Yolanda Porras Méndez

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Yolanda Porras Méndez by FINCA Peru in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 4 - 10 months, FINCA Peru will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Yolanda is the perfect hostess! She’s back at home on her lunch break from work, and does everything possible to make me feel at home- a cold glass of coke along with ‘canchitas’, a delicious Peruvian dried corn snack. She tidies up her one room home as we talk, unnecessarily embarrassed at the state of her home. I assure her it’s okay, she is a single mother raising two children and working three jobs! Still, she moves about, and tells me that business is going well. Her fulltime job supervising nursing students keeps her busy during the day, but it is also the perfect outlet for her jewelry sales. Many of her coworkers and students rely on her to bring them the latest trends in earrings, necklaces, and bracelets, which she imports from the U.S. as well as Peru’s capital, Lima. Yolanda is very grateful for her loans from her village bank that enable her to pursue businesses that provide an extra income for her family. She used her latest loan to purchase new styles of jewelry in bulk, as well as the fresh honey that she has been selling for nearly 30 years. Yolanda’s dream is to open up her own store where she could sell her jewelry. Yolanda sends me on my way with a baggie full of canchitas, looking tired but happy, and hopeful for the future.