By Cynthia McMurry, KF8 Ecuador

Over the past year, I have learned valuable lessons about life, gotten to know myself better, greatly enriched my understanding of microfinance, observed the workings of the informal economy in Latin America, been touched by many clients’ stories and experiences, and been proud to represent Kiva at four different MFIs in three South American countries.

Some of my favorite moments, though, have absolutely nothing to do with microfinance. They’re little cultural quirks, lifestyle adaptations, or just silly everyday things that make me smile, remember that I am not from here, and cherish the experience that much more.

Some of my favorites:

Best heckle: Anyone who’s as white as me and who has tried to run in public in Latin America knows what it’s like to be heckled. You usually get whistles, catcalls, and hear things like, “Faster!” “Run!” and “ONE two three ONE two three.” After a while you learn not to pay too much attention and to instead focus your energy on watching out for dogs and traffic.

Out running in Trujillo at 7am one morning, a driver stuck his head out the window and yelled “Yuquitas peladas!” (“Little peeled yuccas!”), a metaphorical reference to the whiteness of my legs. By far the most creative heckle ever, plus I’m impressed that he was able to think of it so quickly (especially that early in the morning) and stick his head out of the car window while driving and avoiding traffic mishaps. Kudos.

Best street foods: Grilled plantain with cheese (Ecuador), giant corn on the cob with cheese (Cusco), hand-churned muyuchi ice cream (Ayacucho), cow-heart kabobs (Bolivia/Peru).

Pati, a Kiva client in Cochabamba, grills up some cow-heart kabobs

Luzmila, a Kiva client in Ayacucho, dishes out some hand-churned ice cream

Best market find: “Peanut paste” in Ecuador, which is supposed to be used to cook cow’s stomach. When I told the woman I buy it from that I add salt and eat it on bread with jelly, she looked at me like I was nuts. Crazy gringos.

Best healthy eating tip: A loan officer in Santa Cruz, Bolivia once invited me to a glass of caldo de caña (sugar-cane juice), a thick, murky brown liquid that is sickeningly sweet, like drinking a glass of maple syrup. He says, “It’s all natural, don’t worry. They don’t add any sugar to it.”

I’m waiting for this to take off as the next fad diet in the States.

Best religious insight: A conversation I had with a loan officer:
Her: What religion are you?
Me: Oh, I’m not religious.
Her: Why not?
Me: Well, I just have a hard time believing that just one of the world’s religions has all the right answers and all of the others are wrong.
Her: Yes, but if you think about it, the one thing they have in common is that they all lead you to Jesus Christ.

Best financial advice: Hoard change (thanks, Dan Kahn). You’re only as rich as the amount of change in your pockets.

Most humbling idiomatic realization: I will never be done learning Spanish. Every time I think I’ve got it down, I change locations and chalas become sandalias become become zapatillas, or lapicero becomes bolígrafo becomes pluma becomes esfero, or caña becomes chaque becomes resaca becomes chuchaque. And aguacate and palta keep switching back and forth.Where on my resume should I indicate that I know four different words for pen?

Second most humbling idiomatic realization: After two months in Ecuador, I still don’t know how to ask for the kind of bananas I want without pointing. I don’t understand the difference between a platano, a banano, a guineo, a maduro and an orito. If anyone has pictures with labels it’d be greatly appreciated.

Those look like oritos hanging back there, but I wouldn't put money on it

Best way to ask for directions: Most anywhere I want to walk to is immediately deemed too far away and/or too dangerous for a lolita like me to go on foot. In order to avoid answers like “Walk to the corner, hail a cab and tell the cab driver that’s where you want to go,” I’ve learned to strategically rephrase my requests for directions. Instead of asking, “How can I walk to this place?” I ask “How might Antonio Banderas ride a scooter to this place?”

Best way to tell Ecuadorians apart geographically: One day at the beach with the local branch manager, he pointed out that it’s easy to distinguish locals from people from Quito who are in town on vacation. I looked around and wasn’t so sure I could tell, so we started guessing with passers-by. He nodded to one middle-aged man, lounging in the back of his pickup truck with a tank top pulled up to his chest, exposing his sizeable beer belly, which he rubbed fondly.

