Monday, Monday

Heather and I have both noticed that our English is getting kind of messy. So far things have been great with the Spanish and we've only had a few moments where we were totally lost. To be honest, I'm actually impressed with our sweet skills after so much time not speaking.

So...I don't know how much people want to hear about our experiences, but for our parents (at least they care), I'll include details. And as Heather and a million other people have said, "You're pretty verbose," so I'm trying to split the blog entries up so that you don't have to read one entry of ten pages covering one day.

So after Heather and I arrived at the office, Jenry had to finalize the loan of a family who is going to open a restaurant. We spent the time looking at trainings that Eagle Condor (the company that Jenry works for and that we're doing this little internship for) gives to their potential borrowers. Eagle Condor is HARDCORE. And they're awesome. They have this extensive process where they have potential borrowers apply and then they go through this selection process. One of the interesting facts about their process is that they try to decide on who to lend to based on some interesting criteria; such as, church leaders have priority. The reasoning behind this is that they want to help people who are in hard situations financially to improve their lives and have a chance to progress out of poverty. Their first priority is to help the leadership of the church be stable and then they look at the members. They will serve any member, but if the funds are limited, they will try to help leaders who meet the other criteria before they will lend to other members. Tiene sentido.

It is amazing to see what they do for people. Their loans are microcredit loans (small, small loans of $120 to about $2000) to help people either start businesses or grow their current business. For example, there is a man who makes this candy here that pretty much rocks. It's a typical treat in Peru. He could make about 100 to 200 a week and he would make them by hand and then go through the streets trying to sell them. With his loan, he was able to change the process so that he now makes up to 4000 a week and has a distribution process where he sells to resellers. It's totally amazing. They've helped other people open small shops, restaurants, bakeries. It's amazing the difference that this makes in people's lives. I'm totally sold. As we were watching a film today, I totally got emotional and had to keep myself from crying (because I'm emotionally inhibited, okay?). I wasn't sure if it was because I was touched by the work that they do and the lives that they change or because one of our fellow classmates who used to work with them, Russ Tanner, was on the video and it made Heather and me miss him even more! :)

Jenry spent the day talking to us about trainings that they do for the people. Every business owner goes through 6 training sessions of 2-3 hours each where they discuss the basics of business. I wish we could whittle our MBA program down to 18 hours. :) Actually, it's a ton of information, especially for people who may not have had their own business before. Once the people finish their training and receive their loan, Jenry or his assistant or another Eagle Condor representative visits the business every week or every two weeks for two years to give advice, see how things are doing, make sure things are on track. In Trujillo, things are awesome and 100% of their borrowers are making their loan payments. Incredible. It's really beautiful to see the simplicity of these people's lives and to see how much this help means to them. It's awesome.

Jenry also showed us pictures of most of the families and talked about their businesses and where they are right now. Heather and I are going to do visits, write up more detailed histories, look for ways that they can improve their businesses, create a marketing training, and...I don't know. Whatever else there is for us to do. We're really excited. I love this stuff. True, from our perspective it's a non-profit so there's no money for me to work in a business like this, but I would love to be able to make money with my degree and then turn around and find ways to invest in these people's lives. Being here has made me realize how much money I have, how much I can do, how frivilous I often am with my money...and yet to be honest, I know it'll be hard for me once I'm back in the United States to maintain this perspective and refrain from spending my money on luxuries (like eating out, going to movies, new shirts from Banana) when I should be putting it toward helping others.