La Amistad Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to LA AMISTAD Group, consisting of LUZ MARINA CONDORI CUSIQUISPE, ANGELICA ROSARIO TAIÑA MAMANI, MERI HIPOLITA CURIZA QUISPE, ENEIDA CLEMENTE VALVERDE, GEORGINA CURIZA QUISPE, CLAUDIA HUILLCAHUAMAN FERNADEZ, FLOR DE MARIA SANTOS GUEVARA, GIOVANA GUZMAN MENA, RINA MOGOLLON VILLANUEVA, MARIELA PILLCO ANO, RICHART BELLOTA VALER, WILIAM PILLCO AÑO, OSWALDO HUARACCA CUSIQUISPE, JUAN DE LA CRUZ CONDORI ARISACA by Asociación Arariwa in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the 3 months of this loan, Asociación Arariwa will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

This morning, I visited one member of the La Amistad (“Friendship”) Village Bank at her soup restaurant in Cusco. Eneida had just closed up shop and was lying down for a nap when I arrived at 11:30am. Her soup is served as a breakfast dish, and the nap was well deserved, since she had been awake for hours by the time I stopped by.

Eneida used a small part of her 1200 soles loan to buy more plates, pots, glasses and utensils for her soup restaurant. She used the rest of her Kiva loan to pay off most of the remaining debt she and her husband have on their car. Now they have just one remaining fee to pay off; then the car, which her husband drives as a taxi, will be 100% their own.

Eneida has run the restaurant for the past four years; prior to that, she spent four years running it in partnership with her mother. The business has been doing fairly well lately, she says. Sales always drop a bit towards the end of the month, since most workers get paid at month’s end, and May’s drop has been especially acute since many people spent extra money for Mother’s Day. Her most popular soups are “patitas” and “panza” (feet and belly), she says; she typically sells about 50 bowls on weekdays and up to 200 on weekends.

Eneida has been taking out loans from Asociacion Arariwa for more than ten years now. She used to be a member of a village bank in the town of San Salvador, but she and several other members decided it would be more convenient to form a group in Cusco, so they founded the La Amistad Group. Loans have had a very positive impact on her life, she says. She used to have debts at other institutions and was even listed in Infocor, Peru’s bad-credit database. After taking out her first loan from Arariwa, she repaid all of her previous debts, then took out another loan to buy the taxi her husband currently drives. She has since been removed from Infocor, since she is no longer in debt.

Eneida hopes that her business will continue to grow in the future, as it has in previous years. She is planning to open a neighborhood grocery store with her brother next door to her soup restaurant; they are currently doing construction on the space, and expect it to be finished in about three months’ time.

Thank you for supporting entrepreneurs in Peru. As you may know, all Kiva loans are actually administered by local field partners. For the past couple of months, I have been working as a Kiva Fellow with Asociación Arariwa, Kiva’s newest field partner in Peru.

Arariwa (which means “protector of crops” in Quechua, Peru’s main indigenous language) became a Kiva partner in August 2008, but did not begin posting a significant volume of its clients to the Kiva Web site until early 2009. Arariwa’s executive director, loan officers, and Kiva coordinator are palpably excited about what they call “Project Kiva.” They are working hard to visit village banks in isolated, rural areas of the Cusco region so rural clients can tell their stories and fund their loans through Kiva.

Raquel Villafuerte, Arariwa’s Kiva coordinator, is passionate about traveling and visiting the communities of the countryside around Cusco. In this sense, she is perfect for her job. Others might resent the long, often uncomfortable hours of travel on dirt roads, and occasional overnight stays in distant communities far from family and friends that come with the job, but Raquel enjoys the work and always has a smile for her clients and her co-workers. Unfortunately, Raquel and an Arariwa loan officer were injured in a motorcycle accident last month while returning from a visit to a Kiva group. Her scrapes and bruises didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for her work, although she has avoided motorcycles since then.

Arariwa’s loan officers serve different communities in the Cusco area. Some loan officers work within the city of Cusco and hold their group meetings at the Arariwa office. Others work up to two hours outside the city and hold group meetings in clients’ houses or businesses. These loan officers still report to the central office in Cusco each day. Other loan officers work even further from the city (three to nine hours away), live in the communities they serve, and only report to the central office every few weeks. One of these loan officers is Marco, who lives and works in the community of Lares. To illustrate how small Lares is, here’s a conversation I had with Marco about a week before I went to visit one of his village banks, Tikarisun de Ccachin:

Me: I should get your cell phone number so that we can coordinate when and where to meet up.

Marco: There’s actually no cell service there, so I’ll give you the phone number for Lares instead.

Me: Oh, Arariwa has an office in Lares?

Marco: No, it’s the phone number for Lares. The town has one phone. Just leave a message with whoever answers, and they’ll come find me and give me the message.

The Tikarisun Village Bank is located in Ccachin, a rural community high up in the clouds in the hills outside Lares. Like Lares, Ccachin has just one phone, but it is a much smaller community and it has even less contact with the outside world. Ccachin is just thirty or forty minutes from Lares by car, but it is much more isolated due to its small size, its remote location in the hills, and the lack of public transportation connecting it with any other nearby towns.

For me, getting from Cusco to Ccachin meant a nearly four-hour ride in the company pickup truck down bumpy dirt roads. The trip was tiring, even though I had the luxury of traveling in a private vehicle. It was easy to see why villagers in Ccachin don’t travel to Cusco to get loans.

My visit to Ccachin really opened my eyes to the importance of extending microfinance to rural areas. When we talk about people living in developing countries, we don’t always distinguish between urbanites and rural farmers. In Peru, however, that distinction is very important. Peruvians in rural areas are much more likely to be indigenous Quechua-speakers, to be living below the national poverty line, and to have little or no formal education. They typically cook with wood fires instead of gas stoves, live in adobe houses instead of concrete or stucco homes, and have more children to support than do city dwellers. Loans are readily available to a shop owner in the city of Cusco, but not to a small farmer in the countryside.

The credit and education that Arariwa offers go a long way in rural areas like Ccachin, because micro-loans are usually the only source of external support available to small businesses like Señora Ernestina’s grocery store, Señora Victoria’s pig farm, or Señora Hipolita’s chicheria (Chicha is a traditional Andean corn beer). Marco, Tikarisun’s loan officer, is already the godfather of three of his clients’ children, an indication of the respect and gratitude the community has for him. Another Arariwa loan officer, Tula, who works in the remote jungle town of Pilcopata, says that her clients often encourage her to run for mayor of Pilcopata.

Arariwa’s staff is working hard to provide journal updates for all of its Kiva clients. Because so many of Arariwa’s clients live quite far from the central office in Cusco, reaching each and every Kiva client for a follow-up interview is simply not possible. Nonetheless, 27% of Arariwa’s loans have journal entries, compared with just 12% for all Kiva field partners.

I hope you have found this journal entry to be interesting and informative, and I’m happy to answer any comments or questions you may have. I have been lucky enough to see the effect that Kiva loans are having on the ground here in the Cusco region. Arariwa’s Kiva clients, the staff and I are extremely grateful for your support. I hope you continue to lend to Peruvian entrepreneurs through Asociación Arariwa!

Read the Tikarisun Village Bank’s Kiva profile and read about my visit with Evarista, one of the group members:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?action=about&id=95881&page=businesses&_te=mj

View all Asociación Arariwa loans that are currently being funded:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=119&status=fundraising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_te=mj

Best regards,

Cynthia McMurry

Kiva Fellow

Apologies: photo accidentally left out from last email.