for nearly two years. She is a regular renaissance woman around here. Kim has been managing partner/donor relationships, consultants, hiring/firing, training new staff, among other things. I arrived into an extreme busy and tense time due to a confluence of internal and external issues. The external issues have been from the lingering impact of the post-election crisis (you can read my summary below). The internal issues include primarily HR problems. Staffing qualified positions, especially loan officers can be extremely challenging even though the unemployment rate in Kenya is around 40-50%. Due to limits of education and resources, the pool of qualified candidates is small and elusive. When I first arrived they conducted 50 interviews in a few days, so, they didn’t have much time to sit me down for conversations and training about OI-Wedco etc. Instead, I learned as I went along and jumped into preparing my travels to visit clients and sorted out the repayment sheet for their groups posted to Kiva (which hadn’t been submitted for months). Much of OI-Wedco I learned on my own and from brief casual conversations with the staff. Opportunity International is a large international organization that conducts micro-finance operations in 28 countries. They acquired WEDCO (Women’s Economic Development, something, something…they love acronyms in Africa), which was a small struggling Kenya MFI in 2006 and a few weeks they acquired another MFI based in the central province around Nairobi (which has made things interesting). Opportunity International’s growth philosophy seems to be one that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead they find local MFI’s that at the core have strong potential, but need adjustments structure and strategy. OI doesn’t seem to start MFI’s from scratch, but instead “adopts” and integrates them into their network.
At OI-Wedco, constant visitors come in and out. Most are consultants or staff from headquarters in the US, UK or elsewhere. I’ve met dozens as they visit for a week or so and leave. It makes for some interesting conversation and every day different. Ultimately, I’ve been inspired by the social and holistic mission of OI and many of the staff have beautifully expressed to me how they get purpose in working to assist their fellow Kenyans (they could be getting paid better working elsewhere).
The main product OI-Wedco offers is a group loan with a minimum of 15 people (self-help groups or trust groups). When a new group forms they get a collective bank account and apply for legal status from the local government (all together costs the group around $25). For new groups OI-Wedco loan officers offer a 5-7 week training course in various business/finance topics relevant for micro-enterprise. If a client goes clears three loans with a strong payment history they can graduate to an individual loan. That is micro-finance in action. It should provide social mobility that enables people to take incremental steps out of poverty and in this case towards more robust financial services. This group dynamic provides efficiency for OI-Wedco, while providing legitimate collateral and support for the clients. I’ve been amazed at the diversity of backgrounds and incomes for OI-Wedco clients. As you can probably tell if you have explored Kiva, most of the clients listed for funding are individuals. They do, however, have several MFI’s like OI-Wedco that work with on groups (learn more).
I found it interesting that their best clients generally come from rural villages. In order to reach out to many parts of Western Kenya they currently have five branch offices in the towns of Busia, Bungoma, Eldoret, Kisii, and Kisumu (more will expanded soon) and several one room offices in smaller towns. Having the rural areas as the stronger clients does cause problems for costs in transportation and maintaining several branch locations, but the stability, repayment, as well as mission proves its value (plus it is fun riding on the back of an OI motobike). One branch manager told me that he wished all his groups were in rural areas, if so his portfolio would have a tiny PAR (percentage at risk, the primary yardstick of micro-finance stability). He tells me that this is because the rural areas tend to have strong community ties and more responsible/mature members. His main groups with issues are in the urban areas. This he tells me, is because those groups tend to be younger, less experienced, more distractions, and less commonalities tying them to the group.
Riding Shotgun in a Matatu
The timing of the partnership is both interesting and tragic. Kiva and OI-Wedco officially became partners in early December 2007, weeks before the presidential election that sent Kenya into a whirlwind of violence, economic pause, inflation, tension, and the death of 1,500 people. I’ve met with a few clients that received their loan days before the election and used a good portion of the capital to buy stock, which many lost through looting or arson during the turmoil.
After the post-election crisis, Kiva sought to help OI-Wedco in any way. The plan was to post group loans on Kiva that were being rescheduled by OI-Wedco due to the impact of the crisis on client groups. Kiva’s policy is that a new business posted for funding must be within thirty days of the loan disbursement. Because the loans of OI-Wedco groups were only being rescheduled, not re-loaned or “topped up” as the clients like to call it, Kiva made an exception due the extraordinary challenges of the crisis.
Nevertheless, it made things messy and confusing to sort out afterwards, as I’ve been sifting through the repayment data, amounts disbursed, dates disbursed, loan terms, etc. Which made for a maddening time of reconciling the repayments schedule (my eyes are permanently cross-eyed). I discovered some of the reasons for the glitches and have been able to stabilize and I am working on getting a better system going.
Anyway, I thank you for reading this scattered and I’m guessing at some points confusing entry. All in all I am finding my fellowship to be more challenging than I thought it would be, yet more worthwhile than I ever imagined.
9 September 2008 at 08:09 Zack Turner, KFP Coordinator 3 comments
Brief Summary of the Post-Election Crisis in Kenya
The last several weeks I’ve been traveling all over West Kenya visiting groups in the branch offices of OI-Wedco to do journal updates. I return back to Kisumu with a deeply somber heart.
A few weeks ago in Kakemega I met two Kikuyu single mothers from a Kiva funded group. They told me about how they lost everything after the post-election violence. During the turmoil their shop and clothing stock was burned because of their tribal background. They fled to an IDP (internally displaced persons, essentially refugees in their own country) camp run by the UN and stayed for five months. They left the camp because of its awful conditions, and now sell cloths for a vendor and make a measly fifty schillings a day (less than a dollar).
An IDP camp in Kenya
Another woman that I met was Agripina. She is also a member of a Kiva funded group. As a result of the violence she lost everything she owned, her vehicle, house, salon, and car were all burned the evening of December 28th when Mwai Kibaki was officially announced winner of the presidential election. Agripina was a victim of the violence even though she is Luhya (the majority tribe in Kakamega) because she is married to a Kikuyu man. They fled far away to an IDP camp in Nakuru. All of this happened when she was six months pregnant and thankfully she gave birth to her first child, a healthy baby boy on March 11th inside the camp.
What could I say? What could I do?
These weren’t sob stories played up to solicit a handout as touts falsely do on the streets of Nairobi and Kisumu. These were the raw, compelling, and honest stories of the impact of the foolish chaos of the post-election crisis upon three specific women.
I’d like to do my best to explain the post-election crisis in Kenya.
*****Summary
Leading up to the presidential election held in Kenya on December 27, 2007. Several candidates were on the ballot, but the country knew that it would come down to two candidates that would battle for the presidency (much like a particular countries two party system).
Incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, and his former political ally, Raila Odinga, were the two primary challengers. Kibaki is part of the largest tribe in Kenya, the Kikuyu’s, who have had most of political power since independence and the majority live in central Kenya. Of the three presidents in Kenya’s history two have been Kikuyu’s and are notorious for preferential favoritism by giving influential political posts to other Kikuyu’s despite experience or ability.
Raila Odinga is a Luo, which is the third largest tribe in Kenya and most in his tribe live in Western Kenya (where I am based). During his campaign he rallied other tribes under his constituency in opposition to the Kibaki and the Kikuyu’s. It is disappointing that modern democracies in the developing world don’t uniting people to a political party by issues and platforms and instead resort to an easier leverage of tribal background and thus vehemently divide the electorate.
The day after the election as votes were being counted, (media coverage is as rapid as American cable news) Odinga had a significant lead and his party prematurely claimed victory, as the day progressed a swift and suspicious swing in vote tabulations showed Kibaki closing the gap and eventually winning the election.
On December 30th the other tribes grew discontent of the corrupt favoritism and alleged/assumed vote rigging, and there was widespread discontent. The perpetual marginalization spurred a rage of Luo’s and other tribes attacking Kikuyu’s and their establishments in the west while Kikuyu’s responded with attacks against Luo’s and others in the central province. Gangs and militias became small armies and neighborhoods and villages became the battlegrounds. Police and soldiers were sent in to create peace, but they are also accused of attacking innocent people. (I met a member of Kiva funded group who showed me a scar near his ankle from a bullet during the violence)
The violence was a tragic mess that left 1500 people dead, 250,000 people displaced (estimates), millions of dollars of damages to residences, businesses, and goods, and resulted in a period of zero economic activity that impacted every Kenyan as well as landlocked East African nations that rely on transporting their goods through Kenya. I met a recently hired loan officer last week who told me his story. He is a Luo from the Kisumu area, who went to college in Nairobi and got a job working for a start up telecommunications company. For the last few years he poured his life into building the company and his family, the day after the election, the entire companies headquarters were set ablaze (the founder is Kikuyu). They lost millions of dollars of equipment, but most importantly they lost the company and place of work for many people. He was bitter and angry towards the reckless thoughtlessness of the violence, they attacked the business without acknowledging that Luo’s worked there too.
It is important to remember that this crisis isn’t as simple as categorizing a group as bad and good, innocent or guilty, right or wrong. Each side has those that are to blame and each side has those that were innocent victims. Up to this year Kenya had been held as an exemplary developing African state, yet the violence revealed that tribalism still runs deep and that generalizations and hostilities had been on edge for years.
It was devastating and destructive chaos and an absolute miracle that Kofi Annan was able to negotiate a peace by creating a grand coalition government, perhaps the greatest legacy of one of the world’s great statesman. Many international observers were concerned that the crisis could have scaled to match the genocide of Rwanda in the mid-nineties.
After the coalition government was brokered on February 28th the violence stopped. Order was restored and people went back to rebuilding their lives.
*****
After my time in Kakamega, I could do nothing but think about the dark, poignant eyes of Grace, Anne, and Agripina. The pain and loss that they suffered is beyond anything I’ll ever be able to fully comprehend.
My heart is feels like lead, it is heavy seeing how we humans can still resort to the most unimaginative answer to our problems with violence.
It leaves me with the simple question of HOW? How could this happen?
Lack of hope is my best answer and may be too simple.
Nevertheless, it is hopelessness that can lead to desperation of doing unthinkable things.
Hopelessness is what fueled the post-election violence in Kenya because people saw no other hope towards the injustices of an illegitimate corrupt government and it is hopelessness that perpetuates some of the greatest ills in our world.
Grace, Anne, and Agripina have every reason to be hopeless, yet with bold courage continue on with the belief in making something better for themselves and for their children.
Kiva doesn’t only distrubute loans to the poor…Kiva distributes hope.
9 September 2008 at 07:44 Zack Turner, KFP Coordinator 6 comments
A date with Colonel Mathieu and Why Kiva?
I’ve had a pretty frustrating day here in Beirut. To those who plan on traveling, a bit of advice…don’t loose your passport. Especially not in Lebanon. I felt like I was trapped in that scene from Battle of Algiers where Colonel Mathieu is unceremoniously perched atop his desk answering the questions of reporters either with an endless moral treatise or a flippant plume of smoke from his Gauloises and a shake of his head. Afan in the background blowing thick air around around the office, a woman in the corner pecking at a typewriter from the 20′s… Except in my case there were several dozen Colonel Mathieu’s,at least 10 office buildings, and more “regulations, Habibe” than even the aforementioned military man could have stomached.
So, I’ll let my thoughts cool, and as per my last promise and inresponse to some comments (thanks for those, I love the feedback), a bit more about al Majmoua and the role Kiva plays in this whole microfinance thing…
(Disclaimer: I was not a finance major, so I shall do my best to relate the financial info as I have interpreted it to those who are still new like me. For those better versed, feel free to correct me where I go astray…)
Majmoua began as a microcredit program in 1994 under the stewardship of Save the Children. Until about 1999 alMajmoua lent primarily to women and primarily to solidarity groups, not individual borrowers. This of course followed the Grameen model by using the “moral guarantee” of a lending group where there was a scarcity of fixed assets from which to draw. Just before the new millennium however, al Majmoua began expanding its reach and opened up its loans to men and to individual borrowers. Now, with a staff of nearly 90 and $8 million in outstanding loans, al Majmoua has broken its operations into various departments tailored to the needs of very different populations. Under the microcredit umbrella, the Poverty group lending division dispenses loans starting at $100 which are mainly geared toward rural women who have few marketable skills. There is also a non-Poverty group lending division which focuses on those who have established businesses but still lack the capital needed to take out individual loans or loans from an established bank. Al Majmouaalso provides individual loans to more established customers, vulnerable workers (who aren’t borrowing money for their own business, but cannot access formal credit markets), seasonalworkers (in agriculture or tourism, who experience periods of access to capital and periods of no access to capital), families who request home improvement loans, as well as a few Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Alongside their credit services, al Majmouaalso provides their clients with financial education, business management assistance, and skills training. This last opportunity is unique in that al Majmoua tries to tailor their training to skills which will have an immediate and significant impact on their clients ability to work in their region. Many vocational schools here teach skills such as hairdressing, tailoring, or car repair that have already saturated the various markets. Training unskilled workers in these trades provides little benefit. 90% of these non-credit services are being given to women (about 4,000 people in total) and are largely subsidized by grants given to Majmoua from various international donors. That said, the credit side of al Majmoua has been self-sufficient since about 2004. Since then, a small profit has enabled the MFI to lower interest rates and expand their portfolio. Still, in order to sustain more growth, al Majmoua needs more money.
Generally, in order to have enough capital to sustain growth, any MFIwhich is not grant-subsidized will need to borrow money from one of the huge international investors such as Deutche Bank, Merrill Lynch etc in order to provide loans to its developing entrepreneurs. When the MFI makes a profit (from interest on their loans), as Al Majmouadid in 2006, this money becomes available to increase the number of loans that can be given out, but often the demand for loans outstrips the amount of safely available capital. Thus the MFI must themselves borrow in order to lend. While they aren’t borrowing enormous sums by international banking standards, the MFI’s are still being charged 10% interest on these loans from the Big Banks. Let’s say Majmoua, for example, looks to borrow $1 million to replenish its stock of capital and keep expanding its reach within Lebanon. If that $1 million comes from a Big Bank, the MFI is passing on a $100,000 cost to its clients, who will see this in the form of higher interest rates for their micro-loans. If the MFI can obtain a Aaacredit rating from one of the few international credit rating agencies (basically the highest possible garunteethat the company has a stable portfolio of investments), then it can get its capitalfrom a local investment bank at a lower rate, say 6% interest. The Aaa rating is difficult to obtain however, involves its own costs in auditing etc, and is still a significant sum.
