An encouraging perspective on my generation

I feel like I have read so many article about how lazy, self-centered, etc my generation is that this article was refreshing. It is arguing that my generation is also the first global generation. We feel connected to the whole world and to the problems of the whole world too. It shares studies suggesting we are more open minded regarding many social issues (gay marriage, biracial relationships etc) than previous generations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-jensen-arnett/the-empathic-civilization_b_454211.html

Election Day!

Yesterday Costa Rica elected their next President- Laura Chinchilla. She is the first female president of Costa Rica and only the 5th in Latin America (according to a colleague). The whole city had a very festive air on election day.

Candidate flags hanging out car windows were everywhere in the last few days before the election

I went to the polls with the woman I am living with to check out the scene. After we talked to about half the neighborhood (mainly friends and acquaintances of hers but a few strangers too) she made a last minute decision about who she would vote for.

How to vote? The directions were very clear and concise.

That night we stayed up late until the official results are in. I’m still not sure how I feel about Laura’s politics (some say she is just going to be a puppet of the current president Oscar Arrias who is from the same party), but I do think it is exciting that a woman will be leading there country.

Makeup Class

So yesterday, I attended my first makeup class. Besides financial services and trainings regarding goal setting and business development, Fundación Mujer also offers more light hearted classes to its clients- like make up class. Fundación Mujer’s Director encouraged me to attend as a chance to get to know some of the clients (and probably because she noticed that I never wear makeup). Class 1: I ended up as the test dummy for the whole class which was both fun and terrifying (especially when the teacher decided to go after my eyebrows). Overall, it was fun. I’m not sure i have 3 hours to dedicate to it every week, but the Director was right it was a fun place it interact with clients.

Me post-makeover

Everyone was super friendly and wanted to get to know me. I was startled every time I looked into the mirror for the rest of the day, but I got a lot of compliments.

Some classmates. They've definitely had more practice than me.

The true test proved to be getting the pounds of makeup off my face last night. Makeup remover did not make it onto my list of essential items that I needed to pack.

Staff meeting

We had a staff meeting the other day and one of the items on the agenda was talking about Africa. A staff member recently returned from a trip to Uganda and she wanted to share the experience. She went to Uganda for a conference/training offered by one of Fundación Mujer’s other funders, Womens Global.

It was really interesting to watch the staff absorb and talk about her picture depicting poverty in Africa. They were shocked by many of the pictures by many of the things they saw in the photos. Some of it was cultural- women cooking in large pots over fires outside of their houses instead of inside a kitchen (“They’re cooking in the street!”) or women carrying the weight of something on their back via a strap around their forehead. But they were also taken back by the poverty they saw- children running in the street naked, a village market that lacked products etc.

I had already been contemplating the many differences between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. From what I’ve seen and read, Costa Rica is noticeably better off. The staff meeting got me thinking on a different level. It also got me wondering, where in Costa Rica I would see similar poverty levels and how would the signs of poverty be different. Hopefully I’ll get answers to some of these questions in the next few months.

More on interest rates

This is a blog post from the Kiva blog (which is different from the Fellows Blog) about interest rates. It has some similarities to the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago for the Fellows Blog. It was written by a Kiva Staff Member, Isabelle. Her focus is on the social impact of MFIs. Here it is: http://bit.ly/cfUY5j

Where to get off the bus?

It’s Wednesday, so I have a new post up on the LaVidaIdealist.org blog. This one is about how to figure out a basically unmarked bus system.

http://lavidaidealist.org/2010/02/03/where-to-get-off-the-bus

Join Fundación Mujer’s Lending Team

Hi All,

I’m just starting to build a lending team for Fundación Mujer, my MFI in Costa Rica and I encourage you all to join. Lending teams are a great way to connect to other people on Kiva who have similar interests as you, in this case the wonderful Fundación Mujer. Join now: http://www.kiva.org/team/friends_of_fundacin_mujer

I’m hoping to make this lending team a vibrant place for sending and receiving information and updates about Fundación Mujer- even after I am no longer here.

JOIN, JOIN, JOIN!!!

Photos from first day in Tico campo

Wow, I’ve already been hear 1.5 of my 12 weeks. Can you believe it? Here are some pictures from my first two days in the field. The first day I went out we were in the mountains in a cooler area of the country that is well known for growing strawberries and ferns for export. This first photo is from the back steps of a Fundación Mujer clients house.

Al the black is shade cloth that is probably covering ferns, though some might be covering lettuce as well. The ferns are exported for use mainly in flower arrangements. Without shade cloth the sun is to strong and harms the leaves of the ferns.

Sombrillas del pobre/Umbrellas of the poor

After our first visit to a group of borrowers, we swung by Vulcan Poas because the loan officer wanted us to see it. unfortunately, it was kind of drizzly and very cloudy at the top of the volcano and we couldn’t see into it at all, but we could see all the cool plants. I was encouraged when I made a joke about how we could pick one of these leaves to use as an umbrella and the locals responded “They’ll fine you for that” I’m definitely seeing a different attitude regarding environmental protection here than in Nicaragua.

Interesting Article from CGAP

Titled “Does Microcredit Really Help Poor People” I found this article incredibly interesting. It makes a lot of good points starting with the concept that even if microfinance isn’t lifting everyone out of poverty it is still making a positive difference in the lives of poor people. A few summary points:

1. Microfinance helps poor families smooth consumption and pay for big ticket items (weddings, funerals, etc) or emergencies (medicine).  If a family is living on $2/day, it doesn’t mean that the family received $2 each day. Usually, a poor family’s income is much more erratic than that. Financial services help families cope with this vulnerability

2. Formal microfinance institutions are much more reliable than informal lending and savings institutions. Many poor families who don’t have access to microloans or microsavings are still saving and borrowing, but they do it through informal community institutions (think local money lenders) with few protections, sky high interest rates, and often no real guarantee that they will get their money back when they need it.

3. Poor people “vote with their feet.” Basically, if microfinance was not a valuable service to poor families there wouldn’t be so much demand for it. And people probably wouldn’t be so dedicated to paying back their loans if they didn’t want at least the option of getting another one in the future.

4. The authors concede that a year of microfinance services are not as valuable to a family as a year of girls primary education (as one example). But they point out that a year of microcredit is much easier and cheaper to administer than many other programs. Microfinance should only need grants in the form of initial start up money and then can become self-sustainable where most other aid programs for the poor need large ongoing subsidies.

Here is a concluding quote from the article that emphasizes why microfinance is important:

“Small one-time subsidies
leverage large multiples of unsubsidized funds
producing sustainable delivery year after year of highly valued services
that help hundreds of millions of people
keep their consumption stable, finance major expenses, and cope with shocks
despite incomes that are low, irregular, and unreliable.”

I encourage you to read the full article here: http://www.cgap.org/gm/document-1.9.41443/FN59.pdf

It isn’t very long (8 pages of big font) and is written in an accessible manner.

Winner of Kiva Video Contest

I’m a little slow to get this up, but here is a great short video that describes how Kiva works: http://tongal.com/app/submissionDetail.action?id=649;EL

It is really fun to watch and less than 2 minutes long. It would be a great thing to email to friends/family/colleagues that don’t understand Kiva.