Last day at the office

It was a bit poignant, actually, and accidentally I was allowed to be generous and I'm glad of it.

I brought in a cake to say thank you. The biggest cake I could find was about the size of a travel box of Kleenex, but it did the trick, and people seemed really pleased. But I had also brought the books I had read that I had no need to drag back to the States. The staff fell upon these like ravening wolves. I was surprised. I'd actually brought them thinking Taryn would like them, but I realize too that new books are an incredible luxury. They are expensive here. A new paperback mystery costs almost 20,000/= (about $12), and if your salary is 200,000/= a month, books are not going to be on the top of the list.

At any rate, the books disappeared far faster than the cake. And then Olivia, the head honcho, made me stand up so we could get a photo, while Susy brought out a present for me! I really hadn't expected it, given how little I have done in my time here. But it was a substantial gift: a lovely basket, and a plaque made from wood showing zebras under a thorn tree.

The loan officers headed out for a day in the field, Taryn with them, and I waited for Justine who arrived about a half hour later. Her son has been suffering from malaria, as I said, and won't eat or drink because he can't keep anything down. Poor Justine! Especially as this was a particularly busy week. With the holiday, they are fitting in extra meetings on the other days, and Justine needed to go out to the field.

I asked if it was OK if I gave her an American-style hug. She assented, but afterwards also shook my hand. She bustled around getting stuff together to go out to the field while Sissy, the office assistant, told her all sorts of things that needed to happen.

Justine and I went out together, but her route took her to the left and mine to the right, so by about 11 a.m. this morning, I was done.

I had a good talk with Olivia, too, while waiting for Justine's arrival. I told her I was glad for the opportunity to work at MCDT for a reason we both agreed upon: we got to meet the people. It's off the main roads and in remote neighborhoods and they are people I would never have met otherwise. Some I liked a lot, some I didn't, some I simply felt neutral about. But I got a chance to meet them, and that is the gift that this fellowship has offered me. I'm very, very grateful.

Staff photo

I commandeered the camera for my personal use yesterday, as you can see. I wanted to get a picture of the staff before Fred left. He's being transferred to another branch, starting next week. What a blessing he has been.

From left to right, Susy, Fred, a woman whose name I never got (!), Sissy, me (duh), Allen and Justine. You also don't get to see George who's taking the photo.

Ruth

The first week I came to MCDT, Justine, my supervisor, and Olivia, her supervisor, were looking at pictures of borrowers they were preparing to post to the Kiva website. They called me over to look at one person in particular, standing in the middle of a group of five, and said, “You must meet Ruth!” They told me she was the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit and a real survivor. They told me how she is living with AIDS and lost her husband to the disease 10 years ago. They told me how she as at least 5 businesses. I didn’t know quite what that meant until I went to visit her earlier this week.

Justine and I walked down the hill from the MCDT office to Kamwokya, the slum area where MCDT gave out its first loans. Walking through the narrow alleyways and jumping over a few gutters, we reached Ruth’s home. We went into the most cluttered house I’ve seen here in Uganda, but it was cluttered for a reason: everything would be used for some business purpose or another.

There was very little light in the house because huge bags of charcoal were stacked up around the outside (business #1). Inside, a woman sat on a stool waiting for Ruth to return to finish braiding her hair (business #2); next to that stood an ironing board with an iron heated with charcoal for Ruth’s laundry business (business #3). In the inner room, even darker than the first, with just a little light coming through a gap in the corrugated metal roof, Justine and I sat on a small sofa while Ruth sat on a mat she had woven and brought out other mats she had made and sells (business #4). She could have brought down one of three kerosene lanterns she keeps on top of a wooden breakfront that she rents out to people (business #5). In the lower right hand cabinet we could see several phones that she has used as pay phones, but the person she had employed to help her with that was unavailable. She was waiting to find someone to do that so she could start the payphone business again (business #6). To our right was a stack of baskets she had woven that she not only sells, but also rents out to people who are making a formal presentation to bridal families (business #7).


