Firmes Y Bendecidos #2 Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to the Esemereida Ramirez group, consisting of Esemereida Ramirez, Osni Pie, Uala Yan, Cecilla Luis, Maria Salmielto by Esperanza International, a partner of HOPE International in Dominican Republic. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 5 months, Esperanza International, a partner of HOPE International will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Ramirez Esemereida is a member of the bank Esemereida Ramirez Group of which Cecilia Luis is also a member.

Esemereida is a fun-loving 64 year old women who just celebrated her birthday the 10th of February. The day we visited, we found her surrounded by customers talking in the shade of her front porch. Esemereida used her Kiva loan to purchase things for a store that she runs out of the front room of her 4 room batey. She sells multiple things but her best seller are eggs that she sells for 5 pesos. She also recently began selling cold drinks and coconuts that she purchases out of the back of pickup trucks that passes through her community weekly. Esemereida has a weekly profit of approximately 5,000 pesos a week of which she uses to take care of herself and her two grandchildren.

Dear Esperanza lenders,

As you may know, all entrepreneur profiles on Kiva’s website are posted by local Field Partners like Esperanza, whose mission is to “free children and their families from poverty through initiatives that generate income, education, and health, restoring self-worth and dignity to those who have lost hope.” As a Kiva Fellow working with Esperanza International in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, I saw Esperanza’s mission at work most recently while visiting a batey.

For those that are not familiar with the term “batey,” it is a small, barrack-style community built and maintained by large sugar corporations. These communities are often completely surrounded by sugar cane fields, and often they lack basic resources such as clean drinking water, transportation, reliable electricity, and medicine. The majority of a batey’s members work in planting, cutting, and loading sugar cane for eight months of the year. The other four months are a stalemate, during which there are no sugar cane earnings.

In order to ensure continued earnings, one entrepreneur, Cloreta Yan, who lives on a rural batey, used her Kiva loan to open a small store in her house. Her community previously did not have a store where they might buy basic supplies, which meant that community members had to travel to nearby communities to shop. When my fellow Kiva Fellow Kalie Gold and I first visited Cloreta, she offered very basic supplies, such as sugar, oil, and rice. When I conducted a follow-up visit, she was selling over 20 items, including tobacco, ice, drinks, and cookies. She is now earning 600 pesos a week and, according to her loan officer, continues to expand the line of merchandise she sells.

Esperanza has supported 4,251 Kiva entrepreneurs thus far, resulting in approximately $200,000 loaned. Continually working to improve their organization, they have recently opened an office in Trau de Nord, Haiti. Esperanza continues to grow - thanks to Kiva lenders like you!

Staff members at various offices throughout the Dominican Republic visit their entrepreneurs frequently, and many of you will receive an update on an entrepreneur who received a loan contribution from you. Unfortunately, due to logistical and administrative constraints, reaching every entrepreneur for an update is just not possible, even with Esperanza’s dedicated team. Whether or not an update is provided on a specific entrepreneur to whom you made a loan, I hope that you have enjoyed this update on the impact that Esperanza has had with Kiva funds.

Finally, I would like to thank you personally for supporting an entrepreneur in Haiti or the Dominican Republic. It saddens me to realize that this letter marks the end of my time working with Kiva’s Field Partner Esperanza here in the Dominican Republic. For the last three months I have had the pleasure of working with Esperanza, visiting numerous Kiva entrepreneurs, and training staff members in writing business profile updates for Kiva lenders such as yourself.

To see all current fundraising loans from Esperanza on Kiva.org, please click here:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=44&status=Fundraising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_te=mj&_te=mj

To see a short YouTube video on Cloreta Yan, please click here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8reiqg1pbBo&_te=mj

On behalf of Kiva, Esperanza, and its entrepreneurs, we thank you for your continued support.