Somos Puneños!

Yesterday Tyler and I attended our first lending meeting at Prisma. The group was on their third loan cycle and they were borrowing 1,000 soles each. There were only two men, the majority of the women were middle aged and four had brought toddlers with them. As we watched they paid back their loans and interest in order and one woman who had missed her payment the previous week paid a fine of twenty soles plus the payment she had missed. One woman was absent and one of the group members told the sister-in-law of the absent women to run to her house and see where she was. The sister-in-law, who was obviously the youngest women there, refused and the group erupted in argument over what should be done about her loan payment. The presidenta suggested that one other woman pay it, either the sister-in-law or another woman. Various women kept trying to get someone to go to the absentee’s house but everyone refused. Finally they decided to take the payment out from the internal account and fine the woman at the next meeting. She would also have to pay back the internal account plus interest. Although the group was only fourteen people the meeting took almost two hours due to disagreements about fines and how to cover the absent woman’s debt for that month.

After seeing this meeting and doing some online research at the “Speddy Internet Café” above our house, Tyler and I discussed the best way to implement our impact assessment surveys. We had created short interviews for the women to determine what effect Prisma loans had and how Prisma could be more effective but Juan told us that the women would be difficult to contact outside of meetings and reluctant to stay after meetings because of busy schedules. We decided one of the best times to catch people would be before the meeting while those who arrived early were waiting for other members to show up and during the payment part of the meeting. Tomorrow we will test out our strategy for Prisma’s first ever impact assessment!

Aside from microfinance we are also working at the children’s home Hogar San Juan de Dios on weekends. When I was in Puno in 2005 I worked with the kids there, built a rabbit coup, put glass in the windows in the dining room and did several other projects. Now the home has changed so much! They have a “granja” with 300 guinea pigs that the kids take care of and then are sold or eaten at the home. They have a functioning green house with abundant vegetables (very little will grow in Puno because of the dry, cold climate and high altitude) that the boys take care of as well. They also have an old-folks home where 12 “abuelos” who have been abandoned by their families and are unable to care for themselves live. There are 35 boys there currently (there is another home for girls) between the ages of 6 and 14 who are either orphans or have been given up by their parents. Often the case is that when a father dies or abandons a family a single mother is not able to feed her children and gives some of them up to a home like this hoping to eventually be able to take them back herself.

At Hogar San Juan de Dios we are constructing a wall between the bathroom and the dormitory so that the kids won’t have to walk outside to use the bathroom at night and so that the wind will not blow into their bedrooms at night. For those of us more artistically inclined we may be replastering and painting a mural on the back wall of the courtyard. We haven’t designed the mural yet but our idea is to have something both educational and aesthetically pleasing. We´ll see!

Jessie Schmitz