Gabe Francis is a kiva fellow.

What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting Anything

As a Kiva Fellow you have to be ready for the unexpected. And not just in the field. Often the biggest surprises come your off-times when you’re not expecting anything. This weekend I went surfing with Austrian circus performers at Dominical beach, planted trees on an ecologic forest preserve, played soccer with a group of Costa Rican boy scouts, and participated in the Peace Corp’s 10 year Costa Rican prospectus.

Let me recount the steps. Saturday morning I caught the 11:30 bus to the coast thinking I’d spend the weekend lounging around in a hammoc reading. But instead I got distracted by a group of cute Swiss girls. They led me to Dominical beach where we found a group of 18 year old circus performers from Austria. I spent the day watching them climb trees to fetch coconuts, flipping around on the sand, and juggling pins. Late that afternoon we rented surf boards and tried to manage the muddy waves. Late afternoon I get a call from Ernesto, who I had met a few weeks earlier at Leo´s girlfriends house. He asked me if I wanted to go to a barbque at his father’s ranch in the mountains. Of course I did. With the circus kids were still out surfing I said goodbye to the swiss girls and caught the 5pm bus back to San Isidro.

Ernesto’s father’s ranch turned out to be kind of a big deal. That night, high in the cold cold mountains of Quebradas, I found myself being given a lecture on William Walker by a couple of Economists from the Costa Rican ministry of Finance. These two economists argued at eachother late into the night- socialism vs capitalism, game theory, US imperialism, all kinds of things- and when they found out I also studied economics used me as a proxy to bounce their ideas. My life is a marvel I tell you. Since it was rather late Ernesto’s father Don Gilberto invited us to stay the night. 
Ernesto’s father is the director of a nature preserve that serves as the water shed for Perez Zeledon province. His house sits on top of the mountain peaks surrounding San Isidro inside of a nature preserve that he founded thirty years ago. At 5:30 that morning Ernesto gave me a tour of the grounds, which I swear to you, is paradise on earth. Realizing I had found something special, and having no other plans for Sunday I asked Don Gilberto if I could spend the day at his house. Sure, he said, but as long as you come along to a meeting I have this morning. And with that Don Gilberto proceeded to tie a handkercheif around his neck with the emblem of the boy scouts. Ha!

Hours later I found myself bouncing along a dirt road in the back of Don Gilberto’s bright yellow truck surrounded by a group of 12 year old boy scouts. We spent the day playing soccer, building rafts, almost poking eachothers eyes out with carved sticks, planting trees, repeating oaths and all that stuff that boy scouts do. 
Those other two gringos in the photo are Katie and Derrick, members of the Peace Corp who helped organize this troup of boy scouts. Katie is a phenomena. Born in California, living in New York, like me!, she has been living in Quebradas for the past two years. Aside from starting the boy scout troup she has organized the installation of a satellite in the town that serves the first internet cafe in the area, publishes a weekly town newspaper, and generally serves as the town liason for all kinds of economic issues. All of the Costa Ricans are completely enamored with her. Don Gilberto included. He marches to the beat of her drum. After we had sent the boy scouts home and the regular afternoon rains had started, Katie invited me along to a town hall meeting where she and her companion, Derrick, collected opinions and recommendations for the Peace Corps ten year prospectus which they would deliver tomorrow in San Jose to Directors flying in from Washingtown DC. I sat in the back, amazed at where this weekend had taken me.

And thus began my work week.

To my great chagrin, it has been more complicated than expected to visit borrowers in Costa Rica. Now that my office work is done, the greatest obstacle is that FUDECOSUR only has one car. The other loan officers ride motorcycles. While I have zero objection to riding on the back of a motorcycle, in fact I think I prefer it (adventure!), the fierce afternoon rains make that completely impractical. So Monday the loan officers and I sat down and optimized a solution for the classic travelling salesman problem. 300 Kiva borrowers in 39 communities within 2 months using 1 car shared among 3 loan officers. Oh yeah, and lots of rain. This week I’m travelling with Don Gerado.

