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
