Shereef’s Kiva Blog

Posts Tagged ‘social entrepreneurship’

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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One of my first posts was titled ‘recession proof’’ in which I described the resilience of micro-businesses and the integrity of micro-lending. This time around, I want to detail a theme I had only painted with large brushstrokes.

Although EDPYME Alternativa’s borrowers are scattered throughout the region, I live in Chiclayo and it has become the backdrop and the context of my life. To me, one of the most fascinating parts of this small city is the dearth of big box stores. In their absence exists a constant buzz of small-scale commerce.

Let me describe this vibrant economic landscape. In the center of the city, around the main plaza, there is a mixture of restaurants and shops devoted to clothing and electronics (especially cell phones). As one ventures further from the center, the streets become organized by economic themes.

Although that string of stores on Cuglievan is far less efficient than Home Depot, it encourages competition, diversity of selection and keeps more people employed. One of the strangest paradoxes of a modern economy is the contradiction of scale: with efficiency at a large scale less people can do more. Progress becomes self-defeating if people do not have the jobs and incomes to keep on buying from the big box stores!

The hectic flow of social and economic interactions in Chiclayo keeps people interacting with one another, asking for advice and building a community. And on a personal level, it is way more fun to walk through high energy markets and themed streets asking where to find that one little thing than to navigate down the well-marked aisle 3.

*King Kong is the most rich dessert imaginable: a layer of thick caramel, a layer of candied fruit preserves (generally pineapple) and a layer of cake – cut into rectangles, circles or squares

Last week definitely seems to have been the high point of my time working with Kiva so far. For me, it became one of those moments where one is able to see why all the seemingly disparate pieces and decisions of life actually have an order and elegance to them. Enjoy the photos!

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09.29.09 - kiva cumbre and foromic

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