The access I have as representative of Kiva is so very cool. I get to jump in and out of peoples lives and ask them private questions with total immunity. Do you have a good self-esteem? What challenges have you had this year? Oh, 18 of your piglets died? That sounds like a lot. Is that normal?. I can show up unannounced, enter their home, and stick a camera in their face and I’m given free license to do it. This is rather fun. I think I should have been a journalist. This week among many coffee farmers, grocery store owners, and cattle ranchers I interviewed one of the feistyiest old woman I’ve ever met.

Deep in the valley of China Kichá Doña Maria lives with her husband Wilber, 74 years. Recently Don Wilber decided crawling around the hills of his farm to harvest coffee was getting too hard. Never one to sit still, and besides, he needed the money, Wilber was saved by the ingenuity of his wife. One day Doña Maria had the great idea to raise pigs. You can keep them in a pen, they grow fast, reproduce quicker, and get a good price on market. With a loan of $800 she built a pig pen, purchased 3 piglets, and a whole ton of corn feed. Seven months later, on a normal day when she is out feeding her pigs, a gringo shows up with a big expensive camera and asks her life story.

Of course, the stories aren’t always happy. Just today I met a farmer who has gotten himself a little in over his head. He is struggling to juggle multiple loans, his grocery store just closed its doors because he allowed his neighbors to run tabs that they never intended to pay off, and on top of it all he is very sick just had surgery to insert a metal rod into his spine. His only recourse is to sell his house and even that probably won’t get him enough money to pay off his debt. Its unlikely he is going to be able to pay off his Kiva loan. It was an uncomfortable conversation and a sharp reminder that after all, this is still reality.

And that’s where I leave you. Tomorrow I’m headed to Nicaragua. The other Kiva Fellows in Central American and I are getting together for a mini reunion on Isla Ometepe.

I recently wrote a blog post for the Kiva Blog that received some attention. Check it out here.http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2010/09/08/burgernomics-im-kiva-lovin-it/#comments

Costa Rica, the contradiction

Over these past two weeks I have learned a lot about the relativity of poverty and wealth. My weekends have been spent in Costa Rica, the exotic tourism capital of white sand beaches and jungle canopy tours, and my week days in Costa Rica, the Central American plantation that your bananas and coffee come from. The contrast between the two is striking and I reel from the culture shock daily.

Two weeks ago, on a Friday, I got in a car with Leo and Digna (his girlfriend) and headed to San Vito- a tiny town buried in the rolling jungle hills four hours south near the Panama border. We were there to see about a new village bank.

Inside the social hall of town too small to have a center we met with the leaders of a local women’s club. Apparently, they had heard from their neighbors up north that there was a foundation giving out loans people like them, normal people, working people, could afford. They wanted in. It was getting dark and the rain was beating hard against the tin roof so we talked fast and loud. One of them wanted a loan to raise butterflies (its common here to release caged butterflies during birthdays and church events and celebrations, much like doves in the movies). Another, wanted a loan to buy a second saw for his workshop. Rent is expensive but with two saws he thinks he can mill enough wood to turn a profit. I sat there humbled. A simple saw could turn this guy’s life around! Sitting there listening to Leo explain the technicalities I felt proud to be part of a solution. Entrepreneurial spirit is everywhere and these people were excited that they were going to be given a chance to finance their ideas. We ended the meeting when the rain beating on the tin roof became so loud we could no longer hear ourselves speak.

If Costa Rica is a playground for middle-aged middle-income bracket tourists then Manuel Antonio beach is their sand box. The super markets are stocked with imported junk food, the buses run on time, and white costumed waiters serve mai-tais to 5-star hotel guests lounging on combed beaches. Behind them monkeys swing in the jungle vines and ahead, just past the breaking waves, the sea crashes angrily against tiny jungled islands spotting the coast. The Saturday morning that we arrived back from San Vito I caught the first local bus there.

The bus ride itself was worth the trip alone. Our converted school bus, originally from Rhode Island, zig zagged down the lush mountain canopy and along the palm lined pacific coast. Somewhere around Dominical we left the real Costa Rica behind and entered the Costa Rica of postcards and travel magazines. Real-estate advertisement interrupted the skyline. “Your piece of tropical paradise, $200,000 and up”.

