Tikarisun De Ccachin Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to TIKARISUN DE CCACHIN Group, consisting of DIONICIO HUILLCA CRUZ, JUAN VICTOR OBLITAS CHASIN, GENARA CANDENAS ZUNIGA, HIPOLITA ZUNIGA PFURO, VICTORIA CUTIPA CANDENAS, ALEJANDRINA HUILLCA BETANCOURT, CIPRIANA HUAMAN PFURO, EVARISTO CANDENAS ZUNIGA, HONORATA FUENTES ZUNIGA, ERNESTINA ZUNIGA HUALLPAYUNGA, HERMENIGILDO CANDENAS CRUZ, FLORENCIO ZUNIGA LIMACHE by Asociación Arariwa in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the 4 months of this loan, Asociación Arariwa will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

On Tuesday, I traveled to the town of Ccachin to visit several members of the Tikarisun Village Bank. On Tuesday mornings Ccachin holds its weekly market, a colorful affair with men and women dressed in traditional clothing, yelling to one another in Quechua (Peru’s primary indigenous language), and vendors selling gelatin desserts, vegetables, household items and other goods. Ccachin is such a small town that almost everyone knows each another, so the first woman I ran into at the market was able to tell me where to find most of the group members.

I was overwhelmed by how warmly I was received, both by group members and by strangers on the street. I asked one man for directions to Evarista Candenas Zuñiga’s house, and he offered to take me there, even though it was a 10-minute walk in the opposite direction. On the way, he told me he was thinking about forming his own village bank and asked for more information about Kiva and Asociación Arariwa.

I found Evarista at home, busily weaving. Evarista has livestock, which she sells for meat. Right now, she has 25 guinea pigs, 26 goats, one pig, four hens, and a milk cow named Roxana. She also weaves as a second source of income. She makes large blankets, handbags and table runners, some of them amazingly detailed. She sells her work to buyers who come to her town from Cusco. She earns 150 soles for large weavings like the one she is pictured working on, and 250 soles for more detailed weavings like the one she is wearing on her back (which she also made). These large, intricate weavings can take her more than a month to make.

Evarista used her loan of 500 soles to buy a television and DVD player for her two younger children, who are seven and nine years old. She wants them to enjoy the luxuries that she never had while she was growing up. Evarista had seven brothers and sisters, and her mother couldn’t afford to support them all. She didn’t treat the children very well, Evarista remembers, and she cries a little as she remember how her mother tied her up after she lost one of the sheep she was supposed to be looking after. When she was 14 years old, she left her town to go to Cusco with one of her brothers. At the time, she spoke only Quechua and had only completed first grade. When she was 15 she enrolled in school in the city, where she learned to speak Spanish and count. She was teased a lot at school, she remembers, even by her teacher, who called her “wild,” “Indian,” and other epithets for indigenous Quechua-speakers from the country. After two years Evarista was forced to return to her hometown, since she had no money for food and was kicked out of the house she was living in. “I didn’t even have one sol,” she says (one sol=US 30 cents). She walked home to Ccachin, since she had no money for bus fare. The trip – three hours by car – took her several days.

When she returned to Ccachin, Evarista found that her mother wanted nothing to do with her. She met the man who is now her husband, moved in with him, and taught herself to weave from a book. Little by little she saved money, selling her work for just five or six soles, and eventually bought all of the animals she has today. She and her husband have four children, the oldest of whom is now 22 and married with two children of her own. Evarista has sent all four of her children to school and insists that they stay in school, though it’s not always easy. Her second daughter, who is 16, wants to leave high school because many of her friends have done so. “They’ve made me lose my daughter,” says Evarista. “Mothers and fathers don’t make their children study very well here.” Her dream for her children is to have them finish school and send them to Cusco so that they will have more opportunities available to them.

Evarista hopes to continue to take out small loans from Asociación Arariwa so that she can buy more pigs and install a pigpen in her yard. She is grateful for the loans she has been able to access, because they have helped her get ahead in life.

Thank you for supporting entrepreneurs in Peru. As you may know, all Kiva loans are actually administered by local field partners. For the past couple of months, I have been working as a Kiva Fellow with Asociación Arariwa, Kiva’s newest field partner in Peru.

Arariwa (which means “protector of crops” in Quechua, Peru’s main indigenous language) became a Kiva partner in August 2008, but did not begin posting a significant volume of its clients to the Kiva Web site until early 2009. Arariwa’s executive director, loan officers, and Kiva coordinator are palpably excited about what they call “Project Kiva.” They are working hard to visit village banks in isolated, rural areas of the Cusco region so rural clients can tell their stories and fund their loans through Kiva.