After a short visit, we went outside again to see Ruth’s grocery (business #8). Immediately to the right of the grocery is a small hut which is Ruth’s pub (business #9). We went into the pub, which is about 8’ X 10’ or thereabouts, where Ruth displayed her wares. (I asked if she had any waragi, or local brew, an alcohol made from sugar cane. She held up a bottle. Then she pulled out a plastic packet of vodka and said, “Mazungu waragi.” Yes, indeed.)

This first picture shows Ruth standing at the entrance to her pub with the grocery to her right, your left. You can also see some of the charcoal she sells at her (note: bare) feet.

This second picture was taken inside the pub. These are not all alcoholic beverages. The bottles in front are Krest, a carbonated drink that announces it is "bitter lemon," and that's exactly what it is. Not to my taste, being an American sweet tooth, but popular in these parts, and bottled by Coca-cola.

As we left, Justine told me about some of Ruth’s struggle to make sure she pays her loans on time. She gave me this story as an example. Ruth travels out to the country to see to each shipment of charcoal, wanting to make sure to get good chunks rather than charcoal dust. One time, one of the coals was still burning and the whole shipment of charcoal burned before she even got it home. Because MCDT offers group guaranteed loans, Ruth could have said she simply couldn’t pay that week and depended on the other group members to pay for her. Instead, she got sugar cane on credit, chopped them into bite-sized pieces and bagged them, putting them out for sale near her pay phones (business #10). Somehow, she was able to scrape enough money together to pay back her loan each week on time. The dedication and integrity she has shown is simply remarkable. Goodness knows not every borrower is like that, but the fact is there are borrowers like this, and it is a real honor to meet them and know that these loans are making a difference when taken in conjunction with ability, spirit and will.

A busy week!

Hello, there!

It's going to be a short update right now as I only have about 9 minutes left at the internet cafe. I thought I would take advantage of the unlimited internet access I still get at the Life in Africa internet cafe but a) the power is down and b) Ezra is packing up as LiA prepares to move back to their original location. They can't afford the rent where they are any more. Alas!

But I've had a good, very busy week at MCDT, going to four different neighborhoods ranging from rural at the edge of Kampala, to slums, to urban/downtown, to an industrial edge of town.

I've also heard there's a new Kiva fellow who will be arriving next Friday, so I'm starting to make transition plans.

All in all, things are going well and I'll add more details when I can. Today is for laundry, grocery shopping, and general housework. And all is well.

An interview

These past couple of weeks at MCDT, my primary task has been interviewing women who will be getting their first Kiva loan (though not their first loan) in order to write up the brief introduction posted on the Kiva website. You might want to keep an eye out on www.kiva.org if you’re interested in given one of these groups a loan.

I’ve been hearing so many stories doing these interviews, as you can imagine, it’s hard to select any particular one to share. But there was one yesterday that got to me and I thought I’d pass it along.

Fred, the loan agent, and I had gone to Lugala, a rural district near the western border of Kampala, where we met a group in a wooden shack that also served as a classroom. I interviewed six women, using a standard format, asking age, marital status, number of children, whether they are in school, along with a description of her business, her plans for a loan, and her goals.

My last interview of the day was with Christine who runs a grocery business. She is 27. She is married. She has six children. The oldest is 14.

Throughout the rest of the interview I kept looking at her, trying to find signs of how she felt about her life. Was she frustrated? Content? Angry? Resigned? I couldn’t tell. She answered everything in a dry and factual manner without a trace of emotion that I could see. But then, it’s not really an interview that lends itself to emotional outpouring. I am going to read into it, though, that when she said that her goal is to have enough money for all her children to complete their studies that she might be saying a little something about herself.

