Gabe Francis is a kiva fellow.

Trading My Rainforest for a Concrete Jungle

Many count downs start at ten, and it seems appropriate that today, the tenth day before I get on a flight back to the States, I start my own. It is almost surreal that I will soon be trading my rainforest in Costa Rica for the concrete jungle of Manhattan.

This week I layed low and spent the my first ever weekend in San Isidro. I should have done this earlier. Although it seems a sleepy place there are enough holes in the wall to keep a good time going. I even made it out salsa dancing at the local casino with a few peace corps volunteers and a white water rafting guide. Did I really stay out until 4am on a Thursday in the middle of southern Costa Rica? Maybe I called the bluff on this place too early. Also, Costa Rica’s most popular soccer team Saprissa came into town to play the locals. Though not nearly as violent as other south american matches I’ve seen they put on a good show. The local team beat the champions on a last minute goal during a high scoring game, 4-3. Good job boys. It goes to prove that at the three month mark is when you truly start to appreciate a place. It happened this way in Argentina. It happened this way in Spain. And although I am happy to return to the buzz of NYC I am also a little sad to be leaving Costa Rica just as the going gets good. 

The highlight of the week was two days of solid borrower visits with Danny, the loan officer I spend most of my time with now. We took a three hour drive south towards the Panama border until we ran out of road, then four wheeled it for two more hours through muddy jungle roads until we were deep into La Amistad national park. There we met with two separate village banks of AltaMira and Pueblo Nuevo and visited ten Kiva borrowers. Since it was so far away we had to spend the night at Danny’s uncle’s house just outside of Buenos Aires. After an emotional viewing of the Chilean miners riding their rocket out from their hole in the ground Danny’s uncle, who is an absolute riot, invited us out to the private country club of Pindecco, which is the multi-national farming giant off-branch of Del Monte where all of your pineapples comes from. Within no time Danny’s six sixteen year old cousins had shown up and I found myself sipping Imperial beers poolside with a bunch of teeny boppers text messaging their thumbs off in the most out of character country club in southern Costa Rica one can imagine. Life is good.

As requirement of my Kiva Fellowship I am supposed to write a mass journal which will be sent out to all Kiva lenders who have ever made a loan in Costa Rica. That means thousands and thousands of people. Given how prone I am to grammer and spelling mistakes I am taking extra precaution by giving you, my dear friend, a sneak peak. You can find the letter in its entirety pasted below. It is outrageously long, but after three months I think it deserves to be. If you find the time to read it please let me know what you think. I would really like to hear your opinion.

Your’s, truly and faithfully,

Gabriel

…

Dear Kiva Lender,

When asked what they think of Costa Rica most people usually refer to the poster in their local travel agency, white palm beaches, virgin cloud forests, and toucans. Yet, there is a side of Costa Rica that the tour packages pouring out of San Jose regrettably fail to recount. The truth is, while eco-tourism and liberal trade agreements have brought prosperity to some in Costa Rica, many Ticos still live below the poverty line. Is ignorance bliss? We Kiva Lenders know better.

My name is Gabriel Francis, and I am a Kiva Fellow working with FUDECOSUR, a Kiva field partner based in rural southern Costa Rica. With only two weeks left of my fellowship I can hardly believe I will soon be on a plane trading tropical rainforests for the concrete jungles of New York City.

Kiva’s Field Partner FUDECOSUR

As a Kiva Fellow, I was placed with one of Kiva’s Field Partners to provide support and transparency into the money lending process. As you may know, all entrepreneurs on Kiva’s web site are supported by local Field Partners, or microfinance institutions (MFIs) like FUDECOSUR, who are Kiva’s liaison between Kiva lenders and Kiva borrowers. They choose which of their clients are eligible to receive Kiva support, write and upload business profiles, disburse loans, collect payments, write journal updates, and respond to lender comments. Currently, FUDECOSUR is one of three MFIs in Costa Rica and the only to focus exclusively on Costa Rica’s impoverished agricultural region.