At the bus stop in Quepos I met a group of cute girls from Quebec and followed them to their hostel. The place was top notch. For $10 the middle class youth of Rio de Janerio, Boston, Montreal, Trieste, and California shared bunk beds and swapped travel stories. Late at night, after a round of drinking games with Germans and Italians, I went swimming with the girls from Quebec in a pool overlooking the Pacific.  Think, just the day before I was sitting in a farm town listening to a farmer explain why he wants a loan so he can afford a second saw! A saw!

The work weak was spent in bed. I fell sick with the stomache flu on Tuesday. From what I’m not sure. Alone, a thousand miles from anyone who might care, the toilet was alter and my bed my refuge.

Thursday, recovering from my lonely sickness, I caught a bus to San Jose. I didn’t exactly have an idea where I was going next, but it seemed a nice idea to escape San Isidro again. Indecisive to the extreme, in my rucksack I packed both a sweater and shorts just in case I went to both the beach and the mountains. At the Tranquilo Backpackers hostel in Barrio Amon I whipped out the trusty Lonely Planet and put my finger on Monteverde, the Cloud Forest. The sweater would come to good use after all.

I have an amazing super-power ability to sleep on buses, airplanes, and cars. The minute I sit down and the bus starts the slow rumble of the engine puts me to sleep. Five hours later I woke as the bus bounced through sink holds on an unpaved road high up in the northern continental divide of Costa Rica.

Monteverde is the jungle gym of the Costa Rican playground. Canopy tours, ziplines, guided bird watching, river rafting, and all built around one of the earth’s last virgin cloud forests. Eco-tourism they call it. You can hardly step outside without paying forty dollars. It reminded me of the tourism industry built around the Iguazu Waterfalls in Argentina. Perfectly manicured paths cut through stunning scenery, otherwise completely inaccessible.

Refusing to pay for a tour guide, Friday morning I walked 8km up hill to the entrance of the nature preserve. I paid $17 to enter the park and for four hours wandered through the muddy paths. I found out why they call it a cloud forest. A perpetual thick fog leaves the leaves glistening and the moss neon green but prevents you from seeing more than 3-5 meters in any direction. The trees are tall and pre-historic looking with large vines and enormous leaves hanging from them. Large blue butterflies whisk about and these tiny white hovering bugs that look exactly like ferries floated everywhere. 

Although I had originally scoffed at the though of hiring a guide, this is probably one of the places I should have doled out for one. I marched around the paths, wide eyed and happy, but ignorant of the history and the wonder in which I was but a tiny spec. I learned later most of the wildlife in Monteverde is endangered and unique to the area. This forest is one of the only places left you can see the resplendent Quetzal, the mayan bird of legend. There are hundreds of unique species of poison dart frogs, monkeys, and such that I didn’t notice either.

But I did see a lot of hummingbirds. Here is a video from the hummingbird sanctuary just outside the entrance to Monteverde park: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhOC9ZKY72w

Saturday I had planned to leave for Arenál, Costa Rica´s most famous active volcano, but late Friday I got a call from one of my coworkers at Kiva who was in town for a conference. He had decided to come visit me in Monteverde. Since there isn’t much to do in Monteverde if you don’t want to spend lots of money, I sat around the tiny town of Santa Elena reading books, napping in the hammoc, and eating 1,800 colon sandwhiches from the friend chicken shop across the street. Rob, from Kiva arrived late in the day and we hiked around the town a bit. At night we visited this frog museum where a little Costa Rican girl toured us around a pitch back room shining flash-lights on glass aquariums that contained all the frogs I hadn’t managed to see in the wild. Sunday morning I caught the 6am bus to San Jose and put my super-power to work. 8 hours later I was back in San Isidro where it was raining.

With most of the office work finished, at last!, I can finally get to the fun part- field visits with our loan officers. This week I visited two the communities of Platanares de Brunca and Santa Rosa de Brunca. These excursions usually means 2-3 hour drives through Costa Rica´s back roads of pineapple fields and jungle. I am learning that it’s brutest form, village banking is actually little more than a group of local farmers with a notebook and a cash box. It is hardly glamorous work. I sat around while Danny, our loan officer, collected payments in dirty wads of cash from the borrowers. 

