Show me the money!

With the camp over, I was ready to fully focus on village banking, what I hope will be my primary project while I'm here. Village banks are self-selected savings and loan associations meant for those normally outside of the formal banking sector. Even though micro-finance is the sexy topic of the decade, most truly poor people are still excluded because of outrageous fees or inaccessibility. With a village bank, the members of the group save small amounts through a share purchase program and those contributions are used to give loans to members in the group. The interest on the loans is kept within the group and then at the end of the year all profits and savings are re-distributed on a proportionate basis to what each member has saved. Best of all, ideally no outside money is needed, which reduced the ever present dependency syndrome in this country. OK, I know that was probably super boring for most of you but when I first saw this program online in August, I was so excited to get it started in Rift Valley. About a month ago I went to Nyanza to stay with another volunteer, Nadiya, and train on creating village banks. That week was awesome, socially and work-wise, and I will have to put pictures up later. Nyanza is like a Different World from where I come from (dang, I miss re-runs).

So far, I have two, possibly three, groups that I could start village banking with. All of them are women's groups and if it works out well hopefully I can expand it more into the interior where it is more needed. Explaining the process is the most difficult thing; it took our donor Nia a few times of me explaining in English for her to understand. Now imagine explaining it in Swahili or having it translated into Maasai where most of the words dealing with finance don't even exist! I'll be at all the meetings for the groups the first 2 months at least, so hopefully any misunderstandings can be resolved. And, thankfully, these are women I have known for a few months so we understand each other generally a bit more. I wanted to start off in January with the groups up and running but this country basically shuts down after mid-December- no complaints here!

Hope everyone is enjoying the snow, my uncle sent me a picture of snow covered Cleveland and not being home for Christmas is actually a much bigger bummer than I thought it would be. I had to physically stop myself from dissolving into tears many times yesterday and have just resolved to believe that Christmas is not actually happening this year. This is made easier by the fact that I am currently sitting in the sun with a T-shirt on ;-)