Maria Petrona Perez Hernandez

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to MARIA PETRONA PEREZ HERNANDEZ by AlSol (Alternativa Solidaria Chiapas) in Mexico. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 11 - 17 months, AlSol (Alternativa Solidaria Chiapas) will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

I met with some of the members of the group called Clavel 1 at their biweekly meeting. The first one I talked to was Maria Petrona. She is 23 years old, married and has 3 children. With her loans she has been able to buy materials for her craftworks, mainly thread and textiles. She buys everything at her local community, Zinacantan, and then works at her house, weaving and embroidering beautiful table clothes, pillow cases and napkins. She sells her merchandise mainly to local people who either buy it for their own clothing or buy it to then take it to bigger cities where they distribute the items to be sold at larger markets. She has been Alsol’s client (Kiva’s local partner) for some years and her loan is of $4000 pesos.

Later on I met with Maria Gomez, who is 32 years old, married and has 8 children. She works as a craftswoman as well, selling her merchandise to a local trader, who takes it and sells at San Cristobal (nearest city).

Finally, I met with Maria Hernandez, who is 68 years old. She became a widow 7 years ago and needs to work in order to sustain herself despite her old age. She is mother of 6 but apparently receives little economic help from her children that is why she started working really hard since her husband died. All of these women have been punctual with all their payments and truly appreciate the opportunity given by Alsol and in this specific case by Kiva lenders which allows them to be productive women and to sustain their households.