Friendship Bridge

Volunteering for Kiva.org - A Major Change of Pace!

rfay — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:19:06 +0000

One of the goals of our trip (and one reason we are taking 3 years instead of the more normal 18 months) is that we want to be able to volunteer and study along the way. Well, now is the time for our first volunteer stint! We are so excited to be able to volunteer for Kiva.org here in Guatemala.

As we were riding through Mexico, we were really impacted by the poverty we saw, and became tremendously interested in the concept of microfinance, the practice of offering small loans ($100-$1000, usually), without requiring collateral, to tiny businesses. It turns out that last year's Nobel Peace Price winner, Mohammed Yunus, is the originator of the concept, and his book "Banker to the Poor" is tremendously inspiring. What they did with tiny, collateral-free loans in Bangladesh is the most hopeful story about alleviating poverty that I've ever heard in my life.

After hearing about microfinance, we heard about the newish website Kiva.org, which is extending the idea by another level. It allows lenders in the rich part of the world to make small loans (almost) directly to tiny businesses in the more resource-challenged parts of the world, using nothing but a credit card. It's a wonderful new source of capital for the developing world's tiny businesses.

Anyway, we've been accepted as "Kiva Fellows", and will be helping the people of Friendship Bridge to put their clients on the Kiva website. for the last three days we've been traveling to villages, meeting women who are taking out the loans, taking their pictures, writing down their stories, etc. Before long they'll start appearing on the Kiva website. We'll tell you some of the stories here too.

Friendship Bridge is a marvelous organization that makes loans and education for women and their children a major priority. Almost all their clients are the indigenous Maya women of Guatemala, starting and growing little businesses, things like buying a cow or getting additional inventory for a little store, or buying material for their weaving business. We encourage you to visit their website and view the excellent videos they have there.

We'll be updating you on what we see and learn.

Nancy's Second Day of Interviews

nancy — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 22:41:34 +0000

Wednesday I headed up to San Antonio, Solola, Guatemala. It was the second day of volunteer work for Friendship Bridge and Kiva.org. My job was to interview four women and write about them and take photos which will be posted on the Kiva site so that people in the rich part of the world can make small loans to them via the Internet.

Patti (the Friendship facilitator) and I hopped into the taxi (really the back of a pickup). We snaked our way along the shore and up the side of a mountain -- the view was incredible. As I looked across the emerald lake toward the towering volcanoes, I wondered how such a beautiful place could house such incredible poverty.

All day I sat with the Mayan women in their homes, business and community center learning about their struggles, victories and dreams.

These people had been living in a war-torn area for twenty years only to be further pummeled by the incredible natural disaster Hurricane Stan in 2005. The torrential rains as a result of the hurricane washed away many communities. Whole neighborhoods no longer exist because of the mudslides that swallowed up the land the neighborhood sat on and with it thousands of people. It threw these people further into grave poverty.

Poverty is when people who have never had a day of schooling and have no resources to obtain the basics and no access to funds to take care of medical or dental emergencies then lose everything in a natural disaster. Some of the women have no shoes for themselves or their children. Most of the women I interviewed never went to school but know the value of schooling are struggling to figure out how to pay for their children's education. The children have to wear shoes to school and need notebooks and pens. Many families just cannot afford this and are lucky to be able to feed their children. Some do not have electricity or running water. Some have electricity to their house but no lights are on. Perhaps they can not afford light bulbs or the electricity or probably both. When the family has food shortages, this is poverty. When a person has a rotten tooth and it hurts and keeps them up all night and there is nothing they can do about it because there is no money for a dentist, I see this as poverty. The poverty in this town is great.

The women are survivors because they have no choice. They deal with what they are dealt. If they lose everything but the shirt on their backs, they sell that shirt so they can take care of their family. One woman did sell one of her two huipiles, her hand woven top, which cost over $100. It was all she had after the hurricane took everything, including her home.

Most of the women in the area make a living hand weaving traditional maya textitles which are turned into belts, scarfs, huipiles, pants, jackets, cloth bracelets, purses, table and bed covers. They can spend $10 in material, weave a product over the course of two weeks, and sell it for $40. They can only sell a few because the market is so flooded.

In order to weave they seek out loans to buy materials. Before the loans they could only afford material for one product, then wait until it sold and buy the material for the next. With the loans the women can buy enough material to make a few products and sell many more. At other times the loan may be used to send the children to school or just to buy food. The women repay the loan every month and usual pay off the few hundred dollars they borrow in six or nine months. Before microfinance there was little hope to crawling out of poverty, but at least now the families have some hope and room for dreams.