Southern Costa Rica is ripe for Micro-Finance innovation. For a majority of FUDECOSUR’s clients their Kiva loan is the first loan they have ever received, and in some cases ever qualified for. Despite an abundance of national banking options and agricultural credit unions in the area most loan terms are too steep to afford and bank branches too difficult to reach over the muddy unpaved roads. FUDECOSUR specifically tailors its loans to serve this marginalized client base. By operating on a village banking model FUDECOSUR empowers local communities to manage their own credit resources. With your neighbor as local banker, barriers to affordable credit are significantly lowered. Village banking also creates a bond of trust in these farming communities between the organization and its users, ensuring decision-making starts at the community level. As a non-profit organization all profits of this partner go to extending new credit opportunities to these local banks and providing additional educational services such as computer classes. To further facilitate its agricultural clients FUDECOSUR often extends longer than average long terms, so that when a plague or heavy rains destroy the harvest, farmers have some flexibility in payment.

Riding around in FUDECOSUR’s four wheel car over the past three months, I have interviewed over one hundred Kiva borrowers and visited nearly all of its 41 village banks. Since FUDECOSUR is a new Kiva partner and still in pilot phase a majority of my work has been spent on ensuring they are prepared to scale with a Kiva funding increase. The good news is, yes, I think we can expect to see a lot more Costa Rican borrowers on Kiva in the future. In addition to process refinement and borrower interviews, I have also compiled several Social Impact studies to measure FUDECOSUR’s success in their mission to alleviate poverty. The results have been heart-warming.

Recently, Melvin, an entrepreneur in Santa Rosa de Brunca who took out a Kiva loan to purchase two cows, told me that he has really seen a difference in his community since FUDECOSUR came to town. The people have hope he says. Just by looking around he can see a difference. Houses are well kept and children go to school rather than work in their family’s fields. Melvin then wondered outloud if Kiva lenders would like to help his community finance a potable water system, which they are in the process of building.

Client Profile: Doña Maria and her pigs

The executive Director of FUDECOSUR, Leonardo, often starts off his meetings with local village banks by telling the story of a butterfly farm. Imagine, he says, if at every birthday celebration, graduation, or religious ceremony if people let out butterflies! Wouldn’t it be beautiful? A room full of butterflies swirling about in the warm air to complement the happiness of the occasion? Butterflies of all colors, shapes, and sizes are abundant in Costa Rica but most importantly this kind of radical thinking exemplifies the utopian ideal we chase in micro-finance: new economic activity created where there once was none. So it is truly remarkable when such a case is found.

Doña Maria is one of the spunkiest 76 year old women I have ever met. A few years ago Maria’s partner, who is 77, grew tired of trekking about in the hills of his coffee fields. The work is hard and at his age he didn’t feel like battling the mud, the rain, and the ant nests to pick the ripe red berries. So Doña Maria had the innovative idea to create something out of nothing. She decided to build a pig farm.

Maria noticed that people in her village often travelled to the nearby town of Pejibeye to purchase their meat. Very few of her neighbors raised their own pigs and no butcher shop existed in her village. With a Kiva loan of $1,200 Doña Maria purchased six piglets and built a pig sty behind her house. Within six months from her loan date these pigs had already birthed 18 babies, a return of 300% on her original investment. If only my own investments showed such quick returns! Her neighbors quickly started placing bids for her pigs rather than travel all the way to neighboring town. By now Maria has a healthy business that help her and her partner earn a steady income without having to crawl around in the coffee fields. When Don Gerardo, a loan officer of FUDECOSUR, and I first met Maria she was out in knee high rubber boots and an umbrella feeding her pigs despite the heavy rains. Don Gerardo noted that he hopes he shows such initiative at that age. Who wouldn’t agree?