“What about that guy?” said Fernando.
The gentleman in question looked pretty tan. “Mmmm… local?” I guessed.
He laughed. “A local would NEVER do that, Cynthia.”
“What? I’ve seen tons of guys from the coast strutting around showing off their guts,” I responded, confused.
“Yes,” he said, “but never in Lycra.”

Land of Lycra: Quito at dawn. Why was I awake at dawn? My neighbors have roosters.

Cynthia McMurry is a fourth-time Kiva fellow working with brand new Kiva field partner Fundación Espoir in Cuenca, Ecuador. Previously she worked with Fundación AgroCapital in Bolivia and FINCA Peru and Asociación Arariwa in Peru.

To search for currently fundraising loans from Fundación Espoir on Kiva, click here. No currently fundraising clients? Please check back soon! In the meantime, you can join Espoir’s Kiva Lending Team here.

The leftist candidate Mauricio Funes won El Salvador’s presidential election last night, ending 20 years of rule by the rightist ARENA government. Funes’ party the FMLN had developed out of a Marxist inspired guerilla movement that opposed ARENA’s government during the country’s gruesome civil war in the 1980’s. While FMLN supporters took to the streets last night, riding into the capital on beat-up pickup trucks packed with red-shirted youth, waving FMLN flags to celebrate their first presidential victory, there was a more somber mood in ARENA headquarters and in reports from the international press. Though ARENA has spent years crafting a free-market economy, with a stabilized banking system, a free trade agreement with the United States and courting multinational investors El Salvador still remains one of Central America’s poorest economic performers. Over half of Salvadorans live in poverty, without access to consistent food, medicine, work and often quality education. 20% of El Salvador’s GDP is comprised of remittance payments from family members working (illegally) in the United States. More than just a statistic, though, remittances have had overwhelming effects on the social political and economic realities of El Salvador including microfinance. Often small entrepreneurs can only afford to cover their monthly interest payments with support from the money transfers from family living abroad. Especially now, during tough economic times in the United States remittance payments have been slowing causing wide-spread loan defaults and instability in the MFI industry in El Salvador.

Last night I stood in the streets of San Salvador sharing in the excitement of Salvadorans at a possible new direction for their tiny country. Some old enough to clearly remember the bloody civil war of the 80’s but many victims of an ongoing struggle against hunger, lack of work and no hope for change. Their songs and dancing where encouraging, but didn’t distract me enough from noticing the hundreds of vendors that had taken to the streets hoping to sell party t-shirts, sausages and light-up head-wear to celebrants. After all, there’s work to be done and many mouths to be fed in El Salvador. Good luck, Funes.

Entrepreneurs take to the streets to sell Funes "gear" while the masses celebrate.

Kiva is a “sexy”, high-tech cog in the economic development machine, conceived in where else but the dot-com capital of the world: Silcon Valley, California, USA, North America. At the very least I’m jealous at how Kiva seems to be a citizen of both the new “read the New York Times on your laptop in starbucks” and the traditional “Financial calculator at US AID” development worlds. Also, as a product of the AOL instant messenger generation, I would be the first to admit that I am incredibly energized by the emergence of social business, high-tech hybrids. Slick web pages, the same nifty gadgets I use to check local movie times at Fandango.com, and even some really cool hardware to make a difference in the world; right now, right where I am, with the tools and skills I already have (Kiva on your iPhone anyone?). I’m recalling a trip I took last fall to Northen Ghana in which I stumbled into a rural village library and to a tech-enthusiasts dream: several young Ghanaian students huddled around the monitor glow of a One Laptop per Child machine trying to get the operating system to open an excel file. Here was my specialty: a way to express my love for micro processors and working with others ; a process I had been working on since age 5 when I spoke my first words: “C:\dir /p” Even back on the Kiva homepage front, I’ve fallen victim to the seductions of .orgs where I can create a micro endowment at Star Bucks or a virtual parent-teacher association during a long layover in Bogotá. Seriously cool.