As I came home after the day of interviewing, the women’s stories, tears, smiles and laughter stuck deep in my soul. I will never be the same, I am so thankful for being able to have a day like this.

Randy and I will travel around Guatemala for at least another 10 weeks, interviewing the women thoughout this country and capturing a moment of their lives.

What we're doing in our daily work

rfay — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:07:34 +0000

As you know, we're spending some time in Guatemala as "Kiva Fellows", working with the excellent Microcredit organization Friendship Bridge. Here's what we've been doing so far.

During the week, we go to a village every morning and meet with one of the women who are the workhorses of Friendship Bridge, the "facilitators". These are the women who form the credit groups and know all of FB's clients. The facilitator will take us to one of more of the clients' homes and may stay with us or may deliver us over to the women. We then sit down and chat with as many as six or seven families, one at a time, about their business, their life, and what they're doing with their loan.

But some background: Many of the women don't speak Spanish. There are 22 different Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala, and in some of these areas Spanish is not even a second language, it's a foreign language. And of course Spanish is not our native tongue. So sometimes there's a lot of interpreting to do. Somebody has to bridge it, sometimes the facilitator, sometimes a husband or cousin. And don't you think it's a little strange having a middle-aged gringo couple come up the path to your house to ask how you're using your loan? And how are we supposed to explain to them that their picture and their story is going up on Kiva's website to help fund their loans, when they have no idea what a website or the internet is? (Some women do understand, but the eyes of the majority glaze over when we talk about the "Internet" and a "website").

We try to start by introducing ourselves, how old we are, about our bike trip, how many kids we have, etc. Then we ask them to tell us something about their business, how it got started, etc. Then we pump them with a pile of other questions about the family and the business. Finally, we take some digital photos of them in their business environment, which may be a loom, a store, or a pigpen. In the end, we come away feeling like we understand something. Sometimes what we understand is that they're living a pretty rough life.

At the end of the day we go back to the hotel and gather our notes and our interview sheets and write up the profiles for the women before we forget what we're about. We try to pick out a good picture before we forget what face goes with what name.

At the end of the week or two weeks we might spend a whole day uploading all the profiles and pictures to the Kiva.org site. Friday we uploaded 38 profiles that will raise new loan funds for 38 women. It's pretty exciting stuff.

By the way, you might get a chance to invest in one of these loans if you go to Kiva.org, click on "Lend" and select "Central America" for the region. You can look all the current Friendship Bridge loans that are needing to be funded - often they're already funded, so just go to Kiva and fund somebody else!

You can also browse through all stories of the Friendship Bridge women even though they're already funded.

What is Microfinance Anyway?

rfay — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:11:49 +0000

We should probably say something about what this "Microfinance" or "Microcredit" thing is that we're working in with Friendship Bridge and Kiva.org.

The amazing man who won last year's (2006) Nobel Peace Prize pioneered the use of tiny loans without a requirement for collateral or security to poor people. Mohammed Yunus maintains with great success that if you just give poor people access to capital, they can make their own way in the world with their own businesses. His book, Banker to the Poor, is worth every minute of the time you take to read it - it's in every library and every bookstore and here on Amazon.com. It's the most hopeful book about poverty in the world that you will ever read. Yunus, with 25 years of experience in this, maintains that poor people pay off their loans at a much higher rate than the rich ones, and that simply providing capital in amounts like $100-$500 can transform the life of the poor by enabling them to start their own tiny businesses.

Friendship Bridge is a microcredit organization operating along the lines of Mohammed Yunus's Grameen Bank. It makes small loans with no collateral requirement to poor women in western Guatemala. We're riding around the entire region interviewing these women and seeing a little of their lives.

And Kiva.org is an upstart that has found a new way to fund the loans offered to the poor by microcredit outfits like Friendship Bridge - by bringing the stories of the poor right to the web browsers of the richer parts of the world, so they can make loans right from their computers. The money loaned by gringos is then channeled through microcredit organizations like Friendship Bridge to the poor who need the loans.

We sure encourage you to get involved with microfinance by making a loan (or many of them - it's addictive) on Kiva.org or making a gift on FriendshipBridge.org.

Women We've Met Recently

rfay — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:33:14 +0000

We've met a wide variety of women in the last couple of weeks, from Mayan women who speak no Spanish at all and who try to scrape together a living with some weaving and a pig, to fairly ordinary poor urban women who remind us a little more of home, except that to them $15 is what you have to come up with every month for the kid's school payment.