Enter Kiva. Kivaintroduces an entirely new concept by offering a source of investment capital for the micro-banks at 0% interest. Because Kiva is given free use of PayPal, there are no transaction costs either. That means that when an individual logs onto Kiva and donates $25, that $25 goes directly, in whole, to the MFI of choice, and is in turn lent out without any cost to the MFI. The money is shipped from the debit card of the donor in New York to the account of the MFI in Beirut to the hand of the dress seamstress on Abd al Wahabstreet. This is a truly revolutionary concept, because it gets rid of a whole lot of middle men. Yes, you say, but isn’t the MFI still making money off of poor people? In a way, yes. But the alternatives aren’t so great, the on-the-ground costs are still enormous, and as I mentioned they do much more than just lend money, i.e. job training. Wa’Allah, perhaps that’s a discussion for another time.
Next time: who are the Majmoua clients? Until then, m’aa salaama, with peace,
JJ, fee Beirut
What’s in a name?
Well, I’m back in the U.S., which means back to the old grad-student-grind. (There is, however, the new excitement of teaching French 1 for the first time here in Beautiful Berkeley, where I have hardly seen a cloud since my return.) I’ve had a few things to finish up for my Kiva fellowship in Senegal, though, since my last week in the field was spent… in the field. We ran around trying to pack as many interviews as we could into the last few days; but, as if to mock our efforts at productivity, fate struck me with a quick bout of travel-related discomfort that prevented us from visiting our ecovillage clients at Palmerin, where coincidentally there was supposed to be a giant beachside party that week.
Looking back at all the pictures, notes, and data that I now have to make sense of, names and places that three months ago sounded hopelessly foreign resonate with meaning — and return to my memory tinged with nostalgia. “Assane Gueye” is no longer just “ecovillage president, member ISTD group, preschool, Thiaroye-sur-mer” but a hilarious friend and colleague who keeps a smile on his face and the jokes rolling out — the art of teasing, called tooñ or taquinerie, is highly developed among all Senegalese friends and greatly contributes to the fun had by foreigners such as myself — in spite of the fact that his group’s Kiva-financed preschool for underprivileged children is on the brink of closing. Their landlord of three years kicked them out so he could do construction on the building; but the school’s problems had been wearing it down well before that, since many parents cannot afford the $6 per month that the school asks in order to function. The fate of the project is precarious, yet Assane’s cheer and optimism remain steadfast. As he spent his holiday walking through the rain and mud with us (while gently mocking me the whole way) to visit Kiva’s other projects in Thiaroye, a suburb of Dakar that is perpetually jammed with traffic since it straddles the one highway that leads out of town, each client we saw thanked him for his tireless work managing their loans — a volunteer job. But, unlike other persons of community importance who I’ve met throughout Senegal, you would never know from meeting him that he is so respected. Young, unassuming, and witty, his presence reminds you that when your efforts don’t work out, pressing on is not just doable, but doable while enjoying life too.
Assane at the Thiaroye ecovillage office
Or, I could cite the long lists of names which the president of the Ndiaye Ndiaye ecovillage, located several hours southeast of Dakar in the town of Fatick, asked us to diligently record each time we met a group there out of concern for the precise accuracy of our records. Names like Wanguène Sène, Dieynaba Niane, the two Yadikone Ndiaye’s, and Ndiass Diouf (whose group has the unusual activity of making furnaces fueled by cow manure as an alternative to expensive butane stoves) fill this part of my notepad. But such tongue-twisters can be anything but meaningless when I look at them now. One of these groups, which mercifully for me happens to have the simple French name of “Trois Cocotiers,” gave me a heck of a welcome! The women hadn’t all arrived when we first went to their leader’s house to meet them; we waited for a while, but since it appeared they would be taking their time, we left to meet other groups. When we returned an hour or two later, everyone was assembled. But to make up for their tardiness, the women jumped out of their seats one by one and proceeded to dance for a good 15 minutes.
They even sent someone to go fetch the drums to add some atmosphere.
This spectacle more than made up for the beach party I missed in Palmerin.
It is astounding to me to think of how rich my memories of Senegal, a country I knew only through books and the Bissap Baobab restaurant in San Francisco before, have become: foggy ideas and empty names have taken on sharp contours and been colored in with both joy and worry. What will happen to ISTD’s school, or more importantly, its kids?
My only regret is that summers are so short. I can’t wait to go back.
Same Same But Different
In Hanoi the tourist stalls in the old quarter are crammed with all manner of trinkets for tourists to buy. T-shirts are of course popular and there are many that contain that ubiquitous saying ‘same same but different’. Usually I ignore the persistent hawkers ( while fighting back the urge to proudly declare that I am more than a mere tourist ) but events over the past couple of weeks have made me actually stop and think a little more about ‘same same but different’.
I am first generation Australian of Greek heritage. I grew up very much in a Mediterranean household, where family and food is at the core of life. I vividly remember the sense of bewilderment I felt when I went to barbecue of a friend and was told to bring my own meat and drinks. What ? An invitation like that would cause confusion amongst my family, as for Greeks a hosts’ table is laden with food and people fight for the “honour” of paying a bill after a night out.
Although you would not think it, the Vietnamese share quite a few similarities to their Mediterranean “cousins”, as family and food are also at the core of Vietnamese life. For the Vietnamese I would add a third pillar – business and the obtaining of money. This is decidedly lower down the list for Mediterraneans with their “live for today and tomorrow will take care of itself” attitude, although I imagine that if you live in a country where significant poverty is not an issue, you would have a more carefree attitude to money.
Another similarity is how loud the Vietnamese talk! I have a voice that is loud and rises further and quickens in direct proportion to my passion. My Mediterranean friends and I can all talk at the same time and what to others may appear as talking over the top of each other, to us is normal. You don’t stay quiet in a Mediterranean environment – you have your say and you do it emphatically. I sometimes struggle with this in the Australian business culture, but in Vietnam it’s not a problem. I often sit in on meetings where 3 conversations are happening at the same time and the voices get increasingly louder as a point is debated. Sometimes it sounds like they are angry with each other, but they are not – it’s just the very direct conversation style. If a phone rings while sitting in a bus, the phone call recipient will answer and their conversation will boom throughout the bus. This initially surprised me as I expected a more restrained conversational style, but my Mediterranean background helped me adapt very quickly.
I love being Australian. I think that if you grow up in Australia you have truly won life’s lottery, as you do for the most part grow up in a land of tolerance, opportunity and fairness, not to mention outstanding climate and physical beauty. One of things I treasure most is Australia’s multi-cultural background. I love the fact that when you travel you always feel that things are a little bit familiar because you might have seen or tasted something similar as a result of the Italian, Chinese, Portugese, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Lebanese or South African family that lives down the road. Of course Australia is not perfect, but overwhelmingly you have fewer things to complain about as an Australian than you would as a Vietnamese or any of the other countries that Kiva is active in. For me however there is a ‘but’ and the ‘but’ comes in the form of Australia’s isolation. I have often thought that if we could take Australia and just move it further up, then it truly would be perfect. I know many of my countrymen revel in Australia’s relative isolation and would be horrified by this thought, but not me. I wish we were closer to the action. That we weren’t so comfortably complacent. And most of all I wish that Europe wasn’t a whole day away. But I guess you can’t have everything. And after extensive travel and if you consider that the Unites States has had 8 years of Bush and his cronies in charge, there still is no other place I would rather call home.
One of the things I am enjoying however about my Kiva Fellowship is feeling like I am a global citizen. An Australian living in Hanoi, working for an American group with an Asian micro-finance organisation. I love hearing the multitude of backgrounds, perspectives and accents. Last week I attended a micro-finance forum at which over 500 delegates from all around the world were present. I had dinner with Cambodians and Dutch, swapped ideas with a woman from Papua New Guinea and had a lively discussion with someone from Bangladesh.
The more you travel and live abroad, the more you realise that although cultures are different and should be celebrated as such, there are also lots of areas where we are the same. That to me is wonderfully reassuring. Maybe I will get myself one of those t-shirts after all.
Who needs Traffic Lights… We have Honking!
I couldn’t really decide how to start this blog. I’m a bit new to the business. I always assumed blogs were just a bit pretentious unless you had something terribly important to say, but now that I have to write one of these things for my Kiva fellowship, I think I’m growing into the idea. Maybe it’s because now I have something important to say. Was that a touch of prentention? Alas, let’s just hope that someone reads these… Ahlan wa sahlan! I’m JJ. I’m a Virgo, I like fitted hats, and I recently decided that the best way to put off making any major life decisions after graduating with my ever-helpful BA in International Relations was to save up some money, beg others for more, and fly to Beirut where I know nobody and have only a vague notion of what awaits me when I arrive. No, in all truth, I was extremely moved by the chance to get involved with Kiva in a part of the world that is very close to my heart and is so important for us all to better understand. I think I’ve been given a truly unique opportunity to get on board with Kiva– and the world of microfinance in general– at a time when the social entrepreneurship movement is really gathering strength. I hope that I can share some of what I learn along the way with those of you who are kind enough to read along with me.
I will be spending the next 10 weeks working with one of the leading Lebanese microfinance institutions, Al Majmoua, and soaking up as much of this incredible country as possible. I’ve been in Beirut now for about five days, and I’ve decided to decide nothing just yet. Beirut has been at various times terrifying, invigorating, frustrating, beautiful, mysterious, and hilarious.
Echoing a trend from the blogs of many of my fellow Kiva Fellows, my first exciting experience here was vehicular. Not vehicular homicide, nor even manslaughter but damn near close. You see, Road Rules don’t exist in Beirut per say: it’s more like, whoever is on the road, rules. At least that’s what every driver thinks. Taxiing from the airport, my cab driver proved his worth by skillfully weaving between oncoming mopeds and inter-city minivans who cared little for the appropriate direction of travel. Clearly my guy was from the mountains, because the ride was much more slalom skiing than it was driving. Most drivers here don’t hesitate to drive the wrong way down roads, drive backwards down roads, stop in the middle of highways to pick up passengers, blow through what few stoplights exist, or park in any direction or on every conceivable inch of open asphalt. And then, of course, there’s the incessant honking, which, roughly translated, could mean anything from: “Hey, good morning,” to “Do you need a taxi?” to “Are you SURE you don’t need a taxi?” to “You had better move because I’m probably not stopping.” There are of course variations in between, and its always an exciting part of any walk to find out who wins those epic showdowns between oncoming cars who meet on a one-way road.
I spent much of my first weekend in Beirut getting lost in order to get my bearings, as every good traveler knows to do when most streets don’t have names and addresses are described by the big buildings near which they are found. I ventured out looking for an apartment to rent and instead took a grand tour of the city. I walked down the sea hugging promenade of Corniche, through the center of Lebanese nightlife in Gemayzeh, around the luxury condos of Achrifiyeh, across the former Green Line into neighborhoods plastered with posters of Hassan Nasrallah, and eventually found myself standing in Place De Martyres, for many reasons the heart of Beirut, though nothing stands there now save a small iron statue and a tent-museum honoring Rafiq Hariri. The surrounding neighborhood of Solidere was left a wasteland after it had been the epicenter of the horrible violence of the nearly 30-year Lebanese Civil War. Now, it is an haute-culture heaven, paved with granite and infused with all sorts of chic cafes, alongside such traditional Lebanese shops as Salvatore Ferragamo, Porsche, and Dunkin Donuts.
This of course is the new Beirut. And though every block has its share of condemned buildings still bearing gaping wounds from decades of shelling, the center of this city is as far from the past as can be. It seems like that was the intention. As is the case in so many modern developing capitals, Beirut is full of contrast. This point was reinforced during my first field visits at Al Majmoua with Kiva clients, but I promise, I will get to that for the next post. I fear I’ve written too much already. Until the next time, m’aa salaama, with peace,
- JJ, fee Beirut
21 Days on the Road (Part I)
On August 24th I left Dar es Salaam for a 3-week trip to central Tanzania to train BRAC branches on Kiva in three other regions. Here’s a glimpse into the first 11 days of my 21 days on the road:
Day 1:
Seven hours on the bus from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma has kicked off with a traveling saleswoman making her pitch for soaps, toothpastes, and aloe vera at full volume to the entire bus for at least 30 minutes. Perhaps I would mind her hard-sell less if I were able to understand more than 1 out of every 12 words (I do learn, however, that “aloe vera” is the same in English and Swahili. Good to know). When I arrive in Dodoma I discover that the method used by the bus company employee to match bags to owners is to write in permanent marker on the front of the bag the seat the owner is sitting in. F-1 will forever be a memorable place for me.
The Branded Backpack
Day 2:
During an evening battle with hoards of mosquitoes I get to talking with the Dodoma Area Manager, a Bengali beginning his 5th month of a 3-year commitment in Tanzania. He comments on the number of mosquitoes here and compares it to the mosquitoes in Bangladesh. I mention that I am trying to avoid malaria and am taking medication at which point he interrupts me—there is medication for malaria???? At first I think he’s joking (after all, there is malaria in Bangladesh) and then remember I’ve never heard him make a joke. Attempting not to appear shocked, I try to explain that there are these things called prophylaxis that one can take while in a malaria-infected area to try to prevent contracting malaria. Unconvinced by this idea, he maintains a puzzled look on his face and says “malaria is not so bad. I’ve had it many times.” After our conversation ends I walk into my room and promptly take my Malarone.