The highlight was towards the end of the day when a farmer came in asking for a loan to buy two cows. I got to see for the first time a new loan signed to Kiva. I explained to Manuel what Kiva was and what the internet was and how his picture and loan would be put on a website for all the world to see. His eyes dodged around the room the whole time. He was really nervous and I wonder if he understood what I was talking about. He was just a simple guy who wanted a loan for a cow- what’s all this noise about computers?. When it came time to sign his name he became very ashamed. He couldn’t write. He was oh so embarrassed and I felt terrible for him, watching his hand tremble as the pen touched the paper. He apologized over and over that his signature wasn’t any good, that he had never gone to school.

The next day in Santa Rosa I visited a second village bank. It was very similar to the first meeting, except this time I had come prepared. Before leaving the office I had brought print outs of the Kiva website and of the profile pages of four Kiva borrowers in the community. One of them happened to be there that day. As I explained that people all over the world had contributed to his loan, I pointed to the pictures of those people on my printed paper. He loved it! At one point he became very emotional and his eyes started watering. He was so happy that people as far away as Norway and Colorado cared about him! The village bankers were impressed too. They had been giving out Kiva loans for over a year but had never actually seen the website. To them Kiva was just a name they wrote down during the loan paperwork. But to actually see the pictures, to hear it explained, and to be able to ask questions about the process was an eye opening experience. They kept saying how beautiful, how beautiful it is that this exists. They wanted to know if people on Kiva would like to help them build a potable water system for their town, which doesn’t have running water.

Here is Melvin’s loan on Kiva: http://partners.kiva.org/lend/180590

At night I ate dinner at Danny’s house. We ate plates full of platano verde tacos. His mother is one of my new favorite people.

Thanks for reading.
Gabe

It Takes a Village

Hello! This update includes beans drying on a tarp, an exercise in roughing it in Costa Rica with my neighbor the giant sloth, and the exhaustion of Kurt Vonnegut. By the way, have you made a loan on Kiva.org yet? Go make one to a borrower in Costa Rica and tell me what you think. 

Micro-Finance is the process of bringing financial services to the under-privileged. The reason banks have traditionally avoided this sector is that managing these small loans is expensive and risky. Not only is the interest earned on the micro-loans very small, but the people that need them most live in remote areas of unstable countries. Often, a loan officer has to mount his motorcycle and drive hours inside rugged terrain to collect on a payment so small it might not even cover the cost of gas. On top of being extremely efficient, self-sustaining Micro-Finance Institutes, or MFIs, have to rely on alternate funding sources (like Kiva) and innovations like mobile payments and village banking.
 
Last Saturday I decided to skip plans of escape to the coast to see exactly how village banking works. Leo, myself, and a loan officer named Geiner took a trip to visit FUDECOSUR’s village bank comitee in San Martín. I spent most of the hour drive staring out the window at the rolling jungle hills. In route we passed the Pejibaye where villagers were taking advantage of the unusual hot, sunny day to dry their black beans harvest on large white tarps spread across the fields.
 
The committee meeting of San Martin is held in a large communal hall at the top of a large hill. Motorbikes of the borrowers, some who had come from farms many kilometers away, spewded across the adjacent well groomed soccer field. Green hills below were pock marked with the white tarps of sunsoaked beans we had seen earlier. In the hall, thirty humble farmers seated on crudely constructed stools gathered around the multi-purpose auditorium. A tattered list of drink prices hung on the wall (guaro, 400 colones), from a village dance held several months earlier. The women, representing 31% of FUDECOSUR’s entrepreneurs, shuffled nervously in their impenetrable island as leathered farmers, cowboy boots and groomed moustaches and all, lined up to sign their attendance. The meeting was smaller than usual Geiner said. Those missing were busy picking bananas or drying their beans before the inevitable afternoon rains made it impossible to work the fields.   

The business meeting was especially impressive considering it was a banking meeting. The president of the committee, himself a borrower elected democratically every two years, read off a list incomprehensibly long numbers calculated in colones - expenses, loans collected, loans due, interest earned, and projects started. The transparency was impressive. Normally, interest on your loans is a sore subject, you’re sure the bank is robbing you. But here, every penny was laid to account and available to all the farmers to question. If only all banks worked like this.