Doña Maria’s case is only one of many example I have witnessed during my time in Southern Costa Rica. Despite popular opinion, most poor people work hard and when given an opportunity to improve themselves, they take it. Truly, the power of inclusive financial services like micro-credit is astonishing.

Of course, not every story turns out with a happy ending. Every once in a while I interview a borrower where things haven’t gone so well. Like Keilyn of the China Kichá who took out a Kiva loan to finance her father’s grocery store. Within several short months of taking the loan Keilyn lost over $3,000 from bad customers who failed to pay grocery bills made on credit. When her father become ill and required two consecutive surgeries Keilyn found herself burdened with debts beyond her means and was forced to close the store. She and her father count on the sale of the house they live in to cover her Kiva loan payments. Though few and far between stories like this are humbling reminders that although Micro-finance is a valuable service it is not magic. After all, this is still real life.

The Rain in San Isidro

Here in southern Costa Rica the rainy season is in full swing. I think I’ve seen more rain in the past few months than I have in the past three years combined. It rains every day all day without fail and often hard enough to turn the street outside my tiny apartment in San Isidro into a full fledged river. Although it will be a relief to see some sunshine, I have to admit that I will miss the sound of rain clattering against my tin roof. The droning wash puts me to sleep at night and a warm metallic ping is my own natural alarm clock in the morning.

Despite these miserable conditions the farmers of Costa Rica press on. Every day trucks loaded with bright red berries from the recent coffee harvest roll through town, leaving behind a syrupy scent that is unique to the area. It seems almost surreal that those beans will soon follow me overseas to be ground into a dark cup for my daily coffee. As I walk among the fierce skyscrappers of the Manhattan skyline I will be more thankful than ever for the sacrifices it took to get those beans there, for the farmers of the Brunca Region of Costa Rica to which I owe an unforgettable three months, and to you, the Kiva Lenders, who are making it all possible.

On behalf of myself and the entrepreneurs of the Brunca Region of Costa Rica thank you for being a Kiva Lender. Together, may we find sustainable solutions to poverty and facilitate development world-wide.

May this letter find you in peace. As we say in Costa Rica, Pura Vida!

Yours, ever so truly and faithfully,

Gabriel Francis
Kiva Fellow, class 12

PS: This Friday, October 23rd, I will be conducting a one time personal interview with Leonardo, Executive Director of FUDECOSUR to be published on the official Kiva Fellows blog. If you have ever had a burning question about how Micro-Finance works in the real world or a specific questions for this partner, now is your chance. Please use this Google Moderator page to submit and vote on questions: http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=35f62

Becoming a Story Teller

By now I must have interviewed fifty farmers in the Brunca region of Costa Rica. On the surface each of these interviews begins quite the same. A neighbors responds to an inquiry, “Where can I find so and so?”, with a finger pointed in the direction of a few rustling branches on a far off hillside. Deep in the thicket of a coffee bush, or rigid corn stalks, or behind heavy leaves of a banana tree I find a man armed with a machete, a v shaped sliver of brown chest exposed through a shirt tucked into high muddy pants, and nervous eyes. They have no idea why this gringo, naive in his rolled up white long sleeves and poorly inadequate leather shoes, is in their field. Introduced by the loan officer of the bank with whom they have a shaky business relationship as representative of Kiva - what the hell is Kiva? - I begin to ask them uncomfortable questions. “How do you feel this year as compared to last year?”, “Do your children go to school? Why not?”, and so on. Their awkward stance betrays my own insecurities. At once my mind swims and toungue trips with the same mental curse that prevents me, even after all these years of practice, from speaking a fluid spanish. Yet I am improving. The smiles and honest answers are coming in under the 10 minute mark now, a metric that I slowly widdle down with practice. By the end of most interviews I am able to make a personal connection that cracks the shell off of, “Yes… I’m fine.. va mejorando… no le gusta la escuela a él, prefiere trabajar conmigo…” and reveals the practiced wisdoms of an agricultural people who have plenty of space and time to reflect on life’s intricacies. I think I like it here. I think I could do this for a long while. But the itch, this vagabond’s curse, to move on again, to see what’s around the next corner sits on my shoulders like so many devils. November is coming and with it the inevitability of a return to New York. 28 days left in the jungle.