Day 3:
After a successful training for one of BRAC’s Dodoma branches, it’s time to head into the field to begin collecting Business Profiles for the Kiva website with some of the Community Organizers (CO’s). As we prepare to leave, one CO asks me with little optimism if I know how to ride a bike. I respond that I do. The entire staff finds this extremely amusing (I’m not exactly sure why, but one week later I will have the same effect on another branch office when they learn I know how to ride a bike). Within 50 meters of beginning our journey in the abandoned, desert-like neighborhood, locals come out of no where to call in wonder at the muzungu on the bike. A muzungu on foot is one thing, but on a bike is a true novelty. Fifty meters later, I break the chain on the bike. Way to look like a bike-riding expert!
Day 4:
I spend the day visiting groups in a region more remote than any I’ve seen. The uproar my presence creates amongst children and adults alike is a distraction from the meetings we attempt to hold. Our first stop is at the home of a client next to an elementary school. Within five minutes of my arrival, the elementary school has emptied and stands outside of the house. Trying to be sociable, I go outside to say hi to the children who are eagerly trying to sneak a peak, but I miscalculate. The entire student body runs away in fear at my approach. With the help of some local women I coax them back and am able to speak with the kids a little, but none want to come within five feet of me, unsure what will happen. The awe at my presence continues as we walk to another client’s home. A small child sees me and asks if I am higher than God. Not sure what to make of a white person and having never seen one before, this particular child isn’t sure if I am worthy of worship. The Branch Manager and I quickly assert that I’m just like him and not to be worshipped.
Day 5:
Have you ever wondered what happens when you go through your closet and donate bags full of old clothes and shoes to charities? Well I have your answer. They go to Africa to be sold by small-business owners. The second lives of these clothes often come with a very different owner. The line between men’s and women’s clothing is erased as I see manly laborers spitting and pulling up their sagging pants, only to look at their shoes and find they are purple flip flops with sparkles and flowers. Men wearing women’s jeans is also a common occurrence. Other unexpected items have cropped up reminding me of home and making me wonder where the original owners are. Today it’s a BRAC client in a Harvard University t-shirt. Then one of the CO’s creates a stir in the office while we debate whether her new shoes are men’s or women’s. This is the first I’d heard any recognition that there is a distinction. When called upon to state my opinion on the white loafers I realize that they do look a little like men’s shoes. But then again, what’s the difference?
Day 6:
The contrast between the types of businesses BRAC’s clients own is illuminated. Visiting one business I am confronted with a fruit and vegetable stand brimming with every variety of both. I next visit a client’s vegetable stand that is located in front of her house and consists of no more than four tree branches supporting two planks of wood and shaded by a potato sack. She has some tomatoes and five bunches of bananas for sale.
Veggie Stand, V.1
Veggie Stand, V.2
Day 7:
Hit with a stomach bug, I do little poverty alleviation today. I have spent my week in Dodoma in a guest room at one of the BRAC branches here. On this, my last day before moving to another city, the entire branch staff comes into my room every few minutes to see how I am feeling. Unconvinced that constant company is the best way to rest and recover I want to be frustrated but can’t help but appreciate that there are people concerned about my well-being. Us lone-travelers rarely expect anyone to know or notice if something is amiss. In this case, the week spent with this staff has fostered a close bond. That, and I think they are a little freaked out seeing a foreigner sick. They try to convince me to go to the hospital, in part because no one wants to have my death on her conscience. The cook is particularly concerned as he frantically tries to feed me more food, despite that he is deathly afraid that his food is the cause of my problems.
Day 8:
Another bus ride—this time from Dodoma to Shinyanga. The bus departs two hours late and the ride lasts 7 hours. I begin panicking at the end of hour number 1 when we hit unpaved road. Fearing this means 6 more hours of intense bumpiness and massive wafts of dust attacking us through the windows (which we had to leave open or else we would roast to death) I trick myself into falling asleep during the most uncomfortable part of the ride. I wake up two hours later when we rejoin paved road and am thrilled that I’ve found such a constructive way to kill physically uncomfortable time.
Day 9:
It’s the subtle differences from region to region that reveal variances in inhabitants’ standard-of-living. Some generalizations based on my experiences: group meetings of the 20 individuals in a large group are all held at the home (or more specifically, in the yard) of the group chairperson. In Dar es Salaam, we attend group meetings where all members are seated on chairs in a circle. In Dodoma, the group chairperson brings out a large, immaculate woven mat on which all 20 members sit. In Shinyanga, groups squeeze onto tattered tarps not large enough to fit them all. Differences in the dress of the clients bear similar contrast. In Dar, it is not uncommon for the members to arrive in dresses, both western-looking and locally hand-made. In Shinyanga many women wear a combination of Kanga (local inexpensive died fabrics) and discarded t-shirts from America. There is a relationship between mat-style, dress, and the monthly income for each of these women. As we complete loan descriptions to be posted on Kiva’s website we ask what their monthly profit is prior to receiving a loan. In Dar it’s almost always above 150,000 Tsh (nearly $150) and even goes as high as 500,000 Tsh. In Dodoma, the women I meet typically earn a monthly profit of between 50,000 Tsh and 100,000 Tsh. In Shinyanga, most women I meet do not earn more than 20,000 Tsh per month (or $20).
Day 10:
“How old are you?” the CO and I ask one small group leader in Swahili. She confidently declares “31.” We proceed. “How old are your children?” Pause. Blank stare. Women sitting around the small group leader begin to try to puzzle through with her to identify the ages of her 8 children. She takes a guess at her oldest: 23. I let it slide for now, even though it seems quite unlikely that both of the ages she has answered could be correct. From there she tries to remember for how long she was not pregnant before having her next child: “21.” Then she says “19.” She pauses for a moment and asks how many she’s listed. Several minutes later, eight ages have been listed ranging from 4 months to 21 years. I hate to harp on this obviously difficult question but Kiva and its lenders find it implausible when they see ages listed that require the mother to have been under 10 years old when first giving birth. So I ask, “how old were you when you gave birth to your first child?” This she knows. “18” she says confidently. Ah, “so are you 41?” Hmmm. She’s unconvinced. She looks around. The women around her remain engaged in helping her deduce the answer. Finally a light bulb goes off as one of her friends says “yes, you’re 41!” Mystery solved.
Day 11:
When first looking up BRAC Tanzania clients on Kiva you may be struck by something: almost every picture is a group of women standing indoors against a blank wall looking miserable. I came here wondering why this is so universally the case for BRAC’s clients, and today I’ve found my answer. I’m training my 5th branch and for the 5th time, I see that the CO’s have never before held a camera. I’m trying to illuminate the nuances of making the subjects smile and arranging them outdoors so that they look more natural, all the while the COs can’t for their lives figure out how to get in the viewfinder the portion that they are hoping to photograph (I guide their hands to tilt the camera up slightly). Natural-looking pictures will have to wait—for now I’m more concerned with the heads of the clients making it into the shot.
Now, onto the next 10 days! To see all of BRAC Tanzania’s currently fundraising loans, click here.
Cochabamboozled
I have eaten more in the past six days than in my previous five weeks in Bolivia. Cochabambinos pride themselves on living in the eating capital of Bolivia, and the third question people ask you after “What’s your name?” and “Where are you from?” is usually “How do you like the food?” The local specialty is pique, a big pile of beef, chicken, sausage, hot dogs, tripe, chicharrones, hard-boiled eggs and udder (udder!) stacked 8-12 inches high on a bed of french fries. Ronny and Paola, AgroCapital’s Credit Manager and Kiva Coordinator, were good enough to take me out for a culinary introduction to Cochabamba soon after my arrival. Thanks to the pique, my planned envigorating evening jog turned into severe food coma and falling asleep at 7pm with all of my clothes on. This microfinance thing is exhausting.
Pique
I’m lucky enough to get a tour of Bolivia along with my Kiva fellowship, since I’m spending time at three different AgroCapital branch offices: a month in El Alto, a month in Cochabamba and a month in Santa Cruz. There’s a lot of tension between different regions in Bolivia, namely between the eastern, resource-rich “half-moon” regions that want autonomy and the western highlands, which are poorer, mostly indigenous Aymara, and back the Evo Morales government and its socialist agenda. El Alto is almost 100% behind Morales, Cochabamba is somewhat divided, and Santa Cruz is mostly against Morales. It’s painful to see how much time and effort is spent on regional bickering and political posturing in a country where there’s so much to be done in terms of infrastructure and development. And as far as I can tell there’s no easy solution in sight–though more than 60% of the country backs Morales, accoring to the August 10th referendum, the other 40% controls most of the country’s wealth and natural resources and doesn’t plan on ceding them any time soon. This rich-poor, east-west dichotomy goes way back, as does a tradition of corrupt politicians and dictators who serve the wealthy elite. Bolivia has seen 193 presidential coups in its history as an independent nation (an average of one every 10 months, according to Wikipedia), so many that the presidential palace is known as the Palacio Quemado (“burned palace”). I asked one of the loan officers what he thought of the current government and he responded, “Well, it sure has lasted a long time.” This made me smile–my government sure has lasted a long time too, but that’s not exactly on its list of merits for me 
.
Bolivia is a beautiful country, making all of the hard times it’s fallen on even more tragic. Weekend excursions have taken me on a glacier climb, hiking and eating trout on beautiful Lake Titicaca–this weekend looks like a climb up the world’s tallest statue of Jesus and a trip to the Tunari national park. And probably a few generous portions of meat and potatoes.
Climbing the Chica Colla glacier with Dan, Doug, Martin and Emmett
Lake Titicaca
Phnom Penh Notes: Sweaty Jeans, Magic, and Black Smoke
After 7 movies, 4 made-for-TV dramas, 1 documentary, 2 Sudoku games, 1 confiscated Swiss army knife, 1 – $70 extra baggage weight charge, 5 airplane meals of chicken, chicken, and more sai mouan (chicken in Khmer), and 3 different planes, I am finally in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I believe I am the last of the Kiva Fellow 5 Class reporting for duty, but don’t quote me on that, and I just can’t believe I am here after all those months of jealousy and admiration from reading the other fellow’s blogs and notes from the field.
I arrived yesterday morning around 9am to the smile and hand shake of Vichet, one of the Kiva Coordinators at CREDIT – MFI, the MFI I will be working with starting Monday. It was comforting to find someone meeting me since I had not been to Cambodia before. We hopped in the car unfortunately without my bags, and we drove directly to CREDIT where I met some colleagues, and exchanged names, ages, job duties, and aspirations of language acquisition (Sopheap and I think may exchange Khmer lessons for Spanish lessons. We’ll see). They then dropped me off at the guesthouse I will call home for the next 2 weeks or until I find a place to really call home.
My impressions of Phnom Penh have shifted and taken on new shape over the past 24 hours. If I had sat down to write this early last night, you would have read about the potential trash problem in the city with plastic bottles, cans, food items, and other things strewn along the sides of most roads. You would have read about the oppressive heat and humidity, and slight unidentifiable smell in the air. You would have read about the traffic problems brought on by lack of basic infrastructure and city planning. You basically would have read a big, cranky, grouchy, western-centric story since I had not slept well in the plane, and the airline had lost my bags leaving me sweating in jeans. Have you ever experienced 95 degree weather with nearly 100 percent humidity in jeans? I don’t recommend it, and I can guarantee, if you ever are, you will be cranky too.
To my relief, I called the airport and my bags came later in the evening. And of course when I went to pick them up, they were the last two to pop out from behind the conveyor belt curtain at the airport. For some reason fate always seems to enjoy teasing you when you are grouchy in sweaty denim.
I lugged my bags up 2 flights of stairs, grabbed the coolest outfit I packed and got ready for a late dinner. I headed out down the street, and all of sudden the street turned into a magical place with twinkling lights, warm breezes, kids laughing and playing badminton, tuk-tuk drivers playing cards waiting for the next expat needing a ride, all with lightning lighting up the distant sky. Seriously, it was like some magical fairyland had swallowed the city I knew only a few grumpy hours early.
Somehow my new world morphed with simply a change of clothes and the reclamation of my personal items. Beyond morphing without notice, Cambodia is simply another world, another culture, and I have a lot to learn.
Some small, but important things I have noted so far that I need to get used to. The light switches are opposite here (or at least in my guesthouse). Up is off and down is on. Your normal walking pace will have you sweating after 5 paces, so slow is good. Despite wanting to crank the air conditioner on, it will make you sick so just give in and acclimate. The water, despite it looking really clean and clear, can still kill you. And if the water doesn’t kill you, crossing a major road on foot might since traffic laws are non-existent here (But really, there is no correct side of the road to drive on, and it is insane, than add an elephant or two). The moto drivers will always enjoy charging you a little extra so honed bargaining skills are needed. Lunch is between noon and 2pm for a reason, it is simply too darn hot to move. When a drop of cool water falls from the sky hitting you in the face, it means to find shelter fast since the streets are about to turn into rivers. And last, but certainly not least, when you are eating lunch in a lovely open-air café, and you see black smoke rising out of the Wat (Buddhist temple) next to you and you think it is a slightly smelly mid-afternoon incense ritual that you will learn about later, hold your breath because it is actually a body being cremated.
I learned the last one the hard way, and I am still trying to work the smell out of my memory.
I start with CREDIT-MFI on Monday, and I can’t wait to share with you further when I do.
phnom penh traffic
How to adopt a child…..
As some of you might know there is the story about the Guatemalans being a bit scared of people taking their kids for illegal adoption; apparently there was once a Japanese tourist beaten to death when he (or she I don’t know) picked up a kid.
Myself I have had kids dropped in my lab to have them sitting there for a couple of hours during a bus ride where mama already careys two others. One in tied around her back in a cloth an easily mistaken for a small package. One holding her skirt and one carried into the bus while mama balanced a basket on her head. I have also made some good friends with the neighbourhood kids because I walk crossing the hammock bridge with them every day and when we do we try to make it swing as much as possible. This to the big fun of the kids: this crazy gringa….
