Siempre Amigos Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to the SIEMPRE AMIGOS group, consisting of Rosa Leny Suarez Sanchez, Zoraida Rodriguez Fernandez, Patricia Arteaga Castro, Deonilda Aroni Condori, Marilyn Zabala Rosas, Sandra Rodriguez Saavedra, Julio Alberto Calderon Chavez, Agustina Velasquez Peredo, Shirley Romero Maybi, Zenobia Peredo Guzman De Vel, Rosmery Copa Ocampo, Juan Francisco Parada Justiniano, Cristhian Lorenzo Delgado Soleto, Eduardo Cuellar Almanza by Fundación Agrocapital, a partner of ACDI/VOCA in Bolivia. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 5 months, Fundación Agrocapital, a partner of ACDI/VOCA will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

The Siempre Amigos (“Forever Friends”) group all lives in the Villa Busch neighborhood of the town of Guabirá, right near the Guabirá sugar cane refinery. The nearby refinery gives the whole town a distinctly sweet smell, and the main road is packed with big trucks carrying burnt sugar cane to the plant for processing.

I stop by Leni Toledo’s house to chat. Leni hosts the group meetings at her house. Though she is not actually a member of the group, her husband is, and he took his loan out on her behalf since Leni had been blacklisted in Bolivia’s Credit Risk Center because of another group loan she had been involved in where some members didn’t fulfill their repayment obligations. This issue has now been cleared up, so Leni is planning to join Siempre Amigos for its next loan cycle.

The group already knows Leni very well—they chose her to be the group’s “administrator,” meaning that she collects payment from each member of the group and goes to the bank to make deposits. She tells me that she was the president of previous group loans she participated in, and it doesn’t surprise me; she is clearly a very smart, strong, outspoken leader. As she puts it, “Conmigo nadie juega la pelota,” the Bolivian equivalent of “Nobody messes with me.”

Leni sells snacks and drinks from a food stand, so she and her husband invested their Kiva loan to buy more ingredients for her to cook with. She’s currently 8 ½ months pregnant; the baby will be a girl.

Outside of Leni’s house I meet Casiano, the husband of group member Agustina Velasquez. He is busy repairing shoes from his stand on the sidewalk facing the plaza. Casiano and his wife have been with Siempre Amigos for all loan four of its loan cycles. He used the 1,500 boliviano (US$214) Kiva loan to buy more soles, laces and leather. He tells me he fixes six or seven pairs of shoes per day, mostly for folks from the neighborhood. He has been working as a shoe repairman for about eight years, before then he shelled rice for a living. He says that working with the group and AgroCapital has been a good experience, so he and his wife are planning to stick with the group for future loan cycles.

Siempre Amigos has worked very well together, and never gets behind on its payments, thanks to the punctuality and responsibility of members like Casiano and his wife and the discipline and strictness of Leni. “It’s one of the best groups I have,” says the group’s loan officer, Carlos.