A great majority of my time as Kiva Fellow is not spent trekking through muddy fields, avoiding humongous spider webs, the constant rain, and red ant nests the size of death, but sitting in an office hunched over a desk, filling entries in an excel spreadsheet. For the interested, my typical work day looks like this:

7am wake to the sound of my cell phone’s alarm clock. Hit snooze a couple times.

7:45am march 15 minutes to the office, through San Isidro’s city streets. Buy a newspaper on the way. 200 colones.8am check group emails from other Kiva Fellows around the world. 

8:30am eat breakfast with the office in the conference room. Breakfast is usually a cup of poorly prepared drip coffee. Black, thank you, no sugar. The others ussually stick heaping spoonfuls of sugar in their’s until it reaches the consistency of a coffee flavored syrup. One wonders how the ticos aren’t all diabetics yet. Accompanying the coffee is either: 1. an airy baguette dipped into natilla, a fresh soupy cream. 2. the same bread smothered in avocado and black bean paste, my favorite, but increasingly rare since avocados are out of season. or 3. gallo pinto. I interject occasionally into the rapid coloquial conversation.

9am to 1pm I am often filling in a spreadsheet with data collected from a social performance survey painfully extracted from the director. Or, I’m writing the stories I’ve collected from field visits like the ones above. When I have nothing to do, which is far too frequent, I research graduate schools.

1pm I leave the office to get lunch around the corner at a place called, “Comido Tipica Costariquense” (Typical Costa Rican Food). Not very imaginative of them, but hey, at least they’re honest. Every single restaurant here sells the exact same rice, beans, ensalada de platano verde, and carne en salsa. I choose this one because it has a nice patio and the creole girl at the counter has pretty eyes. Of all tangible things, I may miss the fresh fruit juice of Costa Rica the most.

2pm to 4pm Lately I’ve been using this time slot to write graduate school essays. They are coming, slowly.

4pm every one has a coffee break, largely a repeat of breakfast.

4:30pm the office closes. I linger as long as possible, reluctant to go back to my apartment. I hate living alone.

At night I sneak over to my friend’s house around the corner, the Dutch and Belgian couple I met on couchsurfing. Their green energy company is coming along nicely. Every day they seem to get more busy. Solar panels, man, solar panels. If you want to make a tidy business come to Costa Rica and start selling solar panels to the gringo expats. I bring a bottle of wine, Pierre and Arine and their baby Tristane the conversation. I am going to miss them dearly. So rarely can one find such genuine people. Such good friends.

A couple weeks ago I went to Nicaragua for a reunion with all the other Kiva Fellows in Central America. Over seven days we went clubbing in sketchy Managua, swimming in the virgin crater lake of Laguna de Apoyo, witnessed the most beautiful combination of rainstorms at sunset of all time while crossing lake Managua by boat, climbed and conquered the sulfer fumed face of volcano Concepción on Isla Ometepe, danced to tribal drums during Nicaragua’s (and really, all of South America’s) bi-centenial independence, surfed the waves of San Juan del Sur during the day and doused our liquid courage with Flor de Caña rum at night. The details, if you care, are in the pictures.

Here are the photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/gabefrancis/NicaraguaWithKivaFellows?authkey=Gv1sRgCLG35_mqycPxOA#

Here is a video: http://vimeo.com/15336389

This weekend I had ambitions of reaching Isla Caño off of Drake’s Bay on the Oso Peninsula, but late last night I got a call from my friend Ernesto. I’m invited back to his father’s ranch up in the hills of Quebradas. The Costa Rican Boy Scouts are having a bar-b-que.

If you were me, what would you do with your last few weeks in Costa Rica?