With this in the back of my mind it is just só hard to not want to take all those naughty little menaces with their dirty faces home.
I am used to share my food with the kids living on the streets of Peru and Colombia; over there, the waiters in the restaurant will even give them a real seat and a good treat when you invite them to share your food with them. I did this with the two shoeshine boys who shine the Panajachel calle Santander shoes. I mean who can eat 4 (!) pancakes on his own? Myself I am 34 and had never the idea I needed to have kids. Dutch women are first of all not very much the marriage kind and kids is something you might do after 36 or later… I like to chat with all the people I meet; the woman on the street, the man next to me in the bus, my colleagues and the woman who takes care of the house I rent. There are always 4 questions to start with: where are you from, what’s your age, where do you live (in Guatemala red.) and: do you have kids? And I don’t have kids.
This raises eyebrows and I have even noticed women who don’t dare to ask me more about it because they think there must be a problem if at my age (!!!) you don’t have a kid yet!
Well…. This week I went to interview this woman who lives of her tamales sales.
While I walk up the hill at the outskirts of Sololá there is this little boy running around us asking us who we are looking for. We tell him we look for Juana and he says with the biggest smile; that’s my mummy!!
And I am sorry but every time I think of this moment and my interview where the story of the little boy is unravelled I still get tears in my eyes. I have the feeling he will be in my heart forever and we only met for 30 minutes! I feel I need to go back to just hug him but also his mother for adopting him…. I wish I could do more…
Read the journal following the link below, while I work on those rough peaces in my throat….
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=13728
Homeless in Dar
Fresh off the plane, I arrived in Dar es Salaam eager to begin work with Tujijenge Tanzania as a Kiva Fellow. First task: find accommodation for the year. Without Craigslist Tanzania, the whole process promised to be daunting.
It was. Here are some of the reasons:
Go to a real estate agent, he charges you $20 for a tour of available properties. But after showing you a gaggle of multiple bedroom apartments after you ask for a single room you get the sense he’s just showing you anything and everything to get his money. “I said my budget was $600, this place costs double that!”
In addition, Dar es Salaam traffic is as horrendous as the beltway around Washington DC, but without smog checks. A few places I’ve taken a fancy to might be only 5 miles from work, but without my own mode of transportation, I’d have to take a bus to the city center, then switch onto a bus heading back the general direction I just came from – with just a slight change in angle.
Then there are the too-good-to-be-true houses where rent is $500 with air conditioning and hot water. You arrive to find a hot apartment with cold water. They say they can install an a/c unit and water heater, but it will take two weeks and the rent will be $800. Good grief. With rent being paid 6-12 months in advance, chances are you’ll be sweating all year but at least you will have cold showers to cool you off.
I saw one house I really liked. I was told the rent was $500 so I thought I could bargain down to $400. When the owner saw that a Mzungu (white person in Swahili) wanted the place, the price quickly inflated to $900…way beyond my budget. Do you see a dollar sign on my forehead? All the landlords here sure do.
Then there are the “dalali.” These unscrupulous real estate hacks are known for pulling a range of stunts to scam you. Word spread fast around town that I was looking for a place. Subsequently I’ve been contacted by several dalali. As dodgy as they are, I am desperate. So I tried a few out. If they miss your call, they call you back and let it ring long enough so you see they called. That way you call them back and they save precious cell phone credit. They tell you to meet them somewhere and then show up late and stick you with their taxi bill. They could take a bus for much cheaper but they don’t care, remember the dollar sign on my forehead? Often, a dalali says he has an apartment to show you but when you get there, tenants who have paid through December are comfortably living there. Sometimes they drag you through several cafés desperately searching out the owner’s sister’s boyfriend’s friend’s mother who has the key. You wait half an hour then they say you must come back tomorrow, but in truth there is no apartment to see. Really they are just wasting your time … and theirs. I can’t understand why they do it at all, they don’t make any money from the whole shenanigan.
And as everything takes so long to accomplish, after an entire day of searching for housing, you realize you’ve seen only two places. But you’ve spent $10 of credit on your phone and $15 on fuel.
Oh yeah, and add the Swahili language barrier to all of this.
“Bado ninatafuta nyumba ya ndoto yangu…” (Still looking for my dream home…)
While I continue searching for housing, you can support the borrowers of Tujijenge Tanzania by using the following link: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=87&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb
Malaria & My Trip to a Nigerian Hospital
Since arriving in Nigeria, I’ve mostly been hot. When I’m not hot, I’m comfortable. Cold is a word that I reserve for specifying how I would like my bottled water. When I became chilled and goose bumps started popping on Wednesday night, I knew something was wrong.
Within one hour, my forehead was burning up. I returned home from my friend’s house and went straight for my sweatshirt and thermometer. One hundred and two point four degrees. I popped some drugs, collected an arsenal of bottled water and went to bed, telling my Bengali housemate, Rafiq, that tonight I would not be locking my door and that if I did not emerge in the morning, he should come in. I had a sneaking suspicion that this Mac truck of an illness that had hit me might be malaria – the high fever, the pounding head, the aching bones, the fatigue.
Soon after closing my door, dressing myself in socks and my warmest lounge wear and wrapping myself in my silk sleeping sheet that was usually more than warm enough for these Nigerian nights, I began to shiver. I reached for my cell phone and called Rafiq in the other room. “Do you have an extra blanket?” I asked. He brought his blanket and spent the next hour or so brining blood to my extremities by squeezing my feet, arms and hands as well as calming the headache with pressure points and head massage. I fell asleep.
In the middle of the night (around midnight – I had gone to bed at 8:30pm), my fever piqued. I cast off the blankets, tore off my shirt and lay in a pool of my own sweat. I forced myself to drink the line of bottled water that I had gathered with great foresight. I thought I’d call and tell them I wouldn’t be able to go to work tomorrow. I popped more pills in hopes of calming the fever.
As the sun broke, so had my fever. Ninety-nine point eight, much better. I almost felt whole as I called Cynthia, the woman I ride to work with, to tell her I would be spending the day in bed rather than at my desk. She suggested that she still pick me up and we go to the hospital for a malaria test. I agreed, still tired and achy.
A little delirious and still half-asleep I prepared myself for my trip to the hospital. I took money and a bottle of water…I knew that these were the most important things. I didn’t imagine I would stay long and thought that if I had forgotten anything, I could surely purchase it. Other things seemed trivial – my phone, my computer, movies, a book, my iPod, toilet paper.
Hospital Entrance
We pulled up to the hospital. It was a private hospital – one of the best in Benin City. It was a large cement building surrounded by dirt. It almost looked as if it had been newly finished – structurally sound, but still a bit rough around the edges. The doctor was outside and greeted us with a smile, showing us through the front door where the nurses gathered in their white nurse uniforms, some with small white nurse hats. Their dress reminded me of Halloween more than it instilled confidence. They stared at me. I stared at them. One sat me down right there in reception, stuck a thermometer in my armpit and took my pulse. She flipped through a disorganized notebook to find a blank page to write my name on and recorded my data before taking me to the doctor in his office.
I sat down, staring at a large diagram of the female anatomy behind the doctor’s head. “When was you last menstruation?” he asked. What? I’m here for malaria, not a pregnancy test (Nigerians are obsessed with pregnancy, children, fertility, etc.)
“I don’t know,” I replied, a bit annoyed that he wasn’t getting straight to the heart of the issue. I had DVDs waiting for me at home.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I don’t know. Less than a month ago,” I replied. He pointed to the calendar and continued his questioning. I was not of the state of mind that I wanted to expend my precious energy on figuring out when my last menstruation was. I saw little to no relevance (at least not until he had determined that I needed some form of treatment that could endanger a fetus). I knew I wasn’t pregnant and threw out some numbers to appease him, “I don’t know…the 6th…or the 13th.”
“You know you really should know when your last menstruation was,” he said. “It is important to know so that you know when you get pregnant.”
“No, really?” I felt like saying, but bit my tongue. I just wanted my diagnosis and drugs so that I could go home.
“What is your blood type?” he continued. Another toughie. I knew I should know this one…I didn’t.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“I know.”
“It should be in your passport.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s in all passports.”
“Not mine.” I pulled out my passport annoyed to be arguing over whether or not blood type is listed in American passports instead of him asking me about my symptoms.
“It is in all other passports. Look next time,” he said still trying to prove his point. “It is important to know your blood type because if you get pregnant and you are…blah blah blah blah…and your fetus…blah blah blah.” I couldn’t believe he was talking about pregnancy again. I could think of many better reasons to know my blood type. As my blood, whatever type it may be, began to boil, he began to ask about my symptoms and I calmed down.
“Fever, chills, sweating, headache, bone ache, diarrhea, nausea, fatigue,” I rattled off the list I had been waiting to share.
He asked a few more questions about other symptoms and jotted notes down in the book. “Sounds like malaria. I’d like to keep you here for 24-hours of observation,” he concluded in less than half of the time he had spent on women’s issues of fertility and menstruation. What? I wasn’t prepared for this! He must have seen the shock and disappointment in my eyes and said that, maybe, if I was doing really well, I could go home in the evening.
I went out to the waiting area and told Cynthia the diagnosis and the request that I stay. A nurse came over and requested that they find someone to stay with me as well as bring some food for me so that I could start my drug regiment. They walked me to my room. I went, first cutting the deal that if I had to stay past 5 o’clock that the driver would go to my house and pick up my phone, computer and some DVDs to keep me sane.
The room was basic. There were two beds with slightly shaky metal frames. The mattresses were covered first in a plastic sheet and then a blue and yellow checkered fitted sheet. There was a pillow and no blanket. A plastic chair sat next to the bed, as did a wooden school desk and attached chair. A small room was to the side blocked by a curtain. Inside was a bag of cement. I lay down.
The hospital was clean – I was grateful for that. I knew it would be basic, but was a little shocked at how basic. I hadn’t expected a TV or an intercom system and could deal with the fact that they brought a second fitted sheet to me instead of a blanket, but had assumed that a hospital (on the higher end) would offer things such as clean drinking water (essential for maintaining hydration), some sort of food (critical to have with some drugs) and toilet paper (do I need to explain?). With a full staff of nurses, it also surprised me that they insisted that I have a babysitter. The company was appreciated, but made me feel like a bit of a burden.
When my food arrived in a small cooler, I ate it up, ready to get on with the drug regiment. Grace, my babysitter for the day, got the nurse to tell her I was ready. She brought in a weathered IV stand. “I don’t want a drip,” I insisted. This sparked a big conversation and the doctor was called in. “Nope,” I shook my head. “I’d like to take the medicine orally.” At first they thought I was afraid of needles. Then I told them that my doctor at home had suggested that whenever traveling that avoid needles. They showed me their sterilized supplies in hermetically sealed wrappers and I politely declined. With a small crowd gathered I looked at the doctor and said that I will start with the oral treatment and that if I got significantly worse, that we could revisit the issue. The American-style medical self-advocacy was a bit foreign to the hospital staff, but went over fine in the end. I got my oral medication and began on the road to recovery.
When 4 o’clock rolled around, I called for the nurse and began my advocacy again. I was determined to go home and spend the night in my bed. The doctor came in and I pinched my cheeks, sat up and looked as perky as possible. “I’d like to go home.”
He smiled and agreed. He also said that my test results were back and that I had malaria (they had taken blood earlier – I had given in and allowed a sterilized and sealed needle for this purpose). We had a brief exchange where he said that even if the test result had come back negative that it would still have been malaria. He used some metaphor about Bin Laden – a malaria test can’t check every blood cell for the parasite, America can’t check every Afghani cave for Bin Laden…even if malaria or Bin Laden aren’t found, we still know they are there. I wondered if he would have used this metaphor had I not been American. I hoped that modern science in Nigeria was more accurate than American intelligence in Afghanistan.
I took my 6 bags of pills and headed home.
Click here to see entrepreneurs who need funding at LAPO…and make the malaria worth it <<smile>>.
Progressive housing 101, or, an intro to why housing microfinance matters
I promised a long time ago to write about housing in Nuevo Laredo.
So I will exercise self-control and delay the gratification of writing about my recent outing to a lucha libre pro wrestling extravaganza. I will write instead about how housing gets built here in Nuevo Laredo – more of a sweaty struggle than the lucha libre on any day – and why housing microfinance is important in this process.
Visiting Kiva borrowers and writing journals represents a big part of my work for Kiva at my partner organization, FVP (Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva, or Progressive Housing Foundation). For those of you who not yet gotten addicted to reading them, journals are updates that give a fuller sense of the Kiva client and the impact of the loan. So far I’ve visited over 100 borrowers to interview them for a journal. More than 50% of FVP’s portfolio is in housing loans, so I have spoken to many individuals and families who have borrowed Kiva capital to make housing improvements.
One sure icebreaker in Nuevo Laredo when talking to borrowers is to ask if they built their house all at once.
That usually gets a big laugh – a kind of “you don’t know how things work around here, do you?” laugh.
To understand how housing works in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico (and in a lot of Latin America) requires rewiring (or maybe discarding?) the typical 21st century American conception of how a house gets built. Houses do not just look different here; most of the process that brings them into existence is different from the process by which new houses are born in the U.S. – different in terms of the time it takes, how the capital flows, who maintains control of the process, and many other factors.
My icebreaker usually gets a laugh – or a sneer – because it often takes years for families to build their houses to fit their needs. The relatively low household incomes of FVP clients mean that it takes a long time to gather the capital to make housing improvements. Most families thus make housing improvements in stages, using gradual savings and occasional windfalls to purchase building materials and incrementally build their houses, wall by wall, sometimes block by block.
Behind every incrementally-built house there is a unique story. Out front there is usually a dog.
When you drive through some neighborhoods many of the houses look like construction supply yards, with future building ambitions measured in stacks of concrete block. The same number look like construction projects abandoned at various stages of completion. On one block you can sometimes see houses ranging from a wooden shack up to a two story concrete home with balconies – a textbook graphic of the stages of the housing process in that neighborhood. If you have never been to a developing country, this afternoon drive through one such neighborhood gives a sense of how the housing stock is in a perpetual state of evolution.