Last week Nancy met Clara Ajsoc in the highland village of Santa Clara La Laguna. Clara used her Friendship Bridge loan to buy a calf, which she raised, only to lose it to a sudden illness, leaving a young calf behind. But she bottlefed that one and raised it up successfully, and she now sells milk and cheese, where she had no livelihood before. And she wants to get another calf.

In San Antonio La Laguna, Nancy met Catarina Cox Perez, who lost her house to Hurricane Stan in October, 2005. She has been patching it back together bit by bit, but she lives in a really bad piece of broken house with no real windows, and she has to pile rocks up in the broken windowframes for a little privacy. But Catarina's big goal with her next loan is to buy and raise 24 chicks. More power to her. There's the great power of microfinance.

We've also met lots of more mundane people, storekeepers and weavers and clothing sellers, who are just battling the day-to-day struggle to pay for their kids'education. For them to come up with those few dollars per month for school fees and notebooks is an amazing battle. But so many assure us that they're absolutely committed to their kids having a better life. And almost all we've met have kids who are getting at least some education. We've met many, many women who have absolutely no education. They sign their loan papers with a thumbprint. It's just the normal way.

Yesterday we turned up a street out of the village we were in and then off that onto a path up into the hills. It was maybe a half a mile to a set of houses along a creek that were quite a bit more primitive than most we'd visited. Elena Coché, whose family is trying to get buy reselling a few clothes on the street. Their house is of wood, and they have to get water from a "well"set in the side of the creek bank; the kids get sicker in the rainy season.

You can look through all the stories of the women we've met on the Kiva site. To see if there are any available to make loans to, click here.

If you search for "in need" businesses, you may not find any on a particular day, because people seem to snatch them up. But go ahead and fund a businessperson in a different part of the world anyway. It's loads of fun.

Podcast: What we're doing in Guatemala

rfay — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:54:21 +0000

We thought we'd explain to you what we're doing in Guatemala and tell you some of the stories of the women we've interviewed for Friendship Bridge and Kiva.org. We spend most of our time going out to little villages and meeting wonderful women who have started their own little "microbusinesses" using Friendship Bridge loans. The picture is of Clara Ajsoc, the wonderful woman we mention who raised her cow and started a milk and cheese business.

A Not-So-Good Interview in San Francisco Javier

nancy — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 01:27:02 +0000

Morning Road Near San Francisco Javier

This morning we woke up at 4am to catch a microbus from Nebaj, Quiche, Guatemala to interview a group of women in San Francisco Javier. The reason for the interview is to write the story of their business and lives in order to help obtain microloans on Kiva.org for Friendship Bridge in Guatemala. The rain was pouring as we made our way through the deep puddles of the dark streets. Only a few people were out at this time of the morning, walking in the rain underneath thin plastic sheets and clogging along in the total rubber boots so many of the campesinos wear in the fields. A few men hid in the shadows trying to stay dry or sobering up from the night's celebration. This week is the town's annual festival for its patron saint.

We got on the bus a little after 5am. It plowed out of town and followed a rough dirt road for about an hour. The darkness was made more intense by the low clouds that surround this incredible volcanic landscape. The morning light seeped though the misty morning. Clouds obscured most of the surrounding mountains but we got an occasional glimpse of the top of a-not-so distant volcano. They sure reach up into the sky.

The bus arrived at the end of its route after the hour ride and we walked the rest of the way, about an hour up to the village. We saw only a handful of people in the early dawn: a few children running along the road heading to school or running away from these strange gringos, several men walking to work with various field tools and even a mule strolled down the muddy road fully loaded without an owner in sight. We enjoyed the trek up through the hills, way above the village of Salquil. I especially enjoyed the quiet stillness of the wet, lush green terrain.

We only had a name for the group leader and weren't sure if she'd been contacted by phone. We finally found Juana´s house in San Francisco Javier. Her new concrete block house stood out amongst the neighboring tile- roofed adobe homes. Chickens wandered everywhere, the pig was tied out front and the multiple dogs checked us out to see if we had any food. Though we where unannounced, due to cell coverage being out, they got two chairs for us, and served us coffee and rolls out on the front porch. Juana scrambled to get the women together so we could interview them and take their photos.

The women were quiet and reserved – normal for the first few minutes, but this was different. After 15 minutes we could not get them to open up, so we started the interviews. They grew potatoes, raised animals for sale such as cows and goats. When we asked them about the upcoming loan, they told us they were discontinuing the program. When we asked why, they said they had raised enough money and grew their businesses to a point they no longer need the micro-loans. At this point Randy and I looked at each other and realized that there was no reason to continue the interviews. The purpose for our visit was to help raise the funding for their next loan. There was not going to be a next loan, at least not for now. Of course we were glad they'd had such success, but it wasn't turning out the way we expected!

