Kiva Stories from the Field

Tuesday was fairly eventful, I left my apartment by 6 am to meet Beatrice at the Mbengwi moto park on the other side of town. Within seconds of standing at the side of the road, a bike-taxi had stopped and we were haggling over prices. We agreed on 200 CFA (around 40 cents) for around a 15 minute ride. I met Beatrice at the park and we took another bike together to the GHAPE center. The center meetings usually start at 6:30 and run until 12:00 depending on how quickly the clients are able to organize their books and what not. It’s a pretty tedious process; however, it ensures that I’m given the time to do all my interviews.

I interviewed thirteen clients, all with just wonderful stories. One man, Thomas, who is the General Center Chief for the area is phenomenal. He gave some of his last loan to his son to continue his business of window framing and iron door installations. He no longer has to support his son and spent the rest of his loan on a motorbike to use as a taxi. He is making enough profits from taxiing, palm wine, and pigs to easily make his minimum payments and contribute to his personal savings account provided by GHAPE. After my interviews, the meeting still had not finished. People were coming over to chat to me and ask me questions, mostly about whether or not I was married, haha. One woman sat with me for about an hour asking me about Canada and discussing Cameroon. She was pretty sweet, told me I was very pretty for a “white man” and began referring to me as “smiley-smile”–apparently I smile a lot.

Its funny, Cameroon is the first developing country I’ve been to where everyone, no matter how much money they have, is concerned with fashion and appearance. Older women are always wearing fancy African dresses, usually hand made, with gorgeous fabric. All the younger women look like they just walked out of a fashion shoot; new jeans, fancy tops, high heels, they have it all. A lot of the younger women also have children, which they secure on to their backs using a piece of brightly coloured fabric and wrapping it around their chest–kinda takes away from the model look.

After the meeting, one of the clients split her lunch with the credit assistants and I; it was a sardine sandwich–sardines on white bread. Yum. No, it wasn’t bad, but I hadn’t eaten yet, so, perhaps that had something to do with it. The three of us, two credit assistants and I, hoped on a bike to town to get back to work. Once again, fitting four on a bike, no helmets, and me on the very back because of my backpack. I think I’ll start bringing a purse instead.

I finally sorted out my phone issues, well, I realized it is broken and nothing I can do. I did, however, purchase a wireless ‘ctphone’ for my room. It has much better reception, and for 20,000 CFA per month, $40 USD, I can have unlimited internet between 6 pm and 7 am. Considering all the work I need to load on the internet and what not, I splurged. You can hook 5 computers up to the hub, so I think I will donate it to GHAPE when I leave. The internet in the office is so unbelievably slow, and around the same price per month.

Wednesday was excessively long; however, it was also pretty exciting. In the morning Loveline and I met Thomas from Center 06 to go to Belo for the General Meeting at the new Belo branch. Currently there are two branches: Bamenda and Belo. The Bamenda branch has 16 centers and the Belo branch now has 10 centers. Although there is a huge demand for more centers in the area, GHAPE is constrained by a lack of funds. They are unable to add any more centers until they find a new source of funding.

Every center has an elected ‘center chief’ and ‘vice chief’. Together, they facilitate center meetings with the credit assistants from GHAPE, help clients to understand GHAPE policies, give incoming clients initial training, help to resolve disputes within groups and the center, and in general ensure smooth and successful delivery of credit, training, and skills.

All of the Center Chiefs and their Vice Chiefs were present at the meeting from the 10 centers in Belo, as well as the two credit assistants from Belo, Loveline, the General Center Chief from Mbengwi (John Foriben), General Center Chief from Bamenda (Thomas) and myself. The meeting began at 9 and ended at around 4; apparently one of the faster meetings they’ve had in a while. Thankfully I did not attend the earlier sessions, some of which ended past 9 pm. At the beginning of the meeting, the credit assistant wrote the rules for the meeting on the board: no eating, no sleeping, no unnecessary movement, hand up to talk, permission to use toilet, and phones on vibrate. Each of the rules was associated with a fine, for sleeping you were fined and had to stand for the rest of the meeting. It reminded me a lot of middle school classroom, ha ha. The meeting was really interesting though; all of the center chiefs discussed some of the largest challenges they were facing in their new centers and exchanged ideas on how to overcome these challenges. Some of these challenges were things like lateness and absenteeism from clients, clients dropping out after having training and replacement members having no training, and more members wanting to join than the center can accommodate.