Time moves slow on housing improvements because money does not accumulate quickly for most families. Traditional mortgage financing is not an option for most low-income families. Part of the reason is that low-income households simply cannot make the payments that would be necessary to carry even a modest (say $15,000) conventional mortgage. Furthermore, many are self-employed or work informally, making it difficult to prove income even if it were high enough. And the land that they build on often falls short of having full title, so they lack collateral to secure a bank loan. These are only some of the reasons.
Even if these factors were in place for low-income households, most banks are not set up to offer small housing loans and would struggle to break even on small loans. Some government programs have had success in helping low-income families, but are typically only available to workers in the formal sector, i.e. not those who are self-employed or work in informal enterprises. (Probably more than half of FVP clients with Kiva capital fall into the latter categories.)
So households rely on their own wits and resources to build their own housing. This process is called by various names: progressive housing, self-help housing, incremental housing, and informal housing. Variations of this strategy account for the great majority of housing production in the developing world. (By the estimate of one author, Diane Mitlin, upwards of 80% of housing in the developing world is built this way.) The main characteristics of this process are 1) an almost complete lack of involvement on the part of formal institutions (banks, government permitting or inspections, formalized contractors or developers) 2) an incremental approach, building in stages over several years 3) household control over most aspects of the process.
Step One: provisional wood house; Step Two: house of block
This latter point means that each household, in a sense, becomes a micro housing developer. Each family acquires its own land, buys its own materials, provides its own labor or pays an informal contractor to complete the work. All of these inputs to housing require capital, which the family raises however it can – self-financing, you could call it.
As you might have guessed, the process of building housing in a low-income neighborhood of Nuevo Laredo is not exactly like building a house in, say, the suburbs of New Jersey.
To start, the order of the construction process in neighborhoods built incrementally is almost the opposite of building a new house in the U.S., as this crude comparison shows:
Typical new house in U.S.:
1. Land purchased
2. Installation of services (water, sewer, electric)
3. Paving of roads
4. Construction of home
Typical incrementally built house in low-income neighborhood of Nuevo Laredo:
1. Land purchased
2. Provisional home construction starts
3. Home construction gradually transforms into more permanent materials
4. Installation of services, usually electric and water first, then sewer later if at all.
5. Paving of roads, if at all.
Households acquire land by various means – some by purchase and some by occupation. (Purchase seems to be more the norm in Nuevo Laredo now.) Low-income families usually purchase in relatively unsettled areas on the outskirts of the city, where prices are most affordable. For many if not most families, this is likely the biggest sum of money that they have ever paid for anything in their lives. (The average salary of a factory worker here is about $2,000 dollars a year. I never heard of a plot of land costing less than $1,500 in 2008) Families often buy the land in installments, paying a downpayment to the seller and the paying the rest over several months or even several years.
Other families acquire land through occupation. This is a much longer story that would take another blog. To generalize, it means that a group of families “invades” (that’s the word they use here) a plot of uninhabited land (often owned by the city), typically on the periphery. The city often “regularizes” these settlements once they have grown into neighborhoods, eventually granting some form of legal title to the occupant.
For many families used or found materials build the first house. Those who have invaded land also use this house as a marker to stake their claim.
At this point families are landowners, but that’s about all. It is typically land without services – no electricity, no sewer, no water hookups, definitely no cable or internet. Often they have a bill of sale or some proof of an exchange of ownership, but less frequently have an actual title to the land. This is a longer story of informal land divisions that I will get to in another post if I can.
María, a Kiva client and single mother, is one example of how families persistently and progressively build up their home over time. Her parents acquired the land through occupation about 13 yrs ago, a 7X20 meter (about 23X65 feet) plot in a neighborhood that was basically monte — desert brush — at the time of occupation. Their first step was to build a single room house out of wood. This is a typical of families with limited capital; they often build this first part of the house out of found materials or buy used wood and materials at one of the many pulgas (flea markets) in the city. The variety of materials that you see is impressive: old pallets, sheet metal, big cans pounded flat, old signs, the works. Why is this the first step? Two main reasons: some families can afford to pay rent for a more decent place, but paying rent means not being able to save to build a house. So people build a provisional house, live there, save on rent, and can put away some money to build a “casa de material” – a house of more permanent materials.
In the case of María, after four years of being on the land, the city began to install water lines, followed by electric. After about five years she and her family had saved enough to begin building a second room made of wood. Many families at this point do not yet have the resources to put down a floor, and the roof is often made of makeshift materials like second hand plywood and sheet metal. After this point María began saving up to build the first room of permanent materials..
Three years later María applied for and received her first housing loan from FVP, for $8,000 pesos (about $800 dollars). María combined this loan with her own savings to start building the first structure of new concrete block, a two room house behind the original wooden house. (By this point, she said, the original wooden house was already in bad shape.) María told me it would have probably taken her at least another 1-2 years to put together the money to build this first phase of the concrete block house if she had not received the loan.
At FVP, this is often the point at which housing microfinance enters the scene as a source of funds for these “microdevelopers” of housing i.e. when families are already addressing their housing needs, but need to access capital to move their projects forward more quickly. Not unlike the way that microfinance capital can unlock the potential of microentrepreneurs, housing microfinance helps to loosen the bottleneck of capital that can impede housing improvements.
This family bought a "piece of the desert" 15 years ago, built a small wooden house, which they slowly transformed into a two bedroom house of concrete block, using their own savings and three loans from FVP (the last one was Kiva capital).
Based what I have seen as a Kiva Fellow at FVP, here are some major reasons why I think housing microfinance is a valuable tool in a housing context like Nuevo Laredo:
1. Households are already accustomed to improving their homes in stages, so small loans complement this incremental approach. Having a small loan – in the case of FVP usually between $500 and $2,000 – allows families to move forward with improvements and then pay back the capital at a pace that they can handle. It is a like a miniature home improvement loan, tailored to a strategy of progressive construction.
2. The requirements for the loans are flexible – alternative proofs of land ownership are accepted, and the land itself does not serve as the collateral for the loan. (The guaranty on the loan comes from a friend or family member who serves as a kind of co-signer.) Loan officers understand have learned how to determine the income of self-employed or informal sector employees, recognizing that just because they don’t have paystubs does not mean that they don’t have incomes.
3. This capital allows households to make improvements at a much faster pace. This means that families get to live in healthier, safer, more comfortable conditions sooner than would have been possible without a loan. The potential positive ripple effects, in my view, are numerous.
4. Housing microloans enable households to make improvements that require a large infusion of capital and cannot be completed incrementally. For instance, a family can gradually build four walls for a new house, but you need to pour the concrete roof all at once. Many families use a loan for relatively big ticket items that are hard (or much more expensive) to achieve incrementally. Having more capital also means being able to buy more in bulk, get better prices, and get more brick for your buck, so to speak.
5. A housing loan contributes to the creation of an asset that helps to stabilize the family in the present and into the future: a home. Having a house of one’s own means not having to pay rent – and being able to save for other purposes. This asset is probably the greatest representation of wealth that the family has, and, theoretically, could be sold or serve as collateral for a loan in the future. Even if a weak housing market means that the house does not necessarily have a high exchange value, it has a high use value for families, both in the present and a patrimony for their children.
6. Improvements in housing conditions can have positive economic multiplier effects. Of the businesses I visited (about 50) 75% were located in the home of the entrepreneur, ranging from a tailor to a small grocery store to a tortillería. Many families have told me that they had always thought about starting up their own business, but they were waiting to have their own home to be able to do it. Home improvement loans can thus play a role, direct or indirect, in fostering the conditions to start or to expand home businesses.
To continue with the story of María: after finishing the first phase of the two room house, she continued to save, and just completed the two room house by combining Kiva loan capital (a second loan of $1,000) with these savings. It took thirteen years to go from blank land to a house of permanent materials. The newly-inhabited house looks great, stuccoed smoothly and painted a peach color. Right in front of it stands the bare frame of their original makeshift wooden house, a testament to how far they have come. She now uses the second room made of wood for her hair salon, which she started with her sister a few years ago. She makes enough income from the salon to support herself and her three sons, who play under the wooden structure that was their home when they were toddlers. She is thinking of applying for another loan to put up walls around the rear of her property and a new roof on this original structure, to provide a shady place for her children to play. All of this would have been harder to achieve and much slower, María and other families have told me, without having access to microfinance capital.
Stories like María’s are important because they describe the housing process for a large part of the population in Mexico and the developing world: progressive, incremental, largely informal. The way that houses, neighborhoods, and cities evolve has a lot to do with the way that low-income families build progressively in reaction to a housing market that has not offered them many other options. It is easy to look at the first steps some of these houses – scrabbled together plywood, half-built block walls – and think that they are constructed in a helter-skelter manner. To the contrary, there is, in fact, a system by which people improve their housing and a pattern to their resourcefulness. Housing microfinance can play an important contributing role in this system, serving as a powerful resource for these “micro-developers”. It loosens up the blockage of capital that can prevent improvements from moving forward, clearing the way for families who already know how to be resourceful in addressing their housing needs.
Mama’s Left Leg
Squeezing people into taxis is par for the course in Cameroon. As cabs approach, you shout your destination to the driver and if you get the nod you hop in. If there are already three in the back, no matter, there’s room for one more. If there are two in the front, again, no problem: a third person can fit in – roughly positioned astraddle the gear stick (US English: stick shift).
Leaving Bamenda to make the journey to the small town of Belo, I felt a certain smugness at having bagged the front seat of the taxi. A medium-sized (US English: very small) 1980s Toyota Corolla with a broken windscreen it might have been, but at least I had my own seat.
Cars depart the town’s ‘motor park’ (a muddy square with much transport activity) only when fully occupied. However, I’d rather failed to appreciate what this would mean, having made a naïve presumption that longer-distance transport might be a little more comfortable than the round-town variety.
Time passed as I chatted outside with the driver, an agreeable chap despite his keen support of Manchester United Football Club. One, two, three got in the back. The drizzle turned to downpour, so I climbed into my big comfy seat and prepared for the attractive scenery I’d been told the journey would bring.
But it wasn’t yet time to leave. A young woman with (school age) child rocked up and squeezed into the back. The old lady holding a large plastic box of starchy-looking substance grumbled loudly in Pigeon English as she folded an arm somewhere. I began to feel rather guilty about my luxury tourist’s seat.
At least I did – until the appearance of a petit Cameroonian woman in a rather nice gold dress. Bugger. I knew six weren’t going to fit in the back, so I moved up, resigned to an hour in the gear stick position. But some chap directed that I should get out – Mama (as older Cameroonian woman are respectfully called) was to sit there. I made sure I shared a good section of my seat. Rather a squash.
By this point, there was no sign of my Manchester United supporting pal. A new driver instead took position and started the engine. A big, thick-set man, he filled out the remaining third of the front seats with ease. Until he got out. And another man got in. But rather than being yet another new cabbie, this man’s unfortunate destiny was to occupy the seat roughly underneath the driver, astraddle both the gear stick and Mama’s left leg.
I think this may well be the worst seat in Cameroonian taxis. However, as I have only been here a couple of weeks I wonder if this may prove a hasty assertion.
Click here to see if any GHAPE borrowers in Cameroon are currently fundraising on Kiva.
Alternatively click here to view other African loans you can support.
A Study in Contrasts
Dar es Salaam. The city is an assault on the senses. Flying into Nyerere International airport, my first glimpse of Tanzania, and indeed of Africa, is incredibly beautiful – mile upon mile of azure ocean clings alluringly to a sandy coastline, clusters of coconut trees spring up from between houses with maroon and blue roofs, and an incredible profusion of blood red hibiscus infuse the entire landscape with color and vibrancy. Quite simply, it is breathtaking. Little wonder then that the city’s name translates into ‘abode of peace’ in Arabic, named so by Arab sailors who arrived here after months on the Indian Ocean to be greeted by pleasant weather (for most of the year!), fertile land, and incredibly hospitable locals.
Mambo from Dar es Salaam! My name is Nabomita and I am fortunate enough to be spending the next few months working at SELFINA (Sero Lease and Finance Ltd.) here in Dar. Dr. Victoria Kisyombe founded SELFINA in 2002 with the goal of providing Tanzanian women, many of whom are excluded from land and asset ownership due to local customs and traditions, with access to micro-credit. Most of SELFINA’s customers use their loans to start or infuse fresh capital into small businesses. In an economy where unfortunately even college graduates find it an uphill task to find gainful employment, these loans provide women with the opportunity for self-employment and the ability to support their families.
SELFINA’s office is located just off of Old Bagomoyo road, in the Mikocheni B area of the city. The impression that one is left with driving down Old Bagomoyo road, besides the vista of the ocean within walking distance, is of imposing ten feet tall padlocked gates and hired security shielding stately mansions and the people who live in them from the hoi polloi on the street. One could be forgiven for thinking that much of the city’s population lives sequestered behind barricades in absolute luxury.
This could not be further from reality. My visit to a client this week took me into the heart of the Vingunguti Miembeni settlement and showed me just how humbly many Tanzanians live. To get to Vinunguti, one must take a dala-dala or local bus down Uhuru road and then walk about a mile to the entrance of the settlement. Our client, Neema Damasi, met us at the entrance and led us through the confusing maze of winding streets that led to her general store. To call these dirt paths ‘streets’ is misleading. With no concession to modern city planning, the paths slope up and down, and around at random. No more than a foot wide at any point, people walk through them in single file. During the rainy season, the lack of drainage means that the dirt road is flooded with not just mud but also with overflowing sewage and excreta from outdoor latrines. Not surprisingly, the settlement recorded 130 cases of cholera outbreak in 2003 (the last year for which I was able to find credible data). All along the paths and in sudden clearings that one stumbles across, people have built their homes. A vast majority of these are made of wood and have tin roofs, but a few people are fortunate enough to be able to afford concrete. Despite having 14 deep wells dug by the government and other private companies, most of the water is saline and unfit for consumption. Drinking water is supplied by the Water and Sanitation Authority twice a week at midnight. Residents with taps at home are able to store the water in buckets for later consumption, while others must purchase drinking water from vendors. 77% of the population of the settlement earns less than 60,000 Tanzanian Shilling or $52 per month. With almost 69,000 people (2002 census) crammed into an area of 32 hectares (less than 1/10th of a square mile), Vingunguti is one of Africa’s urban ghettos. Despite being only fifteen miles inland from Old Bagomoyo road, it is a completely different world in here. Walking into this was an overwhelming and humbling experience, as I’m sure you can imagine. I had seen poverty before but not on this scale, and definitely not this up close and personal.