At this point we decided to take a group photo and head back to Nebaj, another two hour voyage down the rutted roads in the northern part of Guatemala.

The walk through the hills was as beautiful as the hike up. Just about every man stopped to shake our hands and say have a nice travel. The young children either yelled "gringo" from the safety of their mothers' skirts or ran to find those skirts. And the women smiled at us as they continued their walk with a basket of corn or bread or tamales balanced on their heads and a baby slung on their backs. We caught a microbus at the crossing of two dirt roads and piled in with the 20 other passengers. We arrived back to the hotel at about 1:00 and had a nice afternoon map.

We had learned an important thing. Next time we will try to ascertain in advance whether the group plans to continue. If the answer is no, then we will find another group of women to interview. Of course, in this case we never could have known. And what a delightful morning it was!

We wrote a little book: The Women of Friendship Bridge in Guatemala

rfay — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 23:23:13 +0000

Cover of our book

We have been so taken with the wonderful women of Guatemala and their inspiring stories that we compiled the stories and pictures into a little book. It's only 40 pages, not much of a book, but it does a pretty decent job of capturing what's really happening with Friendship Bridge and Kiva.

You can do two things to read the book. It's a free pdf download that you can read on your computer (or print out if you want). And you can order a very nice printed version (at cost) from this link at blurb.com. It's $18 for a 40-page book, which is a lot, but on the other hand it's pretty nice photography and really says a lot about what we've been up to.

Update: June 2008: We translated the book into Spanish and it's now available so that the wonderful women in it and the facilitadoras who work with them might be able to see it. There is a Spanish-language announcement and you can download the PDF here or if you want you can purchase the book: Both are available at cost on blurb.com.

Our good touring friend Eric Dudfield did a wonderful quick-turnaround edit on this and helped us out a bunch. Thanks, Eric!

Podcast: Friendship Bridge Women of Nebaj

rfay — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:40:12 +0000

We remember so very many women and have so many stories to tell from our time in Guatemala - we thought we'd just tell a few stories. Read on for lots of pictures and a slideshow of the women.

Maria Brito

To get to Maria Brito's house, we rode our bikes just up into the skirts of the valley where Nebaj is. As you leave the city (or town, really) you end up right away in green cornfields with people's houses scattered among them. Before long, you get to the end of the electricity lines, and well beyond the paved road, and end up on a muddy track headed up the hill. That's where Maria's house is. When we first met her, we thought "Oh, she's pretty poor" because she lived in a shack that she herself would not consider a house, with no electricity and with the water spigot across the road (at least she had one). But like many of the women we met, her dignity and friendliness transformed her right before our eyes from someone to be pitied into a woman to be honored, repected, and treasured.

The Nebaj region was devastated in Guatemala's civil war, which lasted from the 60's into the 90's. The worst part was during the mid-eighties, when many of the villages were destroyed completely as a part of the government's attempt to root out the guerrillas. Maria has not recovered from that time - she was the only member of her family left alive after the war, and she has not recovered economically either. In that time of confusion and pain she also got absolutely no education, can't read or write, and signs her name with a thumbprint. But, of course, when she signs her name she has no way to verify what she's signing.

Maria's business is weaving, and she demonstrated the setup of a weaving project by getting out her urdidor, the pegs that she uses to lay out a project. And she also bought some turkeys and pigs with her loan, so we asked to see them - and the kids herded the entire bunch right in front of us (and into the house, where they proceded to eat things they were not supposed to eat. Like most of the weavers we met, Maria spends her loan on yarn, then does her weaving and sells it. Before she had access to Friendship Bridge capital, she (like the others) rarely could get enough money together to buy the yarn.

Rosa Marcos

Rosa is only 17 but is of the new breed of Guatemalan women. She lives with her mother just a little ways from Maria Brito on a different muddy path, but she lives in a much better house, with electricity, and she has a full education. When we talked to her she had just ifnished her education as a biligual Spanish/Ixil elementary teacher, so by the time you read this she should be teaching in a remote village, making sure that the kids get the chance to read and understand the things that they can sign with a signature.

Rosa's significantly enhanced standard of living probably comes from many sources, but it's interesting to note that her two brothers are working in the United States and have sent what money they could home to finance the construction of a real concrete block house, with electricity and a metal roof. Migration of the young men has had some pretty significant impacts on the folks back home.

