We made it home from our quick trip to Nicaragua. The time went really fast and all being said and done it was quite the journey. The experience cannot be summed up easily and it’s not an easy story to tell. If I told you our experiences from beginning to end it wouldn’t really make a lot of sense, not to mention I’m sure it would be pretty boring. Over the next week or so I’ll have some additional details to help in the assessment of things too.
Perhaps I could just start by telling you a couple stories? Like I could tell you about one young lady who was able to bring her income from $5/week to over $50 making tortillas. A $100 investment enabled her to buy some supplies and construct a wood burning stove with a flat cooking surface. She sells out every day in a very short time, she makes enough money to pay extra on her loan and even pay her husbands off after he defaulted.
Then again I could tell you about another older woman who was paying 10% a month on loans to a money lender, a rate that caused her to close down operations for awhile. The loans that we are offering cost far less and have allowed her to expand her business. We don’t have a good handle on the cost of administering the loans but currently feel that at just over 1.6% a month we may be able to scale up our lending and be fully sustainable.
For now I think I’ll just take some time to get up to speed with my pile of emails that have accrued during my time being gone.
