My Kiva Dot Org

For Christmas Mike gave me some gift certificates to kiva.org, a micro lending non-profit. I sat down for a brief moment this morning to do my lending. It is a cool concept, you lend a small amount of money to a person in another (developing) country who will use that loan for a business venture. In a given amount of time this individual repays the loan, giving you credit with Kiva to re-lend. I asked our friend Genia, who works in the micro-finance world if she thought it was legit over Christmas. She said it was fine, but part of the connection to this person in a far-away place is an illusion. If I am getting this right, she said that there is an agency on the developing-country side managing the money-- so you are not exactly lending the money directly to this other person. All of your money goes to this other individual, but its not going into their bank account. Which makes sense-- there of course has to be a system of checks and balances to make it work in a legitimate way.
So, I went with three different loans at this time.
I sent a small amount to a carpenter in Cambodia, a herder in Tajikistan (a married woman with eleven-- that's right ELEVEN children trying to supplement the family income), and a fruit and vegetable saleswoman in Cambodia. I cannot access their photos because the kiva website is bombarded with users right now
http://www.kiva.org/
I guess we were not the only people who had this brilliant idea for Christmas.
Whether the connection with these people far away is real or a bit of an illusion, I really like the concept and cannot wait to see how these businesses flourish. Then I am looking forward to loaning again...

On other fronts my first class went pretty well last night. It was a short class because I really just needed to introduce the course and go over the expectations, etc. It came at the end of a busy day and I felt like I could have done better. No major disasters-- they laughed at my jokes, and seemed interested in the topic (though it is a required class, so these students are not taking it just for the fun of it). I am really looking forward to next week when I can jump in with the material and we can do some learning!