Maria Tipaz Ramirez

Maria Tipaz is another woman who carries on her life with strength and uprightness even though she's lacking some of the things that we consider so basic. She does weaving and has a little store, and uses her FB loan like so many other weavers and storekeepers - it's working capital. We were impressed with her ambition - the weaving had not really brought in enough income, so she started a little tiny store. But the thing that has confused Nancy every time she thinks of it is that Maria can't add or even use a calculator, because she never did go to school. So how does she handle adding up multiple purchases? We asked: She calls one of the kids to do it for her. Thankfully, the kids are getting the education that she missed.

The Village of Vijolom

One fine day we waited for the bus in the rain at 5:00am to go up to the village of Vijolom for an 8:00am group meeting. Vijolom seems so far from Nebaj, but it's still in the same region, with similar dress, including the cinta, the long woven cord that's wrapped into their hair and has little tassels on the end. Almost all the women here are doing one kind of agriculture of another - mostly raising a few sheep. One has a little store, and some weave, like Elena Brito, shown here with her daughters. One interesting note about Elena: she has two deaf daughters, and they have not learned to communicate except with an improvised set of gestures. There don't seem to be any services for deaf children, at least in the remote areas. We ran into another family with deaf children later on, and were struck with the idea that it might be more common than it ought to be.

Juana Corio

Juana was another of the dramatically affected children of the war years, and she, too, has not recovered. She lives in a little place right in the town of Nebaj - there's kind of a side door that you enter to get into the little space where she lives (somewhere) and raises a couple of pigs and some chickens and her two small children. We were pretty amazed at her energy and enthusiam in tackling the business of making a living. She explained to us how she gets her pigs to raise: Instead of riding the bus to the town where she buys them, she walks, starting really early in the morning so she can get there early enough on market day. She walks to avoid paying the bus fare on the way there, because she has to pay extra for the livestock (hoisted up on the top of the bus in baskets, of course) on the way back. So she spends a whole day on getting the pigs when she goes to buy them.

Raising livestock in the center of Nebaj is quite different from what one might expect in the developed world. There is very little grazing available. Almost all the land is reserved for growing crops like corn, carrots, beans, but mostly corn because it is the main food staple . In order to raise a cow or pig or goat, an animal is housed in a pen next to the house or in Juana's case, in the small downstairs outside storage area of her house . We meet women who take their animal out daily walks by attaching a rope as a leash and grazing them along the side of the road or any open space they can the side of the road. It's a way of taking advantage of whatever is out there.

Our visit with Juana helped us to understand something of the strength of the clothing culture of the Mayan women. When we arrived at her house, she seemed poor, maybe unkempt, and perhaps dirty - probably because we came unannounced and because she lives in a place with a dirt floor. But she went out with us to take us to the next client visit, and she seemed like a completely different woman. We wish we had a photo for you - she had her hairpiece in and her baby on her back, and another child holding her hand. She led us with such dignity to the next visit. Once she had her proper clothes on and was out in the world she seemed like a completely different woman.

Catarina Matom

Catarina impressed us again with her commitment to life and her family. As she demonstrated her weaving for us, her 9-year-old son went back and forth with buckets of concrete, helping with repairs and reconstruction on the house. She explained with great gravity her commitment to teaching the child to work around the home, and to keep him busy so that he wouldn't end up a delinquent out on the street.

Catarina's life demonstrated again one of the realities of Guatemalan life: medical intervention usually just doesn't happen. When she was just two, her mother left her unattended (as Catarina recounts with quite a lot of disapproval) and somehow she took a terrible fall. When they finally found her, unconcious, she had a horribly broken leg. Well, nothing was ever really done with it, and she just drags it around to this day. In the developed world, we'd expect at least something to have been done for that leg, but not in Guatemala. An injury of that type will haunt a person for life.

Click here for a slideshow of our favorite pictures of the women in Nebaj

Nuestro libro sobre Las Mujeres de Puente de Amistad en Guatemala

rfay — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:04:18 +0000

Hemos terminado la traducción a español de nuestro libro que trata de las increibles mujeres de Puente de Amistad, quienes conocimos trabajando en Guatemala en Junio y Julio del año pasado. Esas mujeres fueron tan impresionante y admirable. Por eso escribimos el libro, pero nunca tuvimos bastante tiempo para traducir a español y revisarlo. ¡Y las mujeres del libro nunca lo han visto! Pero en Quito pasamos casi una semana estudiando en el Cristóbal Colon Spanish School, y Randy tomó como su objetivo la traducción y revisión del este libro.

Usted puede leer el libro en forma PDF aquí. También es posible comprar una copia imprimida (a nuestro costo, sin ganancia) aquí en blurb.com. (Desfortunadamente no ofrecen pedidos a muchos paises, pero si a México y Argentina.)

Click here for the English version of the book.