Raquel Villafuerte, Arariwa’s Kiva coordinator, is passionate about traveling and visiting the communities of the countryside around Cusco. In this sense, she is perfect for her job. Others might resent the long, often uncomfortable hours of travel on dirt roads, and occasional overnight stays in distant communities far from family and friends that come with the job, but Raquel enjoys the work and always has a smile for her clients and her co-workers. Unfortunately, Raquel and an Arariwa loan officer were injured in a motorcycle accident last month while returning from a visit to a Kiva group. Her scrapes and bruises didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for her work, although she has avoided motorcycles since then.

Arariwa’s loan officers serve different communities in the Cusco area. Some loan officers work within the city of Cusco and hold their group meetings at the Arariwa office. Others work up to two hours outside the city and hold group meetings in clients’ houses or businesses. These loan officers still report to the central office in Cusco each day. Other loan officers work even further from the city (three to nine hours away), live in the communities they serve, and only report to the central office every few weeks. One of these loan officers is Marco, who lives and works in the community of Lares. To illustrate how small Lares is, here’s a conversation I had with Marco about a week before I went to visit one of his village banks, Tikarisun de Ccachin:

Me: I should get your cell phone number so that we can coordinate when and where to meet up.

Marco: There’s actually no cell service there, so I’ll give you the phone number for Lares instead.

Me: Oh, Arariwa has an office in Lares?

Marco: No, it’s the phone number for Lares. The town has one phone. Just leave a message with whoever answers, and they’ll come find me and give me the message.

The Tikarisun Village Bank is located in Ccachin, a rural community high up in the clouds in the hills outside Lares. Like Lares, Ccachin has just one phone, but it is a much smaller community and it has even less contact with the outside world. Ccachin is just thirty or forty minutes from Lares by car, but it is much more isolated due to its small size, its remote location in the hills, and the lack of public transportation connecting it with any other nearby towns.

For me, getting from Cusco to Ccachin meant a nearly four-hour ride in the company pickup truck down bumpy dirt roads. The trip was tiring, even though I had the luxury of traveling in a private vehicle. It was easy to see why villagers in Ccachin don’t travel to Cusco to get loans.

My visit to Ccachin really opened my eyes to the importance of extending microfinance to rural areas. When we talk about people living in developing countries, we don’t always distinguish between urbanites and rural farmers. In Peru, however, that distinction is very important. Peruvians in rural areas are much more likely to be indigenous Quechua-speakers, to be living below the national poverty line, and to have little or no formal education. They typically cook with wood fires instead of gas stoves, live in adobe houses instead of concrete or stucco homes, and have more children to support than do city dwellers. Loans are readily available to a shop owner in the city of Cusco, but not to a small farmer in the countryside.

The credit and education that Arariwa offers go a long way in rural areas like Ccachin, because micro-loans are usually the only source of external support available to small businesses like Señora Ernestina’s grocery store, Señora Victoria’s pig farm, or Señora Hipolita’s chicheria (Chicha is a traditional Andean corn beer). Marco, Tikarisun’s loan officer, is already the godfather of three of his clients’ children, an indication of the respect and gratitude the community has for him. Another Arariwa loan officer, Tula, who works in the remote jungle town of Pilcopata, says that her clients often encourage her to run for mayor of Pilcopata.

Arariwa’s staff is working hard to provide journal updates for all of its Kiva clients. Because so many of Arariwa’s clients live quite far from the central office in Cusco, reaching each and every Kiva client for a follow-up interview is simply not possible. Nonetheless, 27% of Arariwa’s loans have journal entries, compared with just 12% for all Kiva field partners.

I hope you have found this journal entry to be interesting and informative, and I’m happy to answer any comments or questions you may have. I have been lucky enough to see the effect that Kiva loans are having on the ground here in the Cusco region. Arariwa’s Kiva clients, the staff and I are extremely grateful for your support. I hope you continue to lend to Peruvian entrepreneurs through Asociación Arariwa!

Read the Tikarisun Village Bank’s Kiva profile and read about my visit with Evarista, one of the group members:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?action=about&id=95881&page=businesses&_te=mj

View all Asociación Arariwa loans that are currently being funded:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=119&status=fundraising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_te=mj

Best regards,

Cynthia McMurry

Kiva Fellow

Apologies: photo accidentally left out from last email.