Posts tagged ‘new year’
Mongolia’s Lunar New Year
Often on the Kiva website, lenders will see entrepreneurs looking to borrow money to stock their business shelves for an upcoming holiday. In the United States we see retailers plan for the Christmas shopping season, in Central and South America businesses prepare for Carnaval sales and in Mongolia one of the biggest holidays that small businesses look forward to is Tsagaan Sar, the Lunar New Year.
Continue Reading 21 April 2010 at 23:57 Beth Ritchey 3 comments
Kiva Lebanon: Lebanon without the Lebanese?
The ladies (plus gent) that lunched!
As I strolled casually down this major city street I savored the sweet smells of spices as I walked by small grocery shops, admired the dangling gold earrings and embroidered “saris” of women giggling as they strutted down the sidewalk, and edged closer than I normally would to passersby hoping to catch a few phrases in my mother tongue of Bengali. This would seem like a typical day for a Kiva Fellow cruising the crowded streets of Kolkata, but strangely enough Kiva does not yet work in India, and it took me a few surreal moments to remember that I was still in Beirut. Little did I know that on this seemingly normal Sunday I would find myself in Beirut’s multi-ethnic shopping and food district of “Dora” to celebrate the Sri Lankan New Year with my cleaning lady and her friends, also service workers from South Asia living in Lebanon.
A South Asian supermarket and of course a Western Union for money transfers!
