i just wrote a new post on the fellows blog

http://fellowsblog.kiva.org

this one means a lot to me.
i hope you read it!

love,
suz

pic :)

This is me interviewing a few Kiva borrowers for their journal updates.

Olga sells various merchandise in the open-air market.
Priscilla and Delia have a group loan together. Priscilla only speaks Quechua so Delia helped translate for her. Priscilla is dressed in typical mamacha clothing, but her head-to-toe black likely indicates that someone important in her family has passed away recently. In local culture, the mamacha women dress in black for one year after the death of a loved one. Priscilla borrowed for her to bring more merchandise to her shop from Lima. Delia borrowed for her to go to various fairs around the region to bring more cheese to sell at the markets in Ayacucho.

From left to right: me, Olga, Priscilla, and Delia.

finca peru

its not that im proud to be associated with my mfi, but more than i am humbled and honored that i get to be associated with them.

There are literally tens of thousands of MFIs globally...
but how many won GOLD in the 1st ever social performance reporting award?

http://www.themix.org/press-release/first-recipients-new-social-performance-reporting-award

To catch you up, social performance reporting has been one of most obvious achilles tendons of the microfinance industry. That is to say, it hasn't been done until recently. It is very difficult to provide facts to back up an assertion that microloans bring poor entrepreneurs out of poverty. How exactly is that quantifiable, numerically? And how can we tests microfinance's success across nations and continents? How can we compare a Kenyan woman's fruit stall to an Azerbaijan man's taxi business? Or a fisherman in Phnom Penh, a major city in Cambodia, to a grocery shop owner in the rural central Andes of Peru?

What kinds of questions can we ask, and what is appropriate to ask in certain cultures? Certainly you wouldn't appreciate if someone knocked on your door and asked you how much you made last year vs. how much you made this year.

Some of the questions that FINCA Peru has on the survey they use, which is widely used by many other MFIs, are "do you have an iron? do you have a washing machine?" etc. But, these need to also be taken in context. It will be interesting to watch this field emerge.

I'm honored that my MFI is on the ball on this issue.

Meet Lisette, a FINCA borrower, and her baby:

hot and happy :)

here i am hot, it is so dry ive had a continual bloody nose for two weeks, my feet are SO dry and dirty i dont even look at them, i have a mattress on the floor that might as well be a brick, i often step in sewage and most toilets are out of toilet paper, i buy food and i have no idea what it is or what is in it.

but yet i am so, so happy. this is my element :) this is truly where i thrive. this is where i was meant to be! i keep begging everyone to come visit because i am so overjoyed at the experience. the experience was a dream of mine and it is certainly living up to those expectations. i love being challenged and living uncomfortably. i could honestly live in south america my whole life.

anyway, here are a few pictures! i haven't taken many but there should be more fun ones this weekend. ericka and joel (two FINCA volunteers from Canada) and i are going to, on Sunday, "pick a random mountain and climb it." yep. thats our whole plan. there are just so many around the city and there isnt exactly vegetation up here...so thats our plan!

Aqui estan los fotos, aproveche!

Me near Plaza de Armas on the way to FINCA.

Cute little buddy waiting for his mom at FINCA.

Political things...

This is FINCA!

The soccer stadium for Inti Gas. It is really funny seeing the barren Andes in the background. You can't see any homes so it feels like they built a Stadium in the middle of nowhere!

where are the men?

Todas las teorías son legítimas y ninguna tiene importancia. Lo que importa es lo que se hace con ellas. -Jorge Luis Borges

All theories are legitimate yet none of them are important. The only thing that matters is what you do with them.

I am a little lost today. I used to make fun of people who sat by themselves at lunch in restaurants. I am a social being, I wouldn't dare have the confidence to sit and have lunch in the company of me. But that's just what I've been doing the past couple days in Ayacucho, its been purposeful and I like it.

My hours at FINCA are 8am to 12pm and then 2:30pm to 6:30pm, Monday through Friday. The promotoras (loan officers) here work Saturdays also, but I and most other volunteers opt out of that for obvious reasons.

Thus, I have a nice 2.5 hour lunch and I kind of like it. It's not a siesta here, although places close. I have heard this clock of time is typically a time where mothers get their children out of school, take them home, feed them (lunch is the biggest meal of the day), clean house, and then set off back to work.

I enjoy walking around the open air markets (except the meat department... I will continue to convince myself "they are just rubber chickens"), smiling at the vendors, looking at the puffy breads with sprinkles on them, the bananas, the juice stands, the varieties of potatoes. You could really spend a whole day there just looking around. But what I found most interesting is how almost every single vender in the market is a woman.

One fun side note -- you can get 15 tangerines for .50 centavos here, or half a Peruvian Neuvo sole. Because the exchange rate between the US and Peru is 1:3, that is about a penny a tangerine! (Another reason to love the market).

FINCA has had a volunteer here for the past six months who worked specifically with the women, empowering and educating them. This branch of FINCA has been funded in part by a grant from OXFAM. The volunteer is leaving now sadly, as I'd love to pick her brain more, but she did tell me a little about what I've been wondering...

Where are all the men?

The volunteer told me that they had an exercise with the women where they were to give their likes and dislikes. This was a foreign concept to them, so the volunteer gave them examples. Many women responded candidly, with their peers present and in agreement, that it bothers them that their husbands don't work, they drink, and worse yet, they dislike when their husbands beat them.

