Susana Aída

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Susana Aída by Microfinanzas PRISMA in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 6 months, Microfinanzas PRISMA will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Mrs. Susana Aida Alay Buendia owns a store (the largest in Chires) in her pueblo in the sierras of Junín Province, Peru. She began the store with her first loan from Microfinanzas PRISMA and with her fourth – yours – she has invested more in the store and in her potato fields. Mrs. Buendia’s husband works in the mines and her four sons attend school both in the pueblo and in the nearby town of Huayahuasi (Chires only has a primary school, two attend that; Huayahuasi is a 90-minute hike away and the other two go to high school there). While Susana attends her store, she has three full-time employees who work the family’s four hectares of potatoes and are paid 20 soles a day each. During harvest-time, this number expands to 15 or 16 workers. The store helps her pay for lunches for herself and her kids and a few extra luxuries; the real family income comes from the potato fields.

Susana specializes in selling potato seeds rather than just the end crop. She sells the full-size potatoes at the market in nearby towns while the seeds she sells to businessmen from Arequipa in the south. Her next harvest will come from January to March. Each hectare of her fields requires 20 sacks of potato seeds so she reinvests 80 sacks a harvest back into her own fields. The land itself is rented from her grandmother. Susana’s dream is to leave the small pueblo and move to Huancayo (a town of 350,000 people with a university) so that her children will get a good education. Her oldest is wanting to study heavy machinery in an institute.

I made a video of my journey to her village and posted it on the Fellowsblog here: http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2008/12/21/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-kiva-fellow/