First day at MCDT

The folks at MCDT (which stands for Micro Credit Development Trust, I found out) asked me to get there at 9:00. I got there very early (at 8:30), and they were already hard at work, sorting through files and getting things all set up for the day. They were a bit shocked to see me there so early and tried to keep me occupied, but clearly 9 didn’t really mean 9. They asked me to arrive later the next day. In the meantime, I read the newspaper, which didn’t take all that long, and then I watched fascinated as the man across from me sorted baggies full of change into piles of 10 100/= pieces and 6 500/= pieces, and then parceled them out so that everyone at 5,000/= per person for travel expenses.

There were about 6 loan agents going out for meetings with borrowers all over Kampala, scheduled on posters on the wall opposite me. At about 9:40, everything was ready and so everyone stopped everything to say the Lord’s Prayer. I think this is an RC organization as they didn’t say the doxology. After the Lord’s Prayer, someone at the head of the table continued on with the prayer that they would do God’s work that day and all said Amen with the conclusion I’ve come to expect: May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Then we went out.

I went with a rather dour woman called Alle. She didn’t talk much; we just went about our business, taking a matatu up to Wandegeya and then another taxi to Nakulabye (NA-coo-LA-bee-yuh--very near Namirembe and Joseline’s place). From there we walked down into a neighborhood that seemed grittier than I had seen elsewhere—kind of like a bad Oakland neighborhood, not quite so violent, but it had a bit of that feel, very different from the IDP camp that still had a sense of family and countryside.

One of the things Alle had said as we traveled to Nakulabye (with some disgust) was that the women would undoubtedly be late for the meeting. It was supposed to be at 10, but they were almost certain to show up late, though they might show up earlier today because she was supposed to give them something. I found this a little odd, given that she was telling me this at about 10 after 10, thus putting our own timeliness in some doubt. Again, "time" means something rather different here than in the U.S.

At any rate, people eventually trickled in and there was a way that they really struck me as the urban poor that the people in the Acholi Quarters never did. They were a bit scruffier somehow. Except for one woman who was wearing this amazing blue dress with black ruffles on a bias and a matching headdress with a huge black bow, mostly it was T-shirts and wrap-around skirts and flip-flops.

I should describe where we met. We walked down this dirt road and stopped at what appeared to be an empty wooden shack with a doorframe but no door. Inside, it was covered with all sorts of political posters for various candidates: local council, Kampala mayor, Parliament, President Museveni, with slogans like “Working for the Common Man Revolution,” or “Politics with a Human Face.” Alle and I pulled out some small blue wooden benches and set them up for people to sit on when they came. Some boys peeked through the window at us—me mostly. I would smile back at them and they would duck out of sight. One boy, much later, who walked past the door did a classic double-take when he saw me sitting there.

There wasn’t a whole lot for me to do. I did try to do a couple of the Kiva intake interviews for the group loans, but English was not so easy in the circumstances and Alle kept having to interpret while counting money. Both of the group leaders dealt in waragi (which I heard pronounced “wallege”), a local brew, so I learned something new today.

Also tried to learn a Luganda greeting, which I need to review because the ladies were exceedingly amused that I knew absolutely nothing, not even the most basic thing. I think it’s “Ale de nyaga,” but I’ll have to double-check. “Aledenyaga,” a woman would say to me and I would stare stupidly and everyone would laugh. The proper response is to say, “Aledenyaga” back. So I’ll be working on that.

One woman brought a chicken to the meeting, tying its leg with twine that was put under a bench leg. Then she held it down by stepping on its feet. Then she bound its leg with twine. It seemed fairly resigned about all of this. I hadn’t known it was there for quite some time. It gave one squawk when she stepped on its feet, but then stopped. It made me a little uncomfortable, though not uncomfortable enough to stop me from having chicken for lunch (which turned out not to be the best idea).

Alle spent the morning filling out papers, marking passbooks, counting money, showing the group loan members where to sign. There wasn’t a meeting as such. It was just time to collect money and take care of business. The ladies sat and chatted and I have no idea what really went on. After I had finished interviewing the second group leader and taking the group’s picture, Alle said, “You might as well go,” so I made my way slowly home, trying to avoid the rain.