Journal entries that make an impact

[Guest]

.

[alan]

Now you're just making me jealous, Mona! 

[Mona]

I got a nice update for this loan that made me smile. 

http://www.kiva.org/lend/156009
Doña Nora of the Persistentes group feels that her loan from Pro Mujer helped her exploit business opportunities in recent months. Her main
business is selling used clothing in the city of La Paz, but she also caters to different demand at different times of year. For example, for
New Year she prepared cooked maize which people use to prepare traditional dishes; in February she sold water guns and water balloons,
as it´s the tradition in Bolivian to play with water during Carnaval.

[Mona]

That's nice! 

http://www.kiva.org/lend/95418

This is an update on your loan to Government Technical Institute Group in Sierra Leone. Greetings are coming to you from your borrowers in Magburaka, Sierra Leone. Amadu D. Turay, is the principal and leader of the Government Technical Institute, Magburaka. Speaking on behalf of the group, Amadu is very thankful to you for the helping hand rendered to him and his colleagues.

Amadu used his share of the loan to buy house building materials – bags of cements, sand, granite stones. He paid workers and bricks were constructed for him. He then began the construction of a house that is made up of four bed-rooms, a parlor, a bathing-room and a store.

Amadu is very thankful for the fact that he has completed repaying his loan successfully and with relative ease. The loan he described as very necessary and helpful. Without it he said, he could not have been able to save such an amount from his monthly salary alone. But with the lump sum loan amount, he was able to achieve something great.

Judging from the enthusiasm showed by other teachers for a new loan, shows that the loan was very useful to them too, says Mr. Turay.

Mr. Turay first of all wants to thank you for the brilliant idea of coming together as team to help the grass-roots poor by empowering them with a loan to do what they want to do. This is a new idea that has never been before and it is a very good one. He wants to thank you for the kind gesture. "Looking at my accomplishments, I am always very happy because of the loan", said Mr. Turay.

[Mona]

http://www.kiva.org/lend/106744/comment?ent=252189&_te=j


Thank you for your very generous loan to Irina Poleshchuk! I had the pleasure of visiting Irina at her business as a funeral planner in Novomoskovsk. Irina used to sell clothing and bed sheets, but found this business to be difficult, competitive, and not especially lucrative. One year, she experienced the death of 8 people in her family, and learned first hand the details and expenses associated with planning funerals. She found that there was a great need in her community for someone to help a grieving family plan a funeral. She transitioned her business from selling clothes and sheets and opened her current business planning funerals.

"Don't be alarmed by the coffins!" she told me before I entered her business.

Sometimes she feels like a psychologist, she says. Every one of her customers has pain, and she has to give everyone special attention. Irina and her family do everything in the business, she cannot afford to hire employees. With the help of her family, Irina will pick up the body from the morgue, clean and dress the body, dig the burial hole, make the coffin and arrange the flowers.

Her business is about building loyalty, as people don't normally "drop in" for her services. She has to be remembered, so that a family remembers who to turn to in a time of need. Despite the sadness Irina is exposed to on a regular basis, she's learned how to adopt a comfortable and sensitive attitude. She was extremely genial and almost bubbly as she showed me the purple and gold coffin she had finished creating at 4:00 am that morning.

[Patricia SF]

German Gustavo Garzon Rodriguez
http://www.kiva.org/lend/179448?_tpos=1&_tpg=1

Lovely journal update via a blog entry from Kiva Fellow Rob Packer.  Some familar Kiva Friends on this loan, which is wonderful in itself.

http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2010/04/28/art-and-microfinance/

[Mona]

http://www.kiva.org/lend/166092

This is an update on your loan to El Esfuerzo De Teno Group in Chile.

The communal bank "El Esfuerzo de Teno" received their loan in December of 2009. The associate interviewed was Carola, whose business consists of raising and selling chickens, eggs, and pigs. She hoped to invest her loan in the purchase of an incubator (a chicken coop with artificial light) that she needed for her chickens. Instead, she used the loan to purchase more animals; one rooster and three chickens, because some of the chickens she had were not producing eggs. She increased her earnings with this purchase, but unfortunately, because of the earthquake in February, the roof of the chicken coop was severely damaged and she lost a number of her chickens. She has had to make temporary repairs to the roof and construct an entirely new chicken coop for the new chickens.

Fortunately, her home was not damaged during the earthquake nor during any of the following aftershocks, but chickens, startled and without a sturdy chicken coop, have been producing poorly. So sales for Carola's business have been slow. In order to make ends meet she had to sell the majority of her pigs, although she is awaiting the birth of piglets to replenish her stock. The young chickens she keeps are still selling, because they are in high demand in her community in Teno.

Her dream is still to purchase the aforementioned incubator, especially now that the cold winter temperatures are setting in, so that she can continue production.