About half way through the meeting, people started to look a little tired; Loveline decided we needed some stretching to wake us up. After a few stretches, we started playing a game similar to “Simon Says”, only the leader sings “What I do” to which we respond “don’t laugh”. Some of the moves Loveline had us do with her were jumping and clapping, kicking your feet in the air, a dance move similar to get low, and spinning in circles. It was really quite strange. I was just trying to imagine this sort of break happening at an equivalent meeting in North America; I imagine that most board members at local credit unions in Canada do play active versions of “Simon Says”, just to help everyone stay focused. Maybe it should be implemented, perhaps in the Senate; I think it could really lighten things up. At first I was thinking what the hell is going on here, are they kidding? But after a few moves, I was loving it, ha ha, I thought it was great; it definitely woke me up. Another thing I found strange was one of the women who was a center chief would pick her nose constantly when addressing everyone in the room to discuss challenges or solutions to the topic. She would stop mid sentence to look at what she had found, and then continue where she left off a few seconds later. No one else seemed to phased by it, but this was every time she spoke, not just once. It was really strange.

After the meeting, I hung out with Thomas and John until Loveline was ready to leave. The Board member who lives beside the center joined us for a beer, Guinness Smooth is the beer of choice for most here, and it is paired with ‘coloured nuts’. Coloured nuts are one of those things that I have decided are impossible to explain. I suppose the best I can do is to say they are very bitter, in the shape of mandarin orange slice, hard, bizarre texture, and light pink. I also had my first guava today, I’ve eaten the inside parts of guavas, but here they just bite right into them. The outer shell is extremely bitter, reminds me lime peels. The inside was sweet though. Thomas, John and I then bought some bbq’d beef on a stick with hot sauce. It was the first time I’ve had meat or beer since I’ve been here, and I can’t lie, even though the beer was warm and the beef was cold, it was among the best beer and beef I’ve had. Ha ha.

Thursday and Friday have been spent working, a lot. The MFI I’m with does not have a Management Information System, all of their files are kept in little notebooks and written by hand. All of their transactions and calculations are done three times by calculator–it is extremely inefficient; however, they don’t have the capital to invest in any sort of technological improvements right now. It has made training on the new internet site extremely difficult; their knowledge of finance and accounting is also limited. On the upside, there have not been any problems with power struggles or control that we had prepared for in training. Loveline is more than happy to let me train her staff and assign them tasks in any way that I feel will help them to understand the processes best. She has also been asking lots of questions through our one-on-one training that we have been doing for the past week; a very good sign that she is retaining the information and trying to understand. Loveline does most of the Kiva work here, so I think she was excited when I suggested we delegate some tasks to the credit assistants, ha ha. On Monday I will train the credit assistants on the new site and also on journaling and business profiles; we are hoping to have each one of them upload a profile and a journal in the first week of the change over so that everyone knows how it is done. Because the Kiva clients at GHAPE are dispersed through all the centers and each credit assistant is responsible for certain centers, all 5 credit assistants have to understand the process.

Last night I did take some time for myself. I went to a shop next door with Vicky and purchased one litre of palm wine. Palm wine is extracted from the raffia bush and poured straight into a bucket, no distillation or refining process necessary. I bought one litre for 150 CFA, approximately 25 or 30 cents. It was pretty good. It is brought in fresh every morning and begins to ferment throughout the day; apparently by evening it is too strong for a lot of people. It tasted like grapefruit cider, if there is such a thing; alcohol and grapefruit soda. Delicious.

On a more important topic, I found corn flakes the other day in the market. This morning I was so excited to finally have a bowl of cereal; however, I made a major mistake in my planning–no milk. I knew there was some powdered milk in Mama’s house, but not wanting to borrow some at 6 am, I looked for other options. I decided not to use my water, because it has a bit of a chlorine smell and taste to it–didn’t think it would mesh well. Also decided not to use palm wine, too early to start drinking on a Friday. The only other option was tea. So, I added some tea to my corn flakes, knowing it wouldn’t be great, but hoping for better than just dry. It was foul–completely and totally disgusting. After a few bites I got used to it though, and didn’t mind it too much. My food quality control really is dropping quickly; Christmas dinner is going to taste so delicious.

I also learned today that many people keep what are called Kane rats in their homes. They catch them from the bush when they are young and train them to live in their homes; when a door is open, a trained Kane rat will remain in the home. Kane rats grow to about the size of a small cat (not kitten–full grown cat), and are just rats as we know them. You keep the trained one till it is big enough, then one day, you decide you feel like rat for dinner and hey, look at that, you have one right here at home. I think that is one item I will pass on if offered. I also passed on cow skin the other night; that was more because they only had a little to share between five and I knew I would not enjoy it as much as they would. Cow skin is about half an inch thick and purchased in sheets around 2 or 3 inches on each side. The skin is soaked and cleaned with a knife to get dirt and hair off, then cooked in soup. Vicky told me it is one of her favourite foods; maybe I’ll try it later this month. I must say though, this is the first trip I am actually considering passing on some foods, I must be maturing.

Anyway, this update is quickly becoming a novel, so, I will leave it there. I’m hoping to get out of Bamenda this weekend and see a few things; there are lots of mountains and lakes around here so I’d like to check out some of those areas. I’ll be sure to update this with what I find.