Vinceansia Opere

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Vinceansia Opere by Kisumu Medical & Education Trust (K-MET) in Kenya. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the 11 months of this loan, Kisumu Medical & Education Trust (K-MET) will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Greetings from Kenya!

I’m Alison Carlman, a Kiva Fellow working with K-MET in Kisumu. You’re receiving this e-mail because you contributed to a loan for one of K-MET’s borrowers on Kiva. Thank you for supporting these inspiring business people. I wanted to give you an update about what many of them are doing!

Most of K-MET’s borrowers are volunteers promoting health and education in their communities. This means that not only are they micro-entrepreneurs (selling vegetables, doing tailoring, or running some other business in town), but they also regularly take time out of their working day to visit orphans, children, widows, and other sick or vulnerable people in their community. They work with K-MET supervisors to refer malnourished children and ill patients to the outpatient clinic or to the hospital. They also make sure that caregivers have the right information about how to care for their families and neighbors.

The community health care workers (mostly women) form a corps of empowered volunteers who are changing their communities from the ground up; many of them live on less than $1 a day. Earlier this week, a woman told me that she’d like Kiva lenders to know that “we visit the sick. We take care of the sick. At times, the sick will not have anything, and we are forced to give money from our own pockets so that they can eat.” This is truly a group of people who are sharing their small amount of resources with each other to serve more than 4,000 at-risk people in Kisumu.

I’d like you to see this short video demonstrating the work that community health workers do and the conditions in which they work and live. The first shot is of Alice, a Kiva borrower and tailor in the Nyalenda slum of Kisumu. She is pictured at her sewing and embroidery stall. I followed her as she and her K-MET supervisor, Beatrice, visited some of Alice’s patients in the community. I hope that by seeing and hearing the story of Alice you are as inspired as I am by the work that K-MET’s Kiva borrowers are doing!

Thanks again for your support of K-MET and Kiva entrepreneurs. Please consider joining the K-MET Fans Lending Team to continue following this field partner.

Kiva Love,

Alison Carlman

KF8, K-MET Kisumu, Kenya

Vincensia Opere is a quiet lady lady with an investigative nature. Before we begin this interview, she asks a lot of questions about me and says she believes in dealing with a person she understands and one that understands her principles. Vincensia is a widow and a mother of 3 boys.

This is Vincensia’s first loan and she used it in acquiring labor force and seedlings for her farm. The rest of the loan she used to acquire cereals for sale and kept the rest as savings. She says the loan has empowered her so much because she is now able to pay school fees with ease for her sons, she has noticed better living standards and its easy to pay her house rent.

Her future dream is to start a construction supplies store. She thanks kiva lenders and tells me we should both pray for them. She would like a second loan when she is done repaying this current loan.