Our client Neema Damasi rents a small store deep in the heart of Vingunguti from which she runs a grocery business. Earlier this year, she was selling traditional African cloth on the streets for extra income. Prior to that, she ran a tailoring business in 2006. Because up to 53% of Vingunguti’s population is informally employed in small businesses and petty trading, it is not uncommon to switch your trade fairly often. If landlords can find someone to pay more rent on your store than you currently do, you can be evicted – contract or not. Neema is actually doing very well when compared to the average resident of her neighborhood. She requested a loan of 300,000 Tanzanian Shilling from SELFINA in January of this year in order to purchase more fabric in wholsesale for her cloth business. When business did not pick up after a couple of months and a store became available inside Vingungiti, Neema sold off her fabric inventory and used this money to pay rent for and stock her grocery store. Her store sells everything from rice and beans to toothpaste and batteries – given the unusually high population density of Vingunguti and the universal applicability of her wares, business is doing well. During the thirty minutes we spent at her store, she made three sales. True, one of them was selling about a big ladle-full of cooking oil to a customer for 10 cents (probably just sufficient to cook that evening’s meal and all that the woman could afford), but small sales add up. Neema is now earning about 200,000 Shilling ($172) a month from her business, almost four times what 80% of her neighbors make. Only 7% of Vingunguti’s population earns over 100,000 Shilling a month, so she is one of the wealthiest in her area.
Neema’s husband runs another grocery store inside Vingunguti and I am hopeful that between them, they earn enough to provide for their three children and the fourth on its way.
I must admit that one of my concerns prior to coming into the field was that I would find that microfinance was not really helping the poorest of the poor, that it was not effectively reaching those who most needed access to credit. Sitting in the comfortable SELFINA office during my first week and observing clients coming in to make monthly payments did not exactly allay my fears – these women did not look desperately poor to me. After visiting Neema and noticing the marked difference between her and her neighbors, I have become much more convinced of the power of small amounts of capital to make a huge difference. I have also had the opportunity to visit other clients and seen how they live – often as many as six people to a single bare room with no electricity and running water. Conversing with them has revealed that most of them wear their best clothes, take two or more dala-dalas, and spend upto three hours commuting to the SELFINA office every month to make their loan repayments. THIS is how desperate they are for credit. In a society where there are not very many opportunities for formal employment, these women must carve out their own paths to a livelihood. For many, Dar es Salaam does not quite live up to the meaning behind its name, but organizations like SELFINA are doing a fantastic job to try and change that.
To support SELFINA and women like Neema Damasi, please click here:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=90&status=All&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb
New businesses are constantly being added so please check back frequently!
P.S. – I have attached a picture of Neema Damasi and her grocery store, as well as a picture of an adorable and precocious young Vinunguti resident who posed and pranced like a model, as she demanded that I photograph her.
Targeting the Poorest of the Poor
In Cambodia, AMK has the lowest average loan balance per borrower. According to MIXMarket, AMK’s average balance at the end of 2007 was $86 per borrower. To put that in perspective the second lowest was AMRET at $164, which is nearly 90% higher. HKL, Credit MFI, and Maxima (the other three Cambodian MFIs working with Kiva) have an average loan balance of $603, $564, and $514 respectively. Currently, 93.4% of AMK’s loans are below $300 and their average loan balance is now $114. AMK chooses to keep their average loan balance low. They limit individual loans to $500 and they limit the amount an individual can take out as part of a group loan to $150. The reason they do this is because of their mission statement:
“To help large numbers of poor in Cambodia to improve their livelihood options through the sustainable delivery of appropriate and viable microfinance services”
In my last blog post I mentioned how most MFIs were trying to increase their average loan balances to improve their efficiency. AMK, on the other hand, has created a business model that relies more on lending to as many clients as they can. This allows them to use their capital to reach the poorest villagers in Cambodia. The data shows that this business model is working. In 2007, their loan portfolio started at $5 million dollars and grew to over $10 million. From this they made a net income of $823,222 and their return on assets was 9%, which is beyond incredible considering the average loan size. Also, I should mention that AMK is currently owned by Concern Worldwide and Concern Worldwide UK. They have returned all of the profits to AMK as retained earnings, so all the money earned by AMK is reinvested back into the business.
Road in Toek Noem Village
AMK, just like every financial institution in the world right now, is having a hard time getting additional capital because of the credit crunch. Because of this, they are hoping to raise the percentage of their loan portfolio that comes from Kiva. Right now it is about 2.6%. For awhile AMK had limited the number of group loans they were posting because it was too difficult to keep track of them so they could report payments to Kiva. Group loans are usually a mix of monthly-installment loans, end-of-term loans, and credit line loans, so each group loan would have to have payments manually reported after each clients payments were tracked. This was a shame because the group loans are AMK’s best way of reaching the poorest villagers in Cambodia. Group loans can now easily be tracked with the new loan tracker I created for AMK, so they are now going to increase the number of group loans they post on Kiva. You can find them by looking at the loans with the smallest loan size per entrepreneur that are currently fundraising on Kiva.
If you really love what AMK is doing in Cambodia you should join the AMK Fan Club, a Kiva Lending Group which is part of the new Kiva that is about to be rolled out very soon. If you can’t wait leave your e-mail address as a comment and I’ll invite you to the group!
NEW DISCOVERY!!! Microfinance before Grameen
Well, maybe I’m not the first to discover that microfinance existed in Cameroon before the Grameen bank was founded in India or before Mohammed Yunnus got the Nobel Prize, but I felt like I had when I stumbled upon Njangi while talking to some friends over the weekend. The young people who I’ve met in Cameroon are all very intelligent and informed. The standard of education is excellent and radio commercials advertising excellent classroom facilities for young children frequent the radio. Conversation amongst the teens most often centers on grades from the last semester and I’ve yet to meet someone my age who does not plan to pursue at least one masters degree before finishing their education. At the same time that people generally agree here that you must get an advanced degree, cynicism surrounding job prospects is rampant. They swear that no one can achieve a decent position within a company unless they’ve got connections or they’re embezzling. In one of these conversations about the sad state of the nation, I asked my friends why it was that they still pursued advanced degrees and how it was possible for their parents, with families of five to nine children, to sponsor children over twenty years of school. It is a struggle for my family to support just me in college and there are only two children in my family. They said “Njangi!” and then started laughing.
Njangi, as I found out, is microfinance on a smaller scale. Groups of friends, neighbors, mothers of school-age children or motorcycle-driving men get together and pool money that they can then have access to for activities related to the mission statement of the group. Some of these groups have grown into such large and established institutions that credit unions sprouted from their meetings. These groups assign treasurers and leaders. They are based not only on finances but also on community and friendship. The trust amongst the members and the knowledge that without the Njangi groups, life would be a lot harder, brings honesty into the groups. My friends say their mothers get money for schooling, feeding the household and supporting the church all through their Njangi groups. It was a debate amongst them whether Njangi could be the sole source of income, but they pointed out that people “playing” Njangi could borrow from one Njangi and contribute to another and so on and so forth, in order to have access to loans from many sources. In terms of accountancy, I think this strategy is a little risky, but if people can manage paying everyone back in the end, I guess there is no problem. My friends have said that their friends, parents and grandparents all play Njangi, making it the main source of financing in the nation. It has been going on for generations from what I can tell. Apparently, it is illegal in Cameroonian law because it is tax-free and hard to track by the government, yet an estimated 7.5 out of all 15 million Cameroonians play and many towns wouldn’t survive without them. I thought I had stumbled upon some secret that would make a name for me in anthropology. Of course, upon minimal internet research, I found that some people had written on the subject before. One of my friends begrudgingly acknowledged that is was due to the low value that Cameroonian scholars place on publishing that led to the Nobel prize won by Yunnus. “If Cameroonians wrote anything down, we could win awards for the things we have been doing for years, but we don’t write!”
I sought to pursue the topic further. I asked my GHAPE colleagues what information they had about Njangi and found that our own office has its own Njangi! Some of the staff take part in up to five Njangi’s and the values can run up to 20,000 FCFA ($50 USD) contribution per month, which is 40% of their 50,000 FCFA ($125 USD) monthly salary. One of my colleagues who partakes in five Njangi groups explained the financial and scheduling obligations of each Njangi to me.
|
Njangi Group |
FCFA Contribution |
USD Conversion |
% of Annual Income, 50K FCFA |
|
GHAPE |
11,000 FCFA/month |
$27.50 USD |
22% |
|
Cow Njangi* |
30,000 FCFA/year |
$75 USD |
5% |
|
Neighborhood |
Min. 500 FCFA/week |
$1.25 USD |
Min. 4.3% |
|
Father’s Njangi |
5,000 FCFA/week |
$12.50 USD |
43.33% |
|
Njangi #5 |
2,000 FCFA/week |
$5 USD |
17.33% |
|
Total per annum |
552,000 FCFA |
$1,380 USD |
91.96% |
*Cow Njangi pools 20 members annual contributions of 30,000 into a collective fund that buys cows, rice, and palm oil at the end of the year to distribute equally amongst all members. I assume it’s called “Cow” because that’s the largest purchase and main attraction/focus of the group.
The obligations and terms of withdrawal are different within each Njangi. Despite the calculations, the Njangi membership is worth-while, say the Cameroonians I’ve asked. While a meager 50,000 FCFA ($125 USD) per month barely covers basic needs, taking 92% out of the salary seems like a HUGE chunk. At times, my colleagues don’t have an extra 200 FCFA ($0.50 USD) in their budget to eat lunch. What an Njangi offers in a society with no social safety-net, however, is a small sense of security. If a member needs emergency funds or many hundreds of thousands of FCFA, they would need many months to amass that value. Educational fees would not be a possibility without this access to capital. It relies largely on good-will and social equity which makes it such an interesting field of study.
Financial Instruments advertised on one local credit union poster
The GHAPE office Njangi has 12 members, despite there being only 8 people who work in the office. This is because people can enter the Njangi under multiple names, as long as they make monthly contributions per name. The single women in the office have multiple names because they don’t have families and they rely on their boyfriends for the majority of their expenses. Collectively, the GHAPE office offers 10,000 FCFA ($25 USD) of each members’ contribution to a pre-designated beneficiary each month. The remaining 1000 FCFA ($2.50 USD) is pooled into the emergency fund that can be borrowed from, but must be repaid with 15% interest. This is so interesting to me because it is becoming more and more apparent that EVERYONE relies on Njangi. As I mentioned earlier, some of the Njangi’s have grown so large that they are now credit unions and one of the advertised financial instruments offered is Njangi financing. Now that I’ve heard about Njangi, it seems to be popping up everywhere and every new person I question has something to say about it. I just can’t express how interested I am in this. I wish I had another whole Fellowship to study Njangi. Hopefully more extensive research can be done in the field in the near future. <http://www.kiva.org/about/aboutPartner?id=40>
Irresponsible Lending – Some Lessons
I am sitting in the modest headquarters of GHAPE in Bamenda, north west Cameroon.
I am surrounded by the membership books of some of the organisation’s small borrowers, detailing their loan totals and bi-monthly repayments. There is no column for defaults. When the women (it is mostly women) meet to make their regular contributions they stay in the room until the right amount of money has been collected. If someone cannot make their payment then the others have to make up the difference. But they all know each other and it’s never good to be embarrassed in front of your neighbours.
Across the office, Eric is counting the notes and coins collected this morning. And on the radio they are talking, appropriately, about loan defaults. But not in microfinance. It’s the BBC World Service and they are discussing the inadequacies of financial regulation in the West and the embarrassment of Northern Rock, the bank which had to be rescued by the UK government.
It rather got me thinking. Perhaps I could organise a fact finding mission to GHAPE’s offices for the battered bosses of Britain’s Financial Services Authority. I’m sure they could learn a few lessons.
Click here to see if any GHAPE borrowers in Cameroon are currently fundraising on Kiva.
Alternatively click here to view other African loans you can support.
To Begin
Mornings, always one rooster does not know the time of day. As is customary in the neighborhood, most chickens start calling between five and six – but renegade number one is early. 4:30, last time I checked.
To be sure, were it not for the roosters I am guaranteed to wake soon after. Shortly after six the children start to make pattering noises outside my door, as they run out to wash and brush and use the outhouse, and to heat the water kettle for the plastic basin in the washroom. There are four of them – aged 7, 7, 9, 12 – plus an assortment of relatives. School starts early in the neighborhood, and they must all start walking by seven.
These are the children of a colleague, with whom I have been staying since I arrived in Rwanda. Their neighborhood lies 10 kilometers outside Kigali, near the military camp. Rwanda being the land of the mille collines, the thousand hills, our house opens onto a road with a far view of the surrounding peaks and valleys, which in the mornings are liquid with fog. With the west wind and an uncertain sun in the banana leaves it is as beautiful as you can imagine.
My adoptive family is quite a well-off one – they have a car, a few servants, a house under renovation – by no means poor when compared to the 60% of the Rwandan population under poverty line. Simplistically, poverty line here goes by the dollar-a-day standard, which you can benchmark roughly to a liter of milk, two bottles of water, or a half-pound of passion fruit. Meals, then, are necessarily starchy in composition – boiled bananas, rice, beans, potatoes – limited meat.
