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.

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By: Nilima Achwal, KF8, Bolivia

While taking pictures throughout Bolivia of Kiva clients, colleagues, and friends, I’ve noticed a theme. Most people don’t smile. No matter if it’s a jolly loan officer who loves his job, the cleaning girl that always peers curiously over my shoulder at my laptop and brings me mate de coca, or good friends hanging out after work. The second I take out my camera, in fact, the second before I click the shutter, the grins vanish. Ironically (and maddeningly), the second the flash is out, the subject in question almost always smiles or laughs.

It’s not that people scowl for pictures. They just present themselves in a professional, even “cool” way. In their minds, it makes no sense to grin like an idiot just because someone is taking their picture; it’s just not that exciting. Also, since digital cameras are not nearly as ubiquitous here as in other countries, some entrepreneurs get nervous and tell me to wait while they quickly fold their hands in their laps, take off traditional indigenous hats, and look “proper” before I take the picture.

That’s a better-case scenario. Sometimes entrepreneurs don’t want their picture taken at all. I think this has something to do with not wanting to be viewed as attractions. They usually agree to it when I explain that the lenders want to meet them.

What does this mean for the pictures of Kiva entrepreneurs that make it on to borrower profiles and journals? Personally, while taking journal pictures I casually make a little joke or cry “Say whiskey!” (the Bolivian equivalent of “Say cheese”) to get them to giggle, though they try to force back the laughter. After one such occasion, I showed the photo on my camera screen to the group, and one of the young women burst out laughing, teasing her friend, “Look at Marisol, she’s looks like she’s laughing in the picture.”

I always feel the need to convey the warmth and friendship I have experienced with the borrowers so that lenders can experience it too, and the simplest way to do that is through a picture with smiling faces. In real life, we think of smiles as a symbol of acknowledgment and friendship that surpasses language and cultural boundaries.

The conflict comes in when we think about how the borrower wants to present herself to the world. If the borrower feels more comfortable looking professional and hat-less, however much we would be fascinated by a smile and a hat, who are we to force our hegemonic cultural norms on others? However, it could be true that a picture of a smiling entrepreneur brings in funds quicker than would a picture of a seemingly depressed looking man or woman. And isn’t empowering people to pull themselves out of poverty the ultimate goal? But at the same time, by urging entrepreneurs to smile for pictures in order to bring in more lender dollars, we might almost be using our economic power to once again impose our cultural norms on other people.

I’m not saying I am going to stop encouraging borrowers to smile for pictures. To tell you the truth, I like pictures of smiling people. I’m just a little bit more conscious now of my immediate instinct of suspicion of people that seem cold or depressed in photos.

Nilima Achwal is a Kiva Fellow who is working with several branches of Fundación AgroCapital in Bolivia this summer. Lend to an AgroCapital entrepreneur now!

By: Nilima Achwal, KF8 Bolivia

I rode on the back of a motorcycle with a loan officer while going to visit Kiva clients on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia. As my hair blew in the wind, I took in the tranquil green pastures, spotted cows grazing, and women in colorful skirts strolling down the dirt road. When we stopped, I exclaimed, “I love this part of town!” “Really?” the loan officer answered in shock. “I thought you would be horrified; this is the poorest section of town.”

I didn’t quite know how to respond to that. True, I had noticed that the area was very poor, but I had thought it was beautiful how each home had its own chickens and livestock and the residents wore traditional clothing. I suddenly felt ashamed, as if I were viewing this community like a sheltered tourist who did not fully realize or empathize with the economic realities of its inhabitants. But on the other hand, isn’t it necessary to see the beauty in poor communities and its people? Isn’t that what inspires me to help them?

I realized that the conflict I was going through has something to do with the specific idea of poverty that the developed world has. Earlier that day, when I was showing a Bolivian colleague my blog post on the Lonely Planet Bolivia website, the first thing to pop up was a picture of the perfect poverty poster child: a chubby-cheeked Bolivian girl with desperate eyes and dirty hair (with absolutely no offense to Lonely Planet—I agree that there are almost always more positive pictures on the site and in the books.) My colleague was understandably upset. “I don’t understand why every time people talk about Bolivia, all they show is the poverty. There are many beautiful and interesting places here.”

She made a very good point. The images of the developing world that dominate the perceptions of most Americans, that is, those that are propagated by the media, are of dire poverty, filth, and crime. This is most likely not a malicious attempt to malign other nations, but a reflection of the stories that sell. People are fascinated by extremes and probably like the reassurance that their own country is the best place to live. Then I realized why I was feeling conflicted–I did not want to be fascinated by my first exposure in Bolivia to what American ideology has taught me is Poverty: women in plaid skirts, men in farmer hats, donkeys, and dirt roads. I did not want to be a tourist of poverty.

