La Esperanza Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to the La Esperanza group, consisting of Matilde Arrua, Ana Amarilla, Angela Amarilla, Maria Luisa Gomez, Catalina Grance, Felicita Espinola, Gloria Quintana, Agustina Pereira, Maria Del Socorro Chavez, Magdalena Gomez, Florinda Gonzalez, Bernardina Vera, Lina Vega, Carmen Cespedes, Estela Pereira, Isabel Garcia, Casilda Balbuena by Fundación Paraguaya in Paraguay. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 3 months, Fundación Paraguaya will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

A comité is a 15-25 group of women who withdraw small individual loans, but with the social and financial support of working in a group. Typically, loans are dispersed in 12 cycles of 4 months each. At the end of each cycle, an individual can elect to pay off her loan and leave the group, and in this way new members can join. This group, La Esperanza, which means Hope in Spanish, currently has 18 members who live in a small community outside of the capital, Asuncion. This update will focus on four of the members.

Ana (pictured): Ana has a business selling chicharrón (local food) that she makes in her backyard and sells from her house. Every day she travels by local transportation to the supermarket to buy the meat; her dream is to own a truck so she can travel to more markets to obtain the best prices. With her most recent loan, she was able to purchase an outdoor oven (shown), which has greatly increased her efficiency, as she can cook more in less time. Although she was done cooking on the day we visited, she happily ran for her oven to show off for this picture!

Matilde: Matilde has a business selling homemade Paraguayan cheese that her daughter brings from the center of the country, from the dairy farm where she works. Her daughter visits about every 3 weeks to bring cheese; due to the high price of gas, she cannot travel any more often than that. Neighbors know that Matilde sells the cheese and they come to her house to buy it. The money she makes, along with her husband’s work in construction, is often not enough to pay for monthly expenses, so Maltilde has been using her loan to help pay for necessities. Her dream is to open a small library/stationary store out of her house, with internet and a photocopy machine, which she thinks would be very profitable due to her location near a school and lack of competition in the area.

Augustina: Augustina smiles and says she loves to work! She makes empanadas every day in her house, and brings them to her daughter’s small market to sell, making a decent living in this way. Although her loan was intended to be used for ingredients for her empanadas, she gave most of the money to another daughter who traveled to Spain to find work. Due to the severe economic depression, many Paraguayans are forced to leave Paraguay to find work, most traveling to Argentina or Spain and sending the money that they earn back to their families. This is hard on families, as many young people are leaving to find work and leaving their children in the care of grandparents or other family members.

Estella: Estella used her loan to purchase women’s clothing to sell in her neighborhood, which she said was not as successful as she had hoped, due to competition in the area. She hopes to withdraw another loan to buy children’s clothes, which she thinks will be much more successful. She cares for her sick mother and siblings during the day.

All of these women have repaid their loans successfully, and plan to stay in the group for the next cycle.