Mariana Isabel Morocho Sanchez

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to MARIANA ISABEL MOROCHO SANCHEZ by Fundación ESPOIR in Ecuador. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the 5 months of this loan, Fundación ESPOIR will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

I visited Mariana Isabel on Thursday morning at her food stand in the 12 de Abril Market. She was hard at work hacking away at the meat for the afternoon’s lunch. She sells about 40 lunches each day, mostly to regular customers. She received me warmly and treated me to a glass of morocho for breakfast. Morocho is grain cooked with milk, corn starch, sugar and spices, and has a delicious flavor similar to that of arroz con leche, but is mostly liquid so it can be drunk from a glass. She sells about 20 morochos each day for breakfast.

Mariana Isabel works 7 days a week from about 5am to 3pm. After work, she goes home to rest and take care of housework that needs to be done. I asked if she ever gets tired of working 7 days a week, and she chuckled and responded, “I’ve got to pay off my debts.”

Mariana Isabel told me that she used her Kiva loan of $1100 to buy a little bit of everything to restock her stand, for example, ingredients (rice, meat, milk, bread), drinks, plates, and utensils. She says that she always seems to be running out of something. Business has been a bit slow lately, since schools are out on vacation, so many of her customers are out of town or are saving up to pay for school fees and supplies come September, so they are frequenting her stand less. She expects business to pick up again once the school year starts in a couple weeks’ time. Other than the slight drop in sales, she says that things have been normal in both her business and personal life.

Mariana has been a client of Fundación Espoir for quite some time now, and says that she has been able to improve her business significantly thanks to the loans she has received over the years. She has never thought of starting a different business, since she has spent her whole life selling meals and enjoys the work.

Dear Lender,

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 Fundación ESPOIR, a brand new Kiva field partner. Over the course of the summer, I’ve had the privilege of meeting Espoir’s first batch of Kiva borrowers and hearing their stories.

A couple of the most memorable stories I heard were from two young women who are using loans to help run their small businesses while also pursuing their education. The first, Verónica Acurio, worked for years in her parents’ restaurant before deciding to open a restaurant of her own. She now has her own restaurant and uses the profits to pay for medical school. She has one year of studies left before becoming a full-fledged doctor. Despite her impressive accomplishments, Verónica is very down to earth and not at all boastful. Before her Kiva interview, most of her fellow group members didn’t even realize that she is a medical student.

Another Kiva client, Ana Lucia Chapa, lives in the rural community of Turi with her husband and her four-year-old son. Monday through Friday, she makes the long commute to and from the city of Cuenca, where she works full-time as a housekeeper. She also raises guinea pigs, sheep, and cows at home for extra income. Ana Lucia dropped out of school when she was 14 to start working so that she could help support her family, and so she never finished high school. After she got married, though, she decided that she wanted to be a veterinarian, and started going to school on the weekends to earn her high school diploma. She still has eight or nine years of education ahead of her before she can officially become a veterinarian, but she has a great attitude and is determined. Her family has been supportive and her parents and in-laws help take care of her son while she works and studies.

Both Veronica and Ana Lucia are 23 years old, just like me. When I heard their stories, I was impressed that they could juggle so many responsibilities simultaneously and overcome such daunting obstacles in pursuit of higher education, which is more than I can say for myself. Both are cheerful and upbeat despite the difficulties they face and the long hours they put in, seven days a week. I hope to return to Cuenca ten years from now and find them both in white coats, running their own successful businesses of another sort.

Kiva clients aren’t the only people at ESPOIR with inspiring stories of upward mobility. I’ve also had the privilege of meeting staff at ESPOIR’s headquarters and four different branch offices. All received me warmly and touched me with their hospitality and generosity, but I was particularly impressed by a handful of female ESPOIR loan officers who were once village bank clients themselves. For these women, becoming loan officers is an important step forward in their lives. They find the work difficult but also quite gratifying, and are happy to be helping clients because they know how it feels to be a small-scale entrepreneur in need of business capital.

It has been exciting and inspirational to see success stories like these during my fellowship with Fundación ESPOIR. I hope you continue to support Ecuadorian entrepreneurs through ESPOIR!

To search for currently fundraising ESPOIR loans on Kiva, click here . No currently fundraising clients? Please check back soon! In the meantime, you can join ESPOIR’s Kiva Lending Team.

Best regards,

Cynthia McMurry

Kiva Fellow