Today, on Monday, I started my micro finance
project, it wasn’t all that I expected but it is only my first day. There is a
lot of people that have been doing micro finance that are leaving this week and
last week so it seems we are going from a really big group to only two people
or something like that, so there will be plenty to do for us. Today we visited
one of the women groups that we are working with to see how they are doing,
this is done once every week and it is also when we collect money from them and
so on. After that I had my induction into the team and we were talking some but
there wasn’t really a lot to do for me since I can’t help with the monthly
reports and things of that nature yet. Later I met the hot springs group for a
trip to the Mt. Meru market and then a goodbye dinner for Marscha at Maasai
Café. I haven’t introduced you to the hotsprings group yet, there is three from
Denmark; Laura, Freja who’ll be here for four months and I, four from Holland;
Marscha, Nienke, Marco who just finished his bachelor in medicine and Robert a
fifty year old out travelling the world and Emily from the US, more
specifically Pennsylvania who is a hospitality major and dance minor at
college. You all know about the market
so I am going to go straight to the Maasai Café – they have amazing pizzas I
was savoring every bite. It was so good. We might be going there for the social
on Thursday and that gets no complaints from me. When we were done eating my
second cousin from Iceland, Bjarni, and his three friends joined us. It was
really nice to see a known face and listen to Icelandic again though they were
speaking quite fast and most of what they were saying was negative things about
Denmark and Danish people, though Bjarni kept reminding them that I understood
and said that they had gotten used to no one understanding them. I just found
it funny and they seemed nice. They had to leave during the night and I had to
get up early in the morning so we didn’t get to spend a lot of time together.
On Tuesday we were out in the field all day visiting two different groups, but
what we did most was wait. We didn’t get back before five, but we spend maybe
an hour at the most really working. It was nice to see more of the groups and
the individual women. The leader of the second group had a really big garden
with tons of different vegetables and other things. She seems to be successful,
which is what we want for them. Most of the micro finance team is leaving this
week and only I and another will be left next week. A Japanese girl made a
farewell dinner to the second group as well because she has been doing this for
five months and have started to really care for these groups, so she wanted to
show her appreciation. As we got back late I just walked home afterwards to
relax. The next day on a Wednesday we visited a group we call the CHE group
though nobody seems to know why. Only three out of around ten women showed up,
they were all claiming sickness, but apparently that happens quite often. I
don’t think that they are all that serious about the loans if they don’t even
show up to these weekly meetings. Five of the women had their last payment for
the second loan of 200,000 tsh today, only one of them showed up so we could
only do one post-loan interview. But it was nice to listen to how it went for
this woman with her loan and what she did with it. It seemed like it has been
really helpful to her, also all the savings and book keeping training seems to
have helped her. It is good to know that some people are appreciative of the
help that we give them and that they are moving towards something better. After
lunch I had an hour (really only half an hour) of Kiswahili and we did question
words that will all be really helpful to me. In the afternoon I went to town
because I was planning to Skype with my family, but tomorrow will be better for
that. I also visited the Tanzanite experience about tanzanite and it was really
interesting to learn about and I really want one, it is just really expensive
so I think that will have to wait until I have more money to spend than on this
trip. After dinner at home Laura and I had a long conversation with Patrick and
Grace we talked about a lot of different topics like poverty and drugs
trafficking, it is good to get their perspective. We have also promised to
paint/decorate the day care room of the house so we will take a weekend at home
next weekend and do that and relax a little bit. In our minds it looks great,
but we are both not the most creative people so we will see, but no matter what
it will be fun to do.
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