I realize now that that is not the reason I liked the poor section of Cochabamba. On the contrary, I saw the care that went into the mini-farms and dairy businesses that the residents owned. I saw laughter, camaraderie, and hard work. If this community of people did not find anything either wrong or shameful about how they lived, why should I? I had no reason to pity them or be horrified at their “condition.”

At some point, the images of poverty that we constantly receive from television and movies stop enhancing our worldview and start becoming disrespectful to the citizens of those nations. We need to be careful not to lump all residents of the developing world into the big black box called Poverty. Not only do developing nations have a million other aspects to them besides their poverty (like colleges, concerts, sports, architecture, cultures, sub-cultures, natural wonders, technologies, and innovations,) but even their poor are surprisingly diverse. The fact is that the Kiva entrepreneurs I’ve met have had many, many different lifestyles and occupations. I have met butchers, make-up saleswomen, and store owners. Some entrepreneurs have televisions and DVD players but no running water. Some entrepreneurs ask me for the Kiva website address, while other people in their very group do not understand what the Internet is. Almost every entrepreneur I meet in Bolivia has a cell phone, though almost no one has a land line. They are elderly women, families, recently married couples, and young individuals just starting out. The faces of the Kiva entrepreneurs within Bolivia are amazingly varied, and I dare to say that the vast majority of their children have neither dirty hair nor sad eyes.

Nilima Achwal is a Kiva Fellow who is working with several branches of Fundación AgroCapital in Bolivia this summer. Lend to an AgroCapital entrepreneur now!

As I wrote in my last blog entry, my weekend’s planned excursions included a climb up the tallest statue of Jesus in the world (disappointing—turns out he’s closed on Sundays) and a hike in nearby Tunari national park. It also included an unplanned visit to the Clinica Belga Boliviana, the fanciest-sounding hospital in my Lonely Planet guidebook. I had learned the hard way that angry dogs really do bite you in the butt, just like countless cartoon mailmen. I told the clinic’s emergency room attendant that I’d been attacked by a wild dog in the woods and wanted a rabies shot. “Sure, take a seat,” he told me. I winced—talk about adding insult to injury.

Feeling his pain

After 30 minutes or so, a doctor called me in. I told her what had happened: I was hiking in a national park, minding my own business and enjoying my Saturday afternoon, when four dogs started barking at me then attacked me out of nowhere, one of them managing to rip out a small chunk of my bum. I expected to be applauded for having the good sense to go get my rabies shot immediately after having been bitten by a strange dog in the woods, but instead the doctor just clucked her tongue.

“You know, the best thing to do in these situations is to control the dog.  Could you go find this dog?”

I was confused, not sure if she was actually asking me to go out alone in search of the potentially rabid dog, who was roaming free in a national park some 45 minutes away, probably gloating over the tiny piece of a gringa’s butt he had won earlier that day. I told her I really wasn’t comfortable capturing the dog and bringing him back to the clinic for observation. The doctor sighed again, and tried to convince me that this vaccine would be a hassle:

“It’s expensive… you’ll have to come back 5 times… you might get jaundice… you really don’t think you could find this dog?”

I was starting to feel kind of silly and spoiled. Why had my parents never taught me any useful skills, like animal trapping? Thirteen years of violin lessons weren’t doing me much good right now. But, as spoiled as I felt, I was determined to get my shots. After having written a report on rabies for Mrs. Cornwall’s 9^th grade health class, I had definitively decided that I did not want to die from rabies.

After some poking and prodding, the on-duty doctor finally called the dog-bite-specialist-doctor at home. I caught some whispered snippets of their conversation:

 “Hello, Doctor? So sorry to call you at home… foreign girl here… wild dog in the woods… told her to control it, but… doesn’t want to go find it…. I know… I know… Yes, OK, thank you doctor.”

She turned to me. “All right, show me the wound.”

Finally, I thought. I tried to moon the doctor as respectfully as possible and hopped onto the stretcher. Just as she started to clean up the bloody mess, a call went out over the PA system: the doctor was needed to attend to a patient arriving by ambulance. I was left, alone and exposed on a stretcher, for what felt like an eternity (but was probably 30 minutes). Various hospital personnel wandered in and out of the room, seemingly oblivious to my delicate situation as a half-naked, potentially rabid foreigner. Well, at least this will make a decent blog entry when it’s all over, I thought to myself. Not quite Jessica-getting-malaria-in-Nigeria-good, but decent.

Things turned out my way in the end—the good doctor returned, bandaged my bum, gave me my first of five rabies shots, and sent me on my way with just a slight limp and some holes in my pants (and my butt) to show for my afternoon adventure. Now I’m following the locals’ (and T.R.’s) advice to always use Big Stick Diplomacy. Not my favorite foreign policy in U.S. history, but it sure does the trick with Bolivian dogs.

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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

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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!

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