When I have eaten breakfast, I walk down the dirt road towards the main intersection where a great number of people wait, on toe like a swarm of runners at the starting block. They must scramble to get onto a public taxi, one of the local mini-buses that shuttle between town and the local residences. I am of course no match – you will perhaps permit me the luxury of hiring a motorbike to work, which is too a means of public transport in these parts.
Yesterday my colleague Jean and I made our first expedition into the field, which has given me a new appreciation for dust. In the upcoming weeks we will be venturing further afield – so more to come.
–Kathy
I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar
When I first began working in Washington D.C. on Capitol Hill, my initial impression was horror that the country was being run by a bunch of 20-somethings. At 23, I was solidly within the median age range and even felt old when I saw peers walking around with short skirts, finding myself thinking “how inappropriate!” It didn’t take me long to become accustomed to the age range of Hill staffers and soon it even made sense to me that they’d all be so young. The hours were grueling, the work was exhausting, and without energy, enthusiasm, and a youth-like belief in our country a person could not be sustained to carry out his or her tasks.
On my first day at one of BRAC’s branches I had a similar moment of shock at the young faces of the staff. In all of the books I’ve read about microfinance and all of the anecdotes I’d heard through the Fellows Blog and other avenues, I had created an image in my head of a wise, 50-something person distributing loans to the poor, compassionately working to help them lift themselves out of poverty. While the loan officers I’ve met are certainly compassionate, they are not at all 50*. At the first branch I met exclusively 20-somethings. Thinking it might be an anomaly, I visited a second branch only to find more of the same. So far all of the loan officers I’ve met have been young, energetic, driven 20-something women. As one of those myself, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know these women and seeing what brought them to this job. The more I learn about them and their work, the more I understand why I was so wrong to have been surprised.
Much like Capitol Hill, the work of a loan officer requires massive stores of energy. Arriving at work at 7:00am daily and leaving no earlier than 6:00pm, a loan officer spends, on average, the first 5 hours of every day walking on dirt and sand roads, up hills and over streams to meet with her clients. When she returns to the office, she fills out mountains of paperwork documenting the transactions that took place in the field. As MFI branches are often located in remote locations–even those branches around the city–loan officers frequently have long commutes in the overcrowded daladalas to and from work each day. It is not uncommon for them to spend more than an hour and a half in each direction.
One loan officer mentioned to me that she is getting married in November and when she does, she is not sure she’ll be able to work at this job anymore. She says her husband won’t want her working such long hours, and as she starts a family she will have to be home more than this job allows. Worried that I would judge her for this assertion, she quickly added that “You don’t know Africa–it’s different here than America. My husband will not want me to work so much. I want to start a family.” She is right that I have a lot to learn about Africa, but the idea that the job would not be conducive to starting a family does not make me look at Africa’s culture as chauvinistic. On Capitol Hill I encountered much of the same thing (now, whether or not the Hill’s culture is chauvinistic is a different matter). When visitors would marvel at the youth surrounding them in the office my simple explanation was that we have to be young–that if we had families we could never do all that is required of us here. For a loan officer, the same is true.
Meeting these loan officers, the dual purpose that MFIs serve has been illuminated to me. The women (BRAC employees almost exclusively female loan officers–this may differ at other MFIs) are bright and ambitious. Some have finished their A-levels and are preparing for university while others hold Bachelors degrees. All of them care about Tanzania and want to stay in the country but the universal chorus is that finding a good job in Tanzania is difficult. Some of them came upon their work not necessarily out of a deep-seeded passion for microfinance but more practically as a means to make a living and have a good job. They all agree that their positions with BRAC are good for them and they’re happy to have a stable income with a respectable organization. While the power of microfinance may not have been their first reason for coming to BRAC, their investment in and compassion for the women they serve is obvious. BRAC, then, is not only providing poor people with access to capital, but it is creating jobs (several hundred throughout the country) for Tanzania’s brightest young women. As it does so, BRAC is promoting the country’s stability and future success from multiple levels of affluence, helping women from all backgrounds work to earn a living.
*Note to all of the 50-somethings reading this: I am not calling you old. Please take to heart my image of you as wise and ignore any other possible readings of this post.
To see BRAC’s currently fundraising loans, click here.
Patan Business and Professional Women Photos
A few of P-BPW’s borrowers.
A regular borrower’s group meeting.
Borrowers making payments with loan officer.
Ms. Rita
Field visits are by far the best part about being a Kiva Fellow. You’re given the opportunity to hop on a motorbike, hike up a village trail, and actually see the impact of a Kiva loan firsthand.
While this is indeed an incredible experience, after a few weeks of checking in on chicken farmers and vegetable vendors, you begin to think you’ve seen the extent of microfinance’s impact: a few new chickens or vegetables, a small increase in profit margins, etc.
But then you meet someone like Ms. Rita…
Ms. Rita Bashnet lives in the village of Bhatkepati, a small rural development on the outskirts of the Kathmandu Valley. Five years ago, Ms. Rita took her first loan of NRs. 10,000 (USD $150) and purchased some extra seed and fertilizer in the hopes of expanding her small vegetable patch. With the profits from this initial investment and a second loan from Patan Business and Professional Women (they offer a graduated loan program), she then purchased her first dairy cow.
Most dairy cows in Nepal give about 6 liters of milk per day. At about USD $0.50 per liter, Ms. Bashnet hoped that this additional revenue would allow her to further diversify her family’s income. The investment paid off and, with her small savings and the funds provided by the new cow, Ms. Rita purchased a van for her husband, which he now uses to ferry passengers from the village to the more central urban areas of the capital.
From an initial loan of USD $150, Ms. Rita had managed to expand her vegetable operation, purchase a cow, and provide her husband with a job. But Ms. Rita still had more plans…
Kathmandu has long been plagued by fuel shortages that force people to wait up to three weeks for a single cylinder of cooking gas. With deforestation a serious concern throughout the country, many are forced to either further contribute to this environmental problem or use fuel sources such as small brush and trash that are both inefficient and fill small, poorly ventilated homes with heavy black smoke. After hearing about a program that subsidized the installation of methane gas storage tanks, Ms. Rita took another loan and applied for the program. With this new system, she is now able to capture the valuable gas released from her cow’s waste in a simple controlled-release storage tank. Today she no longer purchases gas from the city and can even sell some during times of shortage. With a smart investment, Ms. Rita was able to meet her own energy needs while increasing the income-generating potential of her previous investment.
With her gardens producing healthy vegetables, her husband employed, and her cow producing valuable milk and fuel, Ms. Rita recently took a final loan of NRs. 30,000 (USD $475). This loan has been used to purchase a high-yielding jersey cow that Ms. Rita reports is now producing a whopping 20+ liters of milk each day. This new investment has already proven so fruitful that the Bashnet family has begun construction on a new home on their property.
Ms. Rita exemplifies the potential of microfinance. A combination of access to capital and strategic investment has allowed her and her family to drastically improve their economic situation in a short five years. On the day I visited her farm, she fed me cucumber from her fields, milk (heated on her methane stove) from her new cow, and gave me a tour of her nearly-completed home.
See photos below:
Ms. Rita's old home.
The Bashnet family.
Playing Catch Up.
I should have been a better blogger.
After two months in the field as a Kiva Fellow, I have now returned home to speedy internet, reliable electricity, and a slightly more predictable daily schedule. So, from my comfortable desk with my cup of coffee, I will now try to make up for a less than prolific blogging history.
It can be hard to convey the sights, sounds, challenges, and small victories that are experienced in the field, but here I will attempt to pass along a few stories that might give others a better understanding of Kiva Fellows and the field partners that so kindly put up with us.
Waiting for that elusive internet connection...
During my fellowship, I was posted in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I worked with Kiva’s first and only Nepali field partner, Patan Business and Professional Women. Over the course of two months I completed 150+ field visits and had the opportunity to experience and document the success of this small, but quickly growing, MFI.
In these catch up blogs, I will…
1) Present photo and video documentation of borrower group meetings and individual interviews.
2) Present a few short stories that demonstrate both the success and challenges of microfinance in Nepal.
3) Present a small picture of what it’s like to live and work in Kathmandu.
Coming soon….
Bolivin´ at high altitude
During Kiva orientation, we each had to name our biggest fears about the fellowship. I said I was nervous about not fitting in—I’d learned to adapt pretty well while living in Chile for a year and on my best day I could pass for Chilean, but I knew living in Bolivia would be another story. As soon as I set foot in El Alto, however, I realized how silly my worries were as this fear was immediately eclipsed by another—the constant feeling that I was about to be run over by a minibus.
El Alto is a really vibrant, mostly indigenous Aymara city on a plateau above the valley of La Paz. The neighborhood I’m living in is called La Ceja (“the eyebrow”) because it’s perched right on the rim, about to spill into the city valley. I’ve never seen so much life packed into so little space before—virtually all of my needs can be met without going outside of the two square-block radius around my hostel. Buses to anywhere in Bolivia, international flights, four different microfinance banks and at least one regular bank, quinoa juice, whole limbs of animals in jerky form, you name it. Like Cara and Chantal, I’ve found that Spanish only gets me so far here. Many alteños, especially older folks and recent migrants, speak Spanish as a second language to Aymara. I had hoped to be really good at picking up Aymara, but as it turns out I’m totally useless.
At home in the U.S., two of my tried-and-true maxims are “I’ll take whatever’s cheapest” and “They wouldn’t sell me that if it were really dangerous.” However, after a month in Bolivia (and a handful of broken down buses, a bout with food poisoning and an attempted trip up a narrow mountain road in a snowstorm on a minibus with no snow tires), my mom will be happy to hear that I’ve reluctantly retired these maxims and replaced them with “Is this really a good idea?” There doesn’t seem to be a regulatory agency for much of anything in Bolivia, which leads to delightful labeling like that of my favorite Bolivian beer, El Inca: “An iron-laden beer tonic recommended by the most renowned doctors for anemic, weak and convalescent persons.” Another one of my favorite claims was by a boy on the bus from Oruro to La Paz who was selling powdered maca (a Bolivian root vegetable)—“Do you feel tired? Weak? Jittery? Anxious? Lackluster? Señores y señoras, I have the answer. Maca, señores y señoras, will cure what ails you. Maca is the most potent vegetable known to humanity. Señores y señoras, maca prevents osteoporosis and cancer. It cures anemia, señores y señoras. It is a stimulant, señores y señoras; it is a tranquilizer. It cures impotence, señores y señoras—maca has been called the Bolivian Viagra by international experts. Señores y señoras, maca is used by NASA scientists in the United States to ensure the vitality and heartiness of their space astronauts. And I’m here to offer you, señores y señoras, three envelopes of miraculous maca for just 30 bolivianos.”
One morning, about two weeks ago, I awoke and walked outside my room at the hostel where I’m staying, only to nearly walk into a giant hole with a two-story drop (pictured). Confused, I asked the nice young guy at the front desk what was with the giant hole outside my room. “Oh, that—just wanted to let some more light in,” he replied, equally confused as to why I would ask a question like that.
Letting the light in
There’s a lot of improvisation in everyday life here – which can be fun or frustrating, depending on the circumstances – and serves as a continuous reminder of just how orderly and predictable my life usually is. Last week, for example, we were heading back to El Alto from La Paz, and halfway there the driver told us we couldn’t go any further because the alteños had taken to the streets in an impromptu pro-Evo rally. So we got out and walked along the shoulder. Along the way, we noticed that an awful lot of drivers had gotten out of their cars and were taking apart the highway median by hand so that they could turn their cars around—this was a standard, sturdy metal freeway median with big bolts the size of my fist! It never would have occurred to me that such a thing could be taken apart by hand, much less that this was the logical solution to being stuck in traffic. But when in Rome (or El Alto)…
All in all, Bolivia has been a great experience and quite the adventure. I’ve really enjoyed my first week working with AgroCapital, my MFI, and have been really impressed by the hard work of both the loan officers and the clients I’ve met with. I was also lucky enough to meet up with Partner Development Specialist Dan, retired Kiva Fellow Cara and her husband Engineer Sam in La Paz—it was great to see some familiar faces.
Looking forward to writing more soon!
To see all AgroCapital clients currently fundraising on Kiva, click here
Three border crossings
The border by foot
There are two bridges that cross the river between Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, called Bridge One and Bridge Two. They have other names, if you look at the signs more closely, something like Bridge of Fraternity and Solidarity or International Friendship Bridge. But everyone here seems to refer to them by their numbers. On a recent Friday night I was one of the only people crossing Bridge One on my way to Laredo, passing a line of informal merchants who looked bored and ready to go home. The last of these was an accordion player propped up sleepily against the bridge rail, the hat at his feet bearing barely any change. As soon as he saw me approaching he started pumping out a Mexican love song, and then abruptly stopped after I walked by him. Fleeting love, I suspect.
When I approached the end of the bridge it became clear that there was a crowd, a line of people and families in that linear pose of conversation that only happens in crowded hallways and slow lines. I asked the rear guard of the line what people were waiting for, and the answer was one word: “Permiso”. Two hundred plus people were waiting for permission to get into the U.S. Nothing unusual or special, but it is hard not to feel a bit of something (guilt? empathy?) at moments like this when geopolitical realities are laid bare by long lines of real people. This was compounded by an unfortunate linguistic coincidence: I then had to make my through the crowd saying con permiso, “excuse me” in Spanish but literally meaning “with permission.” Kind of embarrassing.
By the end I started to say perdón, but by that point it just seemed like an admission of guilt: pardon me.
The Border Patrol officer on the other side looked quickly at my passport and asked me what I was doing “over there”. I briefly told him where I was working. He then asked me how crime was these days “over there,” and a couple more “over there” questions. He was talking about it as if it were a town somewhere in Spain or in Puerto Rico. We were standing about 200 yards from “over there”, mind you.