You will notice that El Esfuerzo de Teno's repayments appear as delinquent on Kiva's website. It took the group a month after the
February earthquake to recover their repayment schedule, but they have been repaying, faithfully for the most part, since they re-started their weekly meetings in the middle of March

[Mona]

 

http://www.kiva.org/lend/170121/comment?ent=264163&_te=j

The Mirada de Luz group meets every Monday night in Talca, Chile. At the last meeting they turned in their repayment booklets to their loan officer, Carol, and worked on their business-administration training session (you see them enjoying their coffee-and-dessert break in the attached photo). They were studying financial planning, and spent time discussing examples of business owners and their diverse financial organizational strategies.

Members of Mirada de Luz were pleased to be going about their meeting as normal, and said that business has been relatively normal as well. As you read in the March update, though most of the group members' businesses were unharmed in the February earthquake, many had family members who were severely impacted. Business was, for all, very slow in the weeks immediately following the earthquake; so they are happy that commerce has picked up recently, especially for Mothers' Day earlier in May.


We spent a lot of time at the meeting reviewing the Mirada de Luz profile on the Kiva website, and discussing Kiva. We reviewed some of your lender profiles, and looked at the comments you left them. The women of this group were very touched that people all over the world have been concerned about and thinking of them. Here is what they had to say to you: "Thank you for the support you have sent us, and for being worried about us from so far away. We are re-establishing our businesses here in Talca, and have thankfully returned almost to normal. Besides still being somewhat startled by the event, and the aftershocks that continue occurring, we are moving forward. With much strength and solidarity, we are moving forward.

Sincerely,
Idelia, Bernarda, Angelica, Miriam, Carolina, Luisa, Elia of the Mirada de Luz group"

[Jan & John]

terrrific Ramona...

these kinds of message make it so worthwhile to actually take the time to comment on the funded loans.

I try hard to comment on each but around the 15th it gets so busy

-jan-

[waywardcats]

I really appreciate the level of detail in this journal entry:

-Kerry-


Tupokigwe P. Malumbili

 Location: Kyela, Tanzania

    Dear lenders,

    Mambo (Greetings!) from Kyela, Tanzania and from SELFINA! Thank you for your loan through Kiva to Tupokigwe Malumbili a SELFINA client and micro-entrepreneur. The purpose of this journal is to update you on Tupokigwe and the status of her business.

    As you know, your generosity helped Tupokigwe obtain a loan of $625 April 2009.She is running a business of Cereals and used the loan to buy more cocoa in bulk for reselling. She works at her business for 9-12 hours per day, 6 days per week. Since she took out the loan, her business has been doing well and Tupokigwe's monthly profits have increased from about $140 to approximately $210. She has used these extra profits to pay electricity and water bills, supporting two dependents because they are orphan their parents died for HIV, to pay school fees and to repay her loan.

    In the future, she is planning to request a loan from SELFINA with which she plans to increase the stock. On the personal front, her family is doing well. As you may remember, she is married with eight children. Tupokigwe dreams about being able to send her children to university and to have better life. SELFINA aims to continue to assist Tupokigwe and other women like her, and empower them towards financial security and increased confidence through micro loans. Thank you very much for supporting Tupokigwe, continue to support women like her and lend to SELFINA borrowers.

Posted by zephania mahenge from Kyela, Tanzania
Aug 30, 2010

[Amy-in-PHX]

I came across this thread, Journal Entries that Make an Impact, while gathering info about MFIs from this forum to inform my lending decisions.  I found the stories posted here very encouraging.  So even though the thread has gone cold, I wanted to post an update I recently received on one of my favorite borrowers, Rosa in Peru.  (This is a brief update, posted by the MFI, rather than a Kiva Fellow journal, but follows the theme of encouraging stories of borrower benefit from Kiva lending.)  Here's the original loan write-up:
http://www.kiva.org/lend/228185

Rosa, 56, is separated and lives in her own house with her 4 children to whom she tries to give the best of her work.  After separating from the father of her children she sought help from the state-run soup kitchen. As years went by she gained their confidence and now is the official cook of that institution. So, every morning alongside a neighbor she works in this huge effort. In exchange for their work they are given five food servings which are of great help to feed their families.

Ten years ago, however, she started to sell chicken soup and other typical Peruvian dishes on weekends; being the hard working woman that she is, she now makes and sells Salchipapas (fried potatoes with fried chicken) at her doorstep.  During all these years she acquired a large number of customers that like the flavor of her dishes and her good service and prefer her to others.  Rosa is very happy with her business because it’s quite profitable. She, therefore, wants to install a tile floor where she carries it out.

This is her 3rd loan with MFP and she pledges to repay in a timely fashion like she’s been doing so far.  She will use the requested loan to buy tables and chairs to provide better service to her customers.



Rosa borrowed $1,150, which was disbursed August 6, 2010, and the last payment was received on time, January 15, 2011.  Here is the text of the update posted earlier this month (emphasis added):

Location: Lima, Peru
Rosa's life has improved a lot since her first loan from PRISMA. Before, she was washing clothes for neighbors. The job was physically demanding and not very profitable.     But she believed she had delicious recipes to share and so she started selling traditional Peruvian cuisine to neighbors.

Rosa used her loan to buy construction materials. She is renovating her house to put in a small restaurant, with tiling and tables and chairs.   

. . . .
I just love how Rosa went from being soup kitchen beneficiary, to proprietor of her own restaurant!