Shereef’s Kiva Blog

Posts Tagged ‘development’

Sometimes the thin, sensory stitch that distinguishes reality from hallucination begins to come loose. Yesterday I found myself in a situation so unreal that I began to doubt the feasibility of the world around me.

EDPYME Alternativa has created a new loan product destined specifically for clients who will become Kiva borrowers. Loans of $300 or less at a special interest rate are now offered to rural entrepreneurs. Getting to them generally involves a unique combination of collective vans, collective taxis, mototaxis and walking aimlessly through fields.

Yesterday, Manuel and I took many collective taxis — a random car that allows anyone who needs a ride to hop in with their cargo. We drove for twenty minutes on unpaved dirt road through beautiful knee high corn fields, palm and locust trees spotting the hazy windless horizon. By sheer luck we found the borrower we needed to interview, Aurelio Sandoval, walking through a field looking to catch a ride.

The interview only lasted a few minutes and we waited on the side of the ‘road’ for more potential riders to come by. At this point reality begins to fray at the edges.

A copper skinned woman in a teal dress talks to the driver for a moment and leaves her bags on the floor behind the driver’s seat. She walks away and I decide to sit in the car and read the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It takes a few minutes for me to realize that the chirping sounds I hear are not coming from the tropically bucolic fields surrounding me – but rather from right beside me.

The woman had left a young turkey in a woven plastic bag in the car. And it almost escaped. I went back to reading my book grinning at the situation and out of the corner of my eye I saw not one, but two adolescent turkeys looking up at me with their heads poking out of their unconventional quarters.

Reality frays a little further.

Almost immediately after my realization that there are two turkeys in the car, the driver gives up on waiting for more passengers and tells Aurelio and Manuel that we are going back towards town. Soon after leaving we find another passenger walking. He is holding a live hen, with beautiful orange and gold plumage might I add, by the ankles. He sits in the seat behind the turkey sacks and we set off down the road again.

At some point another gentleman squeezes into the front seat next to Aurelio and we come across the bronze skinned woman again. She squeezes in next to me and for good measure has another sack with a nearly full grown turkey. A decision is made to place all bags of live poultry in the back of this 1997 Toyota station wagon.

The tally so far: 3 passengers in the front, 4 in the back, 3 turkeys and a hen. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is the only thing tying me to reality according to the logic that to escape into a fiction novel one must be escaping from something non-fictional.

And then we picked up another passenger. He sat with the driver in the driver’s seat. The mystery of who was steering, shifting gears and working the pedals has yet to be solved. In disbelief, I closed my book realizing that fiction had been overwhelmed by the implausibility of non-fiction.

Total chaos loomed threateningly in the collective taxi that carried 8 passengers, 3 turkeys and a hen.

The turkeys and hen could revolt against their confinement at any moment. The car would careen into corn fields as dust entered the open windows obscuring all vision. The driver’s already precarious control over the car’s directional instruments would be lost. Feathers would fly and people would shriek. A tire would blow and the hen would escape out the open window.

And then people started to get out. We had returned to the town and needed to catch our next collective van to see another borrower. Manuel slept through the entire ride and the only proof I have that any of this actually happened are these pictures.

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10.24.09 – 8 passengers, 3 turkeys and a hen

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What do you want to be when you grow up? What are your hopes? What are your dreams?

Throughout my childhood, these questions constantly attached themselves to the most prosaic daily interactions. In a sense I, and most of my peers, were conditioned to be ambitious dreamers, convinced of the limitless possibilities our futures held (and still hold).

When speaking with borrowers one of our unstated goals as Kiva Fellows is to uncover their latent sense of possibility and excitement at the prospect of success. During interviews I attempt to understand what aspiring entrepreneurs want for themselves and for their children. But one of the harshest realities that I confront concerns the occasional and precise absence of aspiration.

In no way am I implying laziness or even a lack of imagination; rather, survival tends to distract many Kiva clients from the potential realities that accompany success. And then I had an a-ha moment. While interviewing Yesenia Esmeralda Bances Morales (click to contribute to her loan), who seemed bemused when she heard the question ‘what are your hopes or dreams in life’ it dawned on me that it might have been the first time anyone had ever asked her that question.

Imagine that no teachers, no mentors, no leaders ever asked a child to dream big (Perú has yet to find its Obama). Adults here are in no way cynics but many times they are realists. Even linguistically speaking, Spanish comes designed with an icy grammatical irony. ‘Tener ilusiones’ translates literally into English as to have illusions and translates figuratively as to have hopes or dreams.

After a few minutes of talking to Yesenia about the ilusiones she holds most dear she efficiently described her plans to expand her business, and then the educational opportunities she hopes to make available to her daughter. Incidentally, the same young daughter organized fish and prepared for the day’s sales feverishly in the background.

One of the most important contributions we make as members of the Kiva community – lenders, fellows, administrators, etc – can be romantically understood as giving people the opportunity to dream big and then explicitly asking them to do so.

If I could do the interview again, I would only have changed one thing – I would have asked Yesenia’s daughter what she wants to be when she grows up.

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*I didn’t take many photos of this borrower, so instead have supplemented this slideshow with images of Pitipo. Pitipo is a rural area near Chiclayo with a few Kiva borrowers and endless stories*

09.17.09 - to have illusions

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On August 22^nd the New York Times published the article On to Plan B: Starting a Business describing the unexpected spike of new entrepreneurs emerging from the wreckage of the crisis. They quote the Kauffman foundation and bring the term ‘necessity entrepreneurship’ into the mainstream. And in so doing they articulate one of the misperceptions that surrounds the incentives behind starting a business.

Sometimes I really get the feeling that the talking heads, professors, text-books and pols just don’t get it. And by ‘it’ I mean anything remotely human. To think that greed gets elevated as some sort of miraculously innovative force in the ‘opportunity entrepreneurship’ model, where interest rates adjustments can fix anything, still boggles my mind. As far as I am concerned, nearly all entrepreneurship is ‘necessity entrepreneurship,’ whether in the US, Egypt, Armenia or in Chiclayo, Peru.

The phrase ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ contains a truth lost on contemporary economic thought. Luckily it is not lost on Kiva Lenders, whose generosity grows when ‘opportunities’ dry up.

In the end, I cannot help but laugh out of frustration when I read statements like this: “But research on what is known as post-traumatic growth has found that some people become more resilient when faced with adversity, says Shawn Achor, a Harvard researcher. Creativity surges, he says, as they adapt to a new situation.” I read this during the evening, while during the same day I had been out to visit Angelita Loconi De Teque who is 47 and perseveres through ‘adversity’ to make a better life for the 4 children still in her care.

Weaving in and out of the beachside tinderboxes used to prep and clean fresh catches of fish, thoughts of resilience and tenacity overwhelmed me. In spite of being so close to the ocean, the landscape felt somehow forbidding and desolate like all the odds were against Angelita and her fellow fish sellers. And yet, there she was working and smiling with determination. Out of her necessity, and with a couple of micro-credits to help, Angelita creates her opportunities.

I think Mr. Achor needs a historical reality check, if not a gut check, to realize that most of the world is in a state of post-traumatic (political, historical, or economic) adjustment. The process through which adversity begets creativity includes desperation, fear, anguish and defiance. I think America might finally be learning that lesson and the view from outside the bell-jar has never been clearer.

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09.09.09 - necessity entrepreneurship

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