I had a desire to take him by the hand, lead him over to the line of people waiting for permiso, have a short conversation with each of them to see what they had to say about “over there”, walk across the bridge (pointing out its short length and the pleasant river breezes) and then treat him to tacos in Mexico.
The border by water
I remarked in my first posting that the river that acts as the U.S. – Mexico border seemed neither big (Rio Grande) nor angry (Rio Bravo), especially considering what a well-known international demarcation it is. I have since been corrected that the Spanish name translates more as “rough river.” And I have since been told that its placid look is deceiving, especially when it has just rained.
I live about 4 blocks south of the Rio Grande/Bravo. The river still looks tame to me, nevertheless, and on a hot desert day its water looks pretty inviting. I have been told by a family that lives next to the river – the second house in from the border – that even good swimmers have been drowned by the strong undercurrents. Still, would-be migrants arrive at the border wanting to cross over; some don’t have money or don’t want to pay a coyote to cross them over clandestinely, so they decide to try their luck at crossing what seems like a short distance.
Just a couple weeks ago, said the mother of this family, they pulled two men’s bodies out of the river. She called the river a “traitor” given the way that it looked so smooth but could be sinister.
I recently chatted with a Texas journalist who just did a tour of the border with the Border Patrol. (She said they’re a lot nicer than the INS, or BICE, as they’re called now.) They showed her the strategic points where people cross clandestinely. When people swim or wade across they get really muddy. So when they reach the other side, she explained, they remove their clothes and put on a change of clothes that they bring along.
At some point along the banks of the Rio Grande there is apparently a long colorful string of wet discarded clothing, forming its own kind of borderline. I’d like to take a photo of that.
Generic border shot to replace the photo of the discarded clothes that I haven't taken yet.
Border by train
When I walk home in the evening I come to a railroad track that takes commercial trains across the border, loaded with goods coming from other parts of Mexico and the world, from factories and Pacific ports. I prefer to just walk across the tracks rather than duck down into the foul-smelling underpass.
With the slow-moving train blocking the way, I stopped to talk to a guard there the other day. The train slowed down at this point in order to pass through a big sensor that could supposedly detect the heat of a human body. I noticed the signs warning you not to remain for an unnecessarily long time in the area. Never did I think that small talk could have a slightly dangerous edge to it.
Northbound train
He told me that about 1,000 train cars passed across the border rail bridge every day. Since the track across is only one lane, there was a schedule for going north and schedule for going south. He said that right before the border every northbound train was checked by U.S. Border Patrol and Customs officials, four men and two dogs on each side of the train, inspecting the contents car by car for drugs and I’m not sure what else.
As I write this, my next door neighbor’s dogs are marking their third hour of almost constant barking. Either they don’t like my music, or something serious is happening in Dogland. I wonder if the K-9 squad accepts unsolicited deliveries of mutt poodles and chihuahuas.
To see all currently fundraising loans from FVP on Kiva.org, please click here.
Abdugaffor and Me
“Hello Daniel. How are you? I remember you said that you were willing to help some of my students out with their English lessons and…well, I have a nephew whom I would like you to meet.”
It was 9am on Monday morning. I was drinking Nescafe and checking email, when the MicroInvest English teacher came in to see if I was still willing to fulfill the pledge that I had made the day before to give some of the locals a chance to chat with a native speaker. I was expecting one, possibly two hours of tea with an eager, fresh-faced teenager, a Central Asian devotee of American culture who listened to hip-hop and watched old reruns of “Friends” on Russian TV. What I got was something far different. What I got was Abdugaffor. A 38-year-old doctor-turned-“biznezman” with anti-Semitic tendencies and a David Letterman-like gap between his two front teeth, Abdugaffor did not fit my preconceived mental image of the typical English student. He was not amongst the Western-looking vanguard of Tajik youth, but was instead a well-intentioned, yet bumbling caricature of his country’s isolation from the rest of the world, earnest in his efforts to learn English and clueless about America and the world in general in a simultaneously endearing and shocking, “Borat”-esque sort of way.
Caught between two worlds , the stable Soviet society in which he had come of age and the cutthroat(sometimes literally), winner-take-all world of “kapitalizm” into which his country has been unwillingly thrust in the early 1990s, Abdugaffor is, in certain ways, representative of his generation. He was in medical school in Dushanbe when the brutal Civil War broke out and had to abandon his studies due to this violent struggle for the reigns of power in the newly formed Republic of Tajikistan. When he finally received his degree, salaries for medical professionals had plummeted to below subsistence levels, and Abdugaffor spent six years in the local hospital, working for a pittance before calling it quits. The $40 he received every month didn’t provide him with much of an incentive to stick with his chosen profession and the exigencies of life led him to a career in the bazaar, the only viable option in the constrained economic landscape of Tajikistan. Throughout the course of my time here I have interviewed dozens of individuals trained as economists, engineers, mathematicians teachers, etc., who now work baking bread, selling children’s clothing, or hawking watermelons at a stall in one of the countless markets of northern Tajikistan. The refrain of wasted talent is a constant one. In Abdujaffor’s case, however, the bazaar allowed him to discover his knack for business, and he now has three shops within Panjshanbe Bazaar, selling various food products. Business for him is good as evidenced by his silver ’97 Mercedes.
Here in Tajikstan, the Mercedes is de rigueur for anyone who can afford it, a conspicuous status symbol that doesn’t necessarily mean that one is rich, just not poor. There must be more “Mare-say-days” (as they say the name here) per capita here than anywhere else on earth, most of them coming from the Baltic states where used and damaged vehicles are repaired before being shipped off to the marketplaces of Central Asia. In this part of the world people tend to care less about performance than they do about image. As long as it has the classic emblem on the hood, what’s underneath is not much of an issue and these casualties of Europe’s roads are thus given a second life in the “’stans.”
At 5pm, the time of our first meeting, I walked out onto Sharq street, the bright and chaotic thoroughfare where MicroInvest’s offices are located, lined with a jumble of food-stalls and smoking shashlyk grills, and packed full of speeding minibuses and porters pushing their overloaded carts through the incessant pedestrian traffic. Two minutes later, a silver Mercedes pulled up to the curb, its middle-aged driver turned off the engine, excitedly leaped out of the vehicle, and vigorously shook my hand, exclaiming in slow and labored English, “Helllloooo. My name Abdugaffor. Very niiiice to meeeeet youuu.” A slightly mischievous, yet bewildered smile lit up his face as I returned the greeting, annunciating every syllable to make sure my new pupil understood me.
“I am very glad to meet you too. My name is Dan. I am from America, from Washington, the capital of the United States.”
“Ohhh…veeeery niiiice. I am very happy… very, very happy that you are teach me English. Let’s….EAT!”
What followed was a night of non-stop food accompanied by a endless cups of green tea. The first two hours were spent at the depressing Tajiki-Turkey café, a “fusion” restaurant that turned out to be a dimly lit cavern whose fading green walls probably hadn’t been painted since Stalin died. The conversation started off fairly simply. I asked Abdulgaffor what his favorite food was. “Fried…SHEEP MEAT!” he responded enthusiastically. “Yes..fried sheep meat very good..very tasty…I like. But not very good for you. I doctor so I know these things.”
“What kind of doctor are you?”
“I doctor for children. But I not very good doctor!! Hahahaha,” he said playfully poking me with his elbow and giving me that mischievous smile that was slightly disconcerting. I silently thanked God that I never had to use the Tajik healthcare system.
Next stop was meal number two, this time at Abdugaffor’s friend’s house in a distant part of the city. Plov was served, copius amounts of alcohol were consumed by our hosts, and Tajik poetry was recited. All around me were drunk doctors, practicing their poor English and telling me about the virtues of the USSR and traditional Tajik medicine.
“European Union, Soviet Union….same thing!,” the man sitting next to me exclaimed.
“We Tajiks,” one of the more inebriated ones began, “We discover everything before Europeans. The great Avicenna, one thousand years ago he say baby need to drink milk from mother…and now all Europeans say same thing. They steal from Tajiks! What do they know? Nothing, that’s what!”
The evening was a typical night out in Tajikistan, a heady stream of overwhelming and boozy hospitality, and I left late that night with Abdugaffor demanding that he pick me up after work the next day, same time, same place. Having little choice, I reluctantly agreed.
The following evening, when the Mercedes pulled up right on time, I saw that Abdugaffor had brought along one of his friends, probably to show him that he was actually meeting with a real, live American. We proceeded to my favorite restaurant in town, that wonderful oasis of deliciousness called “Zaitun,” where I had, to say the least, one of the more interesting meals of my life. Abdugaffor began by asking me questions about America such as the following gem that seemed to be taken straight from a script written by Sacha Baron Cohen: “My friend, he live in America. I think he live in Los Angeles. He tell me that he kill sheep in yard and then police give him fine.” A look of earnest confusion swept over his face and he asked “Whyyyy?!! Why not allow kill sheep in yard in America?”
After then going through a 30-minute explanation of what to do in an American airport (“You give the customs agent your passport.” “And then?” “And then he stamps it.” And then? “And then you go to collect your luggage.” “And then?……”), our comedic conversation took a turn for the worse when Abdugaffor and his friend jumped headlong into the subject of Jewish conspiracies.
“You know Putin is Jew and Medvedev, he also Jew.”
“No they’re not,” I futilely replied.
“Yes, they are! So is Bush and…what his name?… oh, Al Gore, he also Jew. You not know? America is Jewish country!”
His friend then piped up, “Why Hitler no like Jews?”
“I don’t really know, that’s a very complicated question and I don’t have time to….”
Abdugaffor immediately corrected the record. “No, no, no, Hitler not that bad. It just story…skazka like we say in Russian. It just skazka made up by the Jew.
Being a Jew myself I was left somewhat speechless at this moment, my face was bright red and my ears were hot. I had heard of people spewing such nonsense before, but it is one thing to read about it and another to experience it laid out in front of your own two eyes in a strange country, with strange people, after too much plov and green tea. My head was spinning and I needed to calm down before I did something I would regret. I just shut my mouth and waited until the tirade had subsided until I berated Abdugaffor’s ignorance in English that was spoken too quickly for him to understand. He drove me home soon afterwards, and at this point I thought that my days with Abdugaffor were over. I was wrong.
A week later I picked up my phone and was greeted by an excited voice on the other end asking, “Oh, Daniel, how are you? It Abdugaffor! You remember me?”
“Of course. How could I forget?”
“Oh, good…veeeerrrry gooood, I happy you remember me. What you do this evening? I want meet with you and practice …ENGLISH!”
Although our last meeting had left a bad taste in my mouth it was hard to say no to his boyish enthusiasm and I chalked up his previous comments to the ignorance that can come from living in such an isolated place like Tajikistan. I didn’t sense any hostility from him, just an utter lack of understanding about the world, that in many ways was a product of his environment. I decided to give him another chance, and as time passed I became less frustrated with Abdugaffor’s narrow view of things and just tried to learn what I could, observing him with a degree of detachment that helped me deal with some of his more unsavory remarks. Things went quite smoothly for several weeks, and I was beginning to think that maybe Abdugaffor was even somewhat “normal.” Needless, to say, these false illusions were shattered fairly quickly when at one of our recent dinners he dropped the following bombshell:
“Ohhh, in America you have lots of gay. It very baaaad…men sleep together, very very bad. In Tajikistan, we don’t have. I never met gay in life. In America you need to….cut them!” he says making a slashing motion with his right hand.
“Cut them? You mean kill them?! But they’re human beings!”
“Yes, yes…zarezat nado!,” he said affirming his opinion in Russian, “Need to kill the gay. Maybe you can cure them, but if not….” He left this sentence hang ominously in mid-air as he made the slashing motion again.
As I picked my jaw up out of my soup I realized that the old Abdugaffor was still alive and well and that maybe some cultural gaps were never meant to be bridged. Yet, what is so strange is that despite his incredible statements of ignorance he could not have been more kind or generous (at least to me, that is). Although I am viscerally opposed to his philosophical viewpoints and I feel that people should be held accountable for their opinions, I have learned to simply throw my hands up and accept Abdugaffor, like so many things in Tajikistan, warts and all.
Where’s my parachute!
Hello all! My name is Mark Disston and I am the newest Kiva Fellow to head to the field. I am writing this on my flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia where I will be joining Maxima Mikroheranhvatho. Maxima is one of the smallest MFIs in Cambodia but has ambitious plans to expand their services. I have the fortune of teaming up with Amy Killian, the current Fellow at Maxima, whose work most of you have likely already read about (if not, see Straws and Sandpaper – my favorite post).
The past week has been a whirlwind. In quick succession I bought my ticket to Phnom Penh, quit my job, packed and subletted my apartment, and sprinted to my plane. Whew. However the upside was that in not sleeping for the 50 hours before my flight I managed to be devoid of all jet-lag when I landed. I just slept the whole flight.
Since I haven’t done anything as of yet, there isn’t much to post. But this is what I’m excited for (no particular order):
1. Meeting the borrowers and hearing their stories – not only those about how Kiva loans helped them, but really any story they feel is important enough to share. I think these small interactions will help me learn the most about the people of Cambodia.
2. Understanding the mechanics of how Kiva loans are implemented on an operational, financial, and technical level.
3. Seeing first-hand the impact, positive and negative microfinance has in people’s lives.
4. Living in a developing country with a scary past – definitely a learning experience.
5. Meeting others who share my passion.
6. Having time to consider my own path in the future and whether living and working in the developing world is something I want to continue.
7. Discovering when I’ve returned to the U.S. how much this experience has changed me in ways I didn’t notice day-by-day until I was re-immersed back into New York culture.
Well here I go! 10 minutes out and descending into Phnom Penh. I’m really not sure what to expect in the months ahead. I wish I had done more research! My thoughts are stuck on the half-completed to-do list sitting in my pocket and the myriad of things I forgot to pack. Oh well. The safety of home is behind me. I’ve made the leap – nothing to do now but enjoy the ride. I just hope I remembered to pack my parachute!
