Gabe Francis

Crop to Cup: A Kiva Fellow’s journey to discover the...

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 02:48:35 -0400

Crop to Cup: A Kiva Fellow’s journey to discover the source of his daily cup of coffee. My first iMovie ever. A rough cut.

"Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now..."

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:58:20 -0400

“Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been frowning on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A.E. Housman, that one could not be young forever—that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer.”

- from Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. I just finished reading this book. Wow, highly recommended.

Trading My Rainforest for a Concrete Jungle

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 23:22:00 -0400

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

a Kiva borrower relaxes on his porch

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:48:42 -0400

a Kiva borrower relaxes on his porch

Becoming a Story Teller

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:44:00 -0400

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?

Nicaragua with the Central American Kiva Fellows of class 12.

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:06:23 -0400

Nicaragua with the Central American Kiva Fellows of class 12.

Happy National Coffee Day from Kiva, my new blog post on the official Kiva blog.

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:06:46 -0400

Happy National Coffee Day from Kiva, my new blog post on the official Kiva blog.

"“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North..."

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:51:07 -0400

“

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.

“He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

“Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ “

”

- modern pop-philosopher Kurt Vonnegut. From his novel Time Quake.

This is what the inside of an active volcano looks like while...

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:14:00 -0400

This is what the inside of an active volcano looks like while laying on your stomache, skin burning with lava rocks, arm extended over a riotous canyon, trying not to choke from sulfer fumes. Volcan Concepción of Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua.

Pig Farmer in Costa Rica

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:23:41 -0400

Pig Farmer in Costa Rica

What to Expect When You're Not Expecting Anything

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:08:00 -0400

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

Burgernomics

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:56:00 -0400

Burgernomics:

Could it be possible to predict the financial risk of Kiva’s micro-finance field partners using the price of a hamburger as proxy? Read my latest blog post on the official Kiva blog. http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2010/09/08/burgernomics-im-kiva-lovin-it/

The Village Banking Committee of Platanares Costa Rica.

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:17:44 -0400

The Village Banking Committee of Platanares Costa Rica.

Costa Rica, the contradiction

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:24:00 -0400

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

the walk home from work San Isidro del General Costa Rica

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:50:00 -0400

the walk home from work San Isidro del General Costa Rica

It Takes a Village

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:48:00 -0400

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

Dealing with the rain

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:50:00 -0400

Dealing with the rain

"“I used to talk to people on the ground all the time. I would ask them – what is poverty to you,..."

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:12:00 -0400

“

“I used to talk to people on the ground all the time. I would ask them – what is poverty to you, and what is wealth? You see you could have a house with a cement floor and hardly a roof. You and your family eat rice and beans on the hard floor, maybe not even swept. And someone sees that and thinks – my, you have a house! And that is something, and you are rich.”

“Poverty is relative,” I nod.

“It is, indeed. Not just relative to others who have more or less than you, but relative to your expectations. It’s a question of vision. When you look at your life and it doesn’t look like your vision, it’s then that you feel poor.”

”

- An excerpt from a beautiful dialogue on poverty from Taylor, former Kiva Fellow in Burundi. Read the whole blog post here: http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2010/04/30/microfinance-skeptics-rethink-your-vision-of-success/

"Here we didn’t get everything we needed. We got everything we wanted…"

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:06:00 -0400

“Here we didn’t get everything we needed. We got everything we wanted…”

- Graffitti on a bathroom wall at Rockin’ J’s hostel on the Costa Rica Carribean Coast

The meager bounty from a day fishing from the beach on the Costa...

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 19:03:30 -0400

The meager bounty from a day fishing from the beach on the Costa Rica Caribbean Coast