Kiva

Volunteering for Kiva.org - A Major Change of Pace!

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Arriving at the Friendship Bridge Office in Panajachel
Arriving at the Friendship Bridge Office in Panajachel (View on flickr)
One of the goals of our trip (and one reason we are taking 3 years instead of the more normal 18 months) is that we want to be able to volunteer and study along the way. Well, now is the time for our first volunteer stint! We are so excited to be able to volunteer for Kiva.org here in Guatemala.

As we were riding through Mexico, we were really impacted by the poverty we saw, and became tremendously interested in the concept of microfinance, the practice of offering small loans ($100-$1000, usually), without requiring collateral, to tiny businesses. It turns out that last year's Nobel Peace Price winner, Mohammed Yunus, is the originator of the concept, and his book "Banker to the Poor" is tremendously inspiring. What they did with tiny, collateral-free loans in Bangladesh is the most hopeful story about alleviating poverty that I've ever heard in my life.

Nancy's Second Day of Interviews

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Maria Chox in San Antonio
Maria Chox in San Antonio (View on flickr)
Wednesday I headed up to San Antonio, Solola, Guatemala. It was the second day of volunteer work for Friendship Bridge and Kiva.org. My job was to interview four women and write about them and take photos which will be posted on the Kiva site so that people in the rich part of the world can make small loans to them via the Internet.

Patti (the Friendship facilitator) and I hopped into the taxi (really the back of a pickup). We snaked our way along the shore and up the side of a mountain -- the view was incredible. As I looked across the emerald lake toward the towering volcanoes, I wondered how such a beautiful place could house such incredible poverty.

All day I sat with the Mayan women in their homes, business and community center learning about their struggles, victories and dreams.

These people had been living in a war-torn area for twenty years only to be further pummeled by the incredible natural disaster Hurricane Stan in 2005. The torrential rains as a result of the hurricane washed away many communities. Whole neighborhoods no longer exist because of the mudslides that swallowed up the land the neighborhood sat on and with it thousands of people. It threw these people further into grave poverty.

What we're doing in our daily work

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Dolores Lopez
Dolores Lopez (View on flickr)
As you know, we're spending some time in Guatemala as "Kiva Fellows", working with the excellent Microcredit organization Friendship Bridge. Here's what we've been doing so far.

During the week, we go to a village every morning and meet with one of the women who are the workhorses of Friendship Bridge, the "facilitators". These are the women who form the credit groups and know all of FB's clients. The facilitator will take us to one of more of the clients' homes and may stay with us or may deliver us over to the women. We then sit down and chat with as many as six or seven families, one at a time, about their business, their life, and what they're doing with their loan.

What is Microfinance Anyway?

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Our new friends
Our new friends (View on flickr)
We should probably say something about what this "Microfinance" or "Microcredit" thing is that we're working in with Friendship Bridge and Kiva.org.

The amazing man who won last year's (2006) Nobel Peace Prize pioneered the use of tiny loans without a requirement for collateral or security to poor people. Mohammed Yunus maintains with great success that if you just give poor people access to capital, they can make their own way in the world with their own businesses. His book, Banker to the Poor, is worth every minute of the time you take to read it - it's in every library and every bookstore and here on Amazon.com. It's the most hopeful book about poverty in the world that you will ever read. Yunus, with 25 years of experience in this, maintains that poor people pay off their loans at a much higher rate than the rich ones, and that simply providing capital in amounts like $100-$500 can transform the life of the poor by enabling them to start their own tiny businesses.

Women We've Met Recently

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Clara Ajsoc
Clara Ajsoc (View on flickr)
We've met a wide variety of women in the last couple of weeks, from Mayan women who speak no Spanish at all and who try to scrape together a living with some weaving and a pig, to fairly ordinary poor urban women who remind us a little more of home, except that to them $15 is what you have to come up with every month for the kid's school payment.

Last week Nancy met Clara Ajsoc in the highland village of Santa Clara La Laguna. Clara used her Friendship Bridge loan to buy a calf, which she raised, only to lose it to a sudden illness, leaving a young calf behind. But she bottlefed that one and raised it up successfully, and she now sells milk and cheese, where she had no livelihood before. And she wants to get another calf.

Catarina Cox Perez
Catarina Cox Perez (View on flickr)
In San Antonio La Laguna, Nancy met Catarina Cox Perez, who lost her house to Hurricane Stan in October, 2005. She has been patching it back together bit by bit, but she lives in a really bad piece of broken house with no real windows, and she has to pile rocks up in the broken windowframes for a little privacy. But Catarina's big goal with her next loan is to buy and raise 24 chicks. More power to her. There's the great power of microfinance.

Podcast: What we're doing in Guatemala

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Clara Ajsoc and her family
Clara Ajsoc and her family (View on flickr)
We thought we'd explain to you what we're doing in Guatemala and tell you some of the stories of the women we've interviewed for Friendship Bridge and Kiva.org. We spend most of our time going out to little villages and meeting wonderful women who have started their own little "microbusinesses" using Friendship Bridge loans. The picture is of Clara Ajsoc, the wonderful woman we mention who raised her cow and started a milk and cheese business.


22:05 minutes (8 MB)

We wrote a little book: The Women of Friendship Bridge in Guatemala

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We have been so taken with the wonderful women of Guatemala and their inspiring stories that we compiled the stories and pictures into a little book. It's only 40 pages, not much of a book, but it does a pretty decent job of capturing what's really happening with Friendship Bridge and Kiva.

Nuestro libro sobre Las Mujeres de Puente de Amistad en Guatemala

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Portada de nuestro libro: Las Mujeres de Puente de Amistad
Portada de nuestro libro: Las Mujeres de Puente de Amistad (View on flickr)

Hemos terminado la traducción a español de nuestro libro que trata de las increibles mujeres de Puente de Amistad, quienes conocimos trabajando en Guatemala en Junio y Julio del año pasado. Esas mujeres fueron tan impresionante y admirable. Por eso escribimos el libro, pero nunca tuvimos bastante tiempo para traducir a español y revisarlo. ¡Y las mujeres del libro nunca lo han visto! Pero en Quito pasamos casi una semana estudiando en el Cristóbal Colon Spanish School, y Randy tomó como su objetivo la traducción y revisión del este libro.

Usted puede leer el libro en forma PDF aquí. También es posible comprar una copia imprimida (a nuestro costo, sin ganancia) aquí en blurb.com. (Desfortunadamente no ofrecen pedidos a muchos paises, pero si a México y Argentina.)

Click here for the English version of the book.

Working with Kiva and Microfinanzas Prisma in Huancayo

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Maria Galarza Valenzuela
Maria Galarza Valenzuela (View on flickr)

One of the objectives of our trip was to spend some time volunteering for various organizations, and getting to know the area and meeting the people that way. We volunteered with Friendship Bridge and Kiva.org in Guatemala last year, and Kiva was kind enough to set up a task in Huancayo and Tarma, Peru. Our job was to visit loan recipients, interview them so that we could write update their profiles on Kiva, and verify that the loan data were all correct.

Two marvellous young women hauled us all over the back country of Peru searching out the selected Kiva borrowers. In Huancayo we took more buses in one day than we could have imagined, visiting what seemed like dozens of little villages outside the city. In Tarma they arranged a 4-wheel-drive and a driver to haul us all over creation to find the clients. In one case we spent about an hour and a half climbing one incredible road up to a remote village... and then found that the woman was not home! However, we eventually found her husband and he was delightful.  read more here... lee mas aquí... »

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