They were very blasé about it. As I look around the city wonder myself where the men are, I wonder how much truth there is to this. Not that I doubt the women, because I don't, but this is a big paradigm shift for me.

My theory until now was that women represent a potential 50% of the workforce in the developing world that is simply unused. Well, that doesn't seem the case here. In fact, it may be quite the opposite.

I shall continue my investigation.

But the Borges quote also reaches me on another issue...
Getting ripped off or overcharged because I'm a foreigner.

This is inevitable so long as you live in a community with both tourism and poverty, but I just don't know how to deal with it. I know I was overcharged for my apartment (Matt and I are paying $200 a month, 800 soles, for a three bedroom apartment -- which is a rip off here, I swear!). I took the apartment because quite frankly, I wanted something soon, I'm sick of living in a hostel, and there is no classified section in the newspaper here. There is no newspaper. In fact, there are only two ways to find apartments. 1) wander the city and look for signs on apartment doors or 2) go to a frozen yogurt shop near the city center where people write apartments for rent in Sharpie every couple days. Craig of craigslist, you are needed in Ayacucho.

As I gave the deposit to the landlord, she brought to me two pieces of cloth. Let me describe them to you. One had an iron on patch of an imitation Winnie the Pooh with a Santa hat on it, and the other had some sort of cartoon character robots (also an iron-on patch). Both were on white towel material, about 1' by 1' squares. I have no idea what one would do with them. Hang them up? Use them as towels?

After signing the lease, she very awkwardly and unprofessionally tried to sell me these towels. She said she bought them for 35 soles each in Lima (about $10. in actuality, something like that would be around 5 soles). After telling me she bought each one for 35 soles, she asked me to buy them for 70 soles each. I couldn't really hide my offendedness this time, as I thought this was really her thinking I was a moron. I told her I am a volunteer, I have been saving and raising money to come here, and I plan on buying nothing for an apartment except a mattress to sleep on. That mattress will be about as cheap as one of her towels. Then, she proceeded to offer me them for 30 soles each instead of 70 soles.

With a dirty look on my face, I asked her if we were done, I took the keys, and I told her I had to go back to work. I sat eating by myself at lunch and thought, what do I do? Argue with them? Tell them I am insulted? Or just ignore it? What is the right theory on this issue?

So... I am confused, but I like this Borges quote because it kind of is like -- in Suzy terms (not to be confused with laymans terms) -- eff theory, just take everything as it comes.

So, I guess I will do just that.

SUZ

My first post to the Kiva Fellows Blog

It's hot off the press!

Please click here and read on!

Love,
Suzy

en ayacucho!

getting here was an adventure in itself for sure. A drive to LAX, red-eye at 2am to panama city (complete with beautiful crystal-clear views of the canal), short layover and onto the next leg to Lima, where i spent 6 hours at the airport before i took a 45 min taxi ride to the bus station where i took an 11 to beautiful ayacucho.

after seeing lima briefly, and then driving in to ayacucho in the morning, i cant imagine ever choosing to live anywhere else than ayacucho.

ayacucho is the andean people of peru at their finest, their most authentic, and is virtually tourist free. with the exception of a few other expat volunteers at finca peru (which i am very thankful for, for obvious reasons) the city doesnt really see many foreign tourists - mainly just peruvians looking for a weekend vacation.

the picturesque andes in the background and the crisp air, the churches on every corner, the women in traditional colorful peruvian attire with their long black hair, parted in the middle, braided and hanging long down their back, with the classic top hat on the back of their head, standing proud on their dusty black heels. their hands are worn, tired, their smiles big, and their babies on their backs and toddlers running around tugging on the other women's skirts. the more further out from ayacucho center they live, the more quechua they rely upon then spanish, or castellano as they call it.

i had the beautiful opportunity of sitting in on a bancomunal, a communal bank meeting, or a group loan as you may have seen them on kiva.

it was an extraodinarily powerful thing to watch these women seated, being taught by a convicted and passionate FINCA employee who explained to them how to understand FINCA's interest rates and how to build savings through their loans at FINCA. the women nodded and laughed, and then we all played a game to get our energy boosted. i, of course, was in the losing group, and had to dance in the center of the room while all the other women laughed at us. (ive noticed this quite a bit traveling. they really like to take the guedita american and make it dance. little do they know IM GOOD AT IT!!!!).

afterwords was collections. i laughed at myself that i actually teared up as these women were called one by one, by name, to hand over their payment in soles (Peru's currency, which runs about 3 nuevo soles for 1 USD). what an extraodinary thing to watch these women, farmers, campesinas, that came to town to proudly give their monthly loan repayment to FINCA. i loved the empowerment i felt in the room. i loved that many of the women had sleeping babies in their laps, were breastfeeding them even as they counted their repayment out to give to FINCA, toddlers running around. these women are juggling so much, quite literally in their hands, yet are not only willign and excited to take out loans, they are their in a timely fashion to learn from the classes FINCA offers its socios (partners/clients) and make their repayments on time. i was floored at the entrepreneurship these women have. that given the chance, they do take the offer of a loan, and they take it seriously. i am impressed as its not a level of entrepreneurship i wouldve imagined, given their circumstances. i feel empowered to be in their presence and to be translating their stories. i am really excited to be here for the next ten weeks. i actually couldn't fathom being more excited.

love love
la suz