I am the visitor. I am from Kiva. I am Jeremias. This has been my introduction for my first days in Guatemala.
Tueseday, we went to San Martin. It is a two hour drive from Guatemala City: thankfully it was Marco and not me who was driving so I could observe the scenery as we passed through beautiful rolling hills covered in forests. In the distance we could see small peaks, and each one was covered in trees.
Once we arrived, we were greeted by Bertha Carmelina Tohon, who just finished fundraising on Kiva. She gave us a warm we
lcome and insisted that we have tea before we leave her comedor (eatery). She was not shy to share her life story. I quickly learned that her kids attending college, one studying psychology and the other chemistry. I learned that she thought the Guatemalan school system did not teach the children anything practical, and that she has a typing school where kids learn using typewriters. I learned that she was hard working: “There is time to rest when you die,” she said.
But not all of our visits on this day would be this happy. Read the rest of this entry »
The people I come in contact with.
This is how Kiva works. You give a loan. The loans goes through Kiva. It goes to an microfinance institution. They give money to a lender.
I will working with a microfinance institution Guatemala City (FAPE) to help them better work with Kiva, and get more loans to those who need them. Most of what I will be doing is helping FAPE understand the way Kiva works better, and helping them to post more loans on Kiva’s websites. The barriers will be cultural, financial, temporal, and who-knows-al.
Another important job of mine is maintaining transparency. I am going to work with FAPE to help them put more information on Kiva’s website on exactly who their borrowers are. In this role, I will be meeting and interview the individual burrowers.
A social critic named David Rodman has recently written about Kiva, critisizing its transparency. Among his points, many of which I take issue with, he takes aim at the Kiva Fellows program and the process of interviewing borrowers: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s about a week and a half until I takeoff, and I have recently found out that when I arrive, I will be living in a seminary. I don’t know who I’ll be living with or what my living quarters will look like, but I’m sure it will be a learning experience. Despite these uncertainties, I keep finding myself more inspired the more I learn about Kiva. Here’s a link to my bio on Kiva’s website. Scroll down about a quarter of the way.
In reading an article by the founder and CEO, I was reminded off this core principle: Kiva is committed to transparency. If some sort fraud occurs with one of their partners in another country, they do not hide from it, but rather they proactively tell their lenders and supporters about it. And lenders in turn respond with a greater devotion to Kiva as a result of their honesty, instead of looking at this setback as a sign of weakness (if only governments also held this belief). I will be proud to be a part of this organization.
I also stumbled into a little more clarity of what my life interests may be. Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen claims that although life expectancy increase is correlated with GDP increase in developing countries, that when two factors are taken into account, that correlation disappears. Those two factors: incomes specifically of the poor and public health expenditure. My experience doing health education in Argentina and working with microlending to poorer communities with Kiva fall right in line with those two factors. Maybe what I most interested in global development, and health and microfinance are just two ways at which I have approached that field. Here’s a brief Amartya Sen article or check out his book, Development as Freedom, for a really good read.
Meg Gray, a current Kiva Fellow in nearby Nicaragua wrote a very interesting blog entry on how different businesses in other places look. It’s a really cool read about breaking preconceptions
In case you missed it, here’s a little more information on what I will be doing. Also, for those still wondering what Kiva is, be sure to check out their website. It explains things very simply.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed so far. I’ve been able to raise over half of my goal of $2,000. Thanks for all your support.