But then, yesterday on a visit to an organic farming coop in the mountains outside of San Salvador, El Salvador I had an out of cell phone service experience: I was reminded about the nitty grity work of community growing from the ground up, but more importantly how exciting and rewarding it can be. Donning her sweat-stained Che Guevara hat, Mercedes the local community organizer in the Salvadoran pueblito, enthusiastically shuttled us from one “shared work” project to another. With a $1k microloan in cash directly group of university students, the community had developed a good old-fashioned, plastic piping, brick tank, and muddy ditches water system to supply their organic crops of corn, tomatoes, onions, squash, oranges, cilantro, carrots, tilapia fish and countless other plants I wish I could understand in Spanish. Her crowning achievement since increasing total food production by three fold from last year are her Cuban designed, homemade water pumps (She pointed out several times that they were designed in Cuba). These two pumps, which each cost about $50 in parts, are made from used metal piping and a fire extinguisher tank, use no electricity or gasoline, and are able to pump river water about 50 vertical meters up the side of a mountain to supply acres of farm land with necessary irrigation. Can your iPhone do that? Needless to say, I was quite impressed by the ingenuity and persistence of the organic farming cooperative that has worked patiently for years on this agricultural project and are now hoping to reinvest their microcredit fund into personal vegetable gardens in each family’s home. With little more than sweat and some used parts from a hardware store the community has been able to drastically improve the economic and emotional quality of life in their community. Next time I visit I’ve planned to propose my new partnership with the organic farming cooperative: cubanwaterpumps.com

Posted in Apoyo Integral, El Salvador, KF7 (Kiva Fellows 7th Class) Tagged: Agriculture, Cooperative, iPhone, Micro credit, Micro loan, Waterpump ]]> http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2009/02/10/iphone-water-pump/feed/ 3 Sam img_06061 img_1735 http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2009/01/21/mi-casa-tu-casa-a-kiva-fellow-at-the-apoyo-integral-field-partner-in-el-salvador/ http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2009/01/21/mi-casa-tu-casa-a-kiva-fellow-at-the-apoyo-integral-field-partner-in-el-salvador/#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:55:49 +0000 Samuel Baker http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/?p=2781 ]]>

My name is Sam Baker, and for the next several months I will be working with Kiva’s field partner Apoyo Integral in El Salvador. Having only been in-country for about a week and recently finished with an orientation of Integral’s microfinancial services, I thought I would take the time to highlight an especially unique feature of Apoyo Integral’s loan offerings in El Salvador: technical assistance in home building. Kiva community feedback coupled with longer fundraising times for home improvement and construction projects on the site suggests a slight hesitation among Kiva lenders considering a loan for the sake of home improvement. Having said this, it is not unreasonable to ask for example how a home improvement directly affects an entrepreneurs income, ability to pay off the loan and more importantly; provide a more secure and sustainable future for their families. Fortunately I had the opportunity to explore this question during my visit with Apoyo Integral’s sister project the Salvadoran Foundation for Integral Support’s housing technical assistance program: Tu Proyecto (Your Project). Tagging along for a day of work withTu Proyecto’s civil engineers, I watched how they offered their FREE engineering expertise to four of Apoyo Integral’s home improvement microcredit clients. Clients are advised on everything from cement mixing formulas, structural design, layout, ventilation, lighting as well as water and electricity issues. (In one case a technical assistance engineer was perceptive enough to recommend that a client might move a window to another wall closer to where he planned to place the kitchen table, thereby allowing his school aged children better light to study by during the day!) In addition to learning about a truly useful and uncommon service to homeowners in El Salvador, I also was also presented some data with which to respond to the “housing hesitation” issue: 3 out of 4 visits to Apoyo Lenders happened to be living and working under the same roof. The first lender was a photographer who was intending on building an addition to his house. The Tu Proyecto engineers advised him of a better way to secure his roof from the weather as they feared rain water might soon leak into his house, effectively destroying all the digital photography equipment he uses for his livelihood. The second lender was a farmer who needed to weatherproof his house to store grain, and the third was a carpenter who was building a larger home and considering how he could incorporate his workshop into the design.

Though these are only several examples from many, I believe it is interesting to illustrate how important a home can be for small Salvadoran businesses and indeed small entrepreneurs around the world. Not to mention all the benefits of health, safety, and personal dignity that come with owning a decent home. In short, here is Apoyo Integral’s value proposition to Kiva users who invest in their housing loans: Apoyo Integral uses the discounted capital received from Kiva to pay the Tu Proyecto engineers to do free construction evaluations for their clients. This means that in addition to clients being filtered for their financial ability to repay a loan, home owners receive professional engineering advice to ensure an effective investment in a family’s future!