Blog Explanation

This blog will document my first year of post-graduate work in microfinance. The majority of the posts will be dedicated to recording my role and work with Sinergia, a microfinance organization located in Trujillo, Peru, but my first posts will record my microfinance tour through Central America. I am visiting microfinance organizations in four cities in Latin America (San Crisobal de Las Casas, Mexico* San Salvador, El Salvador* Tegucigalpa, Honduras and Managua, Nicaragua) so that I may see the diversity of microfinance's global impact, so that I may learn from other group's successes and failures before launching my own projects (no need to reinvent the wheel, right?), and so I can explore Latin America!

MFI Visit #1

This photograph was taken in a small Mayan village outside of Tumula, Mexico. Jose Miguel (pictured, left) is guiding the unnamed borrower´s (pictured, right) thumb onto the loan contract. Thumb prints are used in place of signatures when borrowers are illiterate. The elderly mayan woman is smiling because she has just paid off her third successful loan without default and has decided, along with her other solidarity group members, to extract a fourth loan of approximately $100, which she will use to purchase unrefined sheered sheep wool. She dyes the wool, spins it into yarn, and then using the yarn, stitches traditional skirts similar to the one she is wearing in the picture.