Juana

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Juana 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. Juana de la Cruz de Galarza runs a restaurant at the indoor market off the main plaza of Tapo, a village in the sierra province of Junín, Peru. For the past twenty years, she has sold breakfast and lunch there, Monday to Friday. She wakes at 4am, begins preparing the food at 5am, receives her first customers at 7.30am, switches to lunches at 11.30am, and ends between 4.30pm and 5pm. She buys her ingredients twice a week, Thursday and Sunday, at the market in Tarma, a town about an hour away. Her stall in the market is wide enough for a table in the back, shelves for utensils and ingredients, and a sink and stove that end with a bar that faces the rest of the market. In addition, she shares about 6 picnic-like tables with tablecloths with two other restaurants on either side of her. Her breakfasts and lunches (a fixed menu) both cost 3.5 soles (~$1) each and she typically sells 25 to 30 a day. From November to January, demand drops but it picks up again during the harvest times. She used to rent a stall on the first floor of the market for 80 soles a month but now rents one on the second floor for only 30 soles a month. With all her hard work, she makes 15 to 20 soles in profits a day. While we interviewed her, Juana gave us coffee and a lunch. She is a very sweet woman who, when asked what her dream was, said it was that I’d “take her with me in my pocket [she’s maybe 5 feet and I’m 6’5”].” A more serious response was that she hopes to one day move to Lima with her daughters who already live there. She has two daughters, both in university, who are studying to become a nurse and a clothing designer respectively. Every two weeks, she makes the seven-hour trip out to Lima to see them.