Leo, the director, gave a speech explaining the social mission of FUDECOSUR. The extra wet season this year has flooded crops and made it difficult for some farmers to pay their loans. Delinquent payments are on the rise towards 3%, up from 1.3% last year. He at once implored the importance of timely repayments of loans while simultaneously exhuding a humbleness that endeared him to their cause. FUDECOSUR is here to serve you he said. “Without you, we wouldn’t have jobs. And without us the comité would have no funding for your future projects.”  

I, standing in the back, taking photographs and filming, was introduced at one point as Kiva was explained. Multitudes of sun scorched faces twisted my way still confused at exactly why a gringo had bothered to come to their meeting. Between business items, names of attendees were pulled put of a hat and small prizes were distributed - a plate, an aluminum pot, a knife. Later it was explained this was to keep morale (and attendance and therefore repayments) high. After the question and answer session, where one borrower asked how they, the borrowers of comité San Martín, were doing in repayments in comparison with other committees, we ate a communal lunch of, what else?, rice and beans.
 
That night Leo invited me to the house of his girlfriend for a bar-b-que. Her three son and I are now facebook friends, the pervasiveness of which I still find miraculous. I showed them my apartment in New York on Google Maps Street View which blew their minds. The youngest one, probably 9 or 10 years old, all night got a kick out of playing with his cellphones ring tone which called out, “Excellente, Mae” the Tico equivalent of Sweet, Dude.

Sunday was Mother’s Day in Costa Rica. Store windows were full of all the cheesy catch phrases you’d expect leading up to the event. My day was spent helping friends of Arine and Pierre, my original couch surfers, move to a new house.

Ana Sofie and Cedric, a Belgian couple, moved to Perez Zeledon two years ago to start a new life. With inheritance money they purchased a small farm on the edge of a hill an hour outside of town and built a small house, a cabin really. No running water and no electricity yet. They plan to live on the land. Roughing it to the extreme. And even more extreme because the woman Ana-sofie is cute and pregnant. It takes a special person to want that. Thereau comes to mind along with all the usual philosophic meditations. Cedric had just built a septic tank and was teaching me about water irrigation and farming coffee. In the adjacent forrest lives a giant white sloth which we went searching for, but couldn’t find.

That afternoon, sweaty and tired from moving furniture over muddy roads, we went swimming at a local water hole by the river. Over 300 colon cervezas at the restaurant next door where we learned the definition of Tico Time waiting for our appetizers of fried platanos. The only common language that united us all was badly spoken spanish which I found very amusing.

This week at work I’ve been working on a social performance audit of FUDECOSUR. I’ve found that no one likes an auditor, so I’ve been trying to get creative with how I request sensitive information. I’ve also been running into a new Tico cultural barrier. They never say no even when they obviously don’t mean to help. I guess they don’t want to dissapoint or something? I find it very frustrating. So I was happy when Wednesday I scored a major victory by retrieving some documents I needed to get started. On the internet I found out a separate funder of the foundation had previously done a similar audit. A quick call to their office in San Jose and I was passed through to the Director who with out blinking offered to send me all her research. The Kiva name opens doors in the social sector, just like my previous employer Google does in the private. Overall, I’m learning a lot about Micro-Finance and how exactly NGO’s like FUDECOSUR work. It’s fascinating but coming along slower than I like. I think I’ll write a blog post about it on the Kiva Fellows blog.

Nights are pretty dead in this back water trading post of a town. I think I need a hobby to fill the time after the 4pm end of work day and 8pm when everything closes. Hoping that comes soon because my supply of Kurt Vonnegut novels is running thin. If anybody who is still reading this email wants to send me some philosophy books or a used guitar (or banjo) or whatever, I’d be happy to send my address. Thank god for internet cafes I guess.

This weekend I’m deciding between visiting another community meeting with Leo in San Vito, on the Panama border or going to Manuel Antonio beach with a visitor from Kiva Headquarters. San Vito is far enough away that we have to spend the night. Leo promises we’ll be back by 11:30am Saturday when the bus for Manuel Antonio leaves. I’m going tempt fate. Let’s see if I make it.

Gabriel