San Juan de Limay

Yami and I went on a trip! This was... surprising since I didn't have any idea we were going. First, we took a bus for three hours from Managua to Esteli. There is nothing remarkable about Esteli in my opinion. Then, we jumped to another bus on our way to San Juan del Limay (also another three hours).

San Juan de Limay was, however, very neat. The distance between San Juan de Limay and Esteli really isn't that far, what takes so long is that the bus (which was the exact same bus I took to school from age 5-17 except it was covered in dramatic symbols of Jesus) has to transverse all these winding mountain roads.

There was a dramatic downpour as soon as we arrived in the city. Yami asked if I wanted to wait until the next day to travel out to visit the artisans in the area or go right then, so I said screw it and lets go.

After walking the the selva for 20 minutes we reached a group of artisans who took us around the village; many of these women lived without electricity and made necklaces and small beads to sell. Later we visited a cooperative house that had originally started with 20 women but now only had four.

Besides the horrible bus it was all and all a good trip.

Behind On Writing For A Good Reason

Ugh, it has been a pain to try to write everyday, especially since I am trying to quickly complete a project for the organization that I am volunteering for. The group is thinking about jumping into a micro lending program, or at least a pilot program, since they have recently made two loans to two different people and have had a 100% repayment rate. What I've been mainly working on here is figuring out a way to formalize this and use it to augment what the organization already does -- which is to connect artisans to fair trade markets here in Nicaragua and the United States. Many of the models and literature on the subject tend to focus on the Grameen model -- essentially lending money to groups without collateral and using the social pressure of repaying loans instead of the threat of having whatever physical capital taken away. For example, the organization made one loan to help a women rebuild an oven that she used to fire her pottery. That may not work here in Nicaragua since many of the people we work with are not in cooperatives or any formal group per se.



So, the question is how to establish a program to enable the artisans we work with to increase their capacity for producing goods, on an individual basis, when they have no collateral nor any of the "social capital" that the Grameen model employs. God I love doing this stuff!