Florencia

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Florencia 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. Florencia Ramirez de Lavado lives in the village of Tapo, located an hour away from the town of Tarma in Junín province, Peru. For the past 32 to 34 years, Florencia and her husband have run a butcher shop and business in their town. She sells beef, pork, and lamb. Her husband buys the animals in the ‘heights’ (the village is in a valley while the fields are scattered all around the sides of the valley and lower down near a brook) while she kills them at a place outside town and runs the actual stall in the market. Unlike another rural butcher I met, Mrs. Ramirez de Lavado does not have a machine to cut up the animals but rather uses a simple handsaw. Tapo has a two-storey building for their market with the second story opening out into the plaza (the building is on a hill). For the cows, the family buys one (typically 100 kilos) for 750 soles and sells it for 8.5 soles a kilo, a 100 sole profit; lambs are typically ten kilos, bought for 80 soles and sold for 100 soles. In a regular week, Florencia sells six to seven lambs and one to one-and-a-half cows. The majority of her sales go four or five butchers in Lima. She makes the seven-hour journey every weekend, selling her meat there on Saturdays and Sundays. The days before and after her journey to Lima are the days she sells at the market in Tapo. Two children live with her and her husband, a daughter who is 15 and a son who is 9. The son, as he was on summer vacation, later cheerfully led the Microfinanzas PRISMA loan officer and I around the village to meet the rest of the Kiva borrowers in the area. Florencia’s dream is to simply continue moving forward and maybe have a little more for her family. Because she conducts the majority of her butchery business in a second house outside of town, we took the picture at her house near the main plaza of Tapo.