According to the posted date on my old blog, it is four years and one week since I initiated my first loan on Kiva. I was impressed when I found Kiva.
That organization seemed to be what I had looked for long before, and I found it. It is one in a thousand ways that people could use to help those unluckier or poorer than themselves. Back then, when I was still in Asia, I usually join with my closest friends on charity trips to remote areas, where living conditions are so bad that many of us couldn’t even imagine. After moving to Europe, I badly missed those trips. I missed my friends and the meaningful things that we did together.
The woman wept with joy as she was given the key to her new house. The old house was destroyed by the storm.
Helping those poor people – one way or another – also helped us ourselves. Looked at the poor children, who have to walk 2 or 3 hours to school in winter, wearing only old, patchy, and thin clothes, or at the persons whose only meal of the day is a pot of steamed rice with salt helped us to respect this life better. An old saying, “All men are created equal.” is by no means accurate, at least from what we saw. We are lucky people. We have everything we need for our lives. We have enough food for today, tomorrow, next week, and much longer, while some people don’t know what they will eat tomorrow if they scoop the last grain out of their pot.
I always wanted to do something. And the moment when I found Kiva, I knew what I had searched for was found.
After spending only 20 minutes scrolling through “start-up” projects listed on Kiva, I registered my account and started my loan career on Kiva. $25 was lent to a 31-year-old woman.
“Mrs. T is 31 years old and she is married with two children. She has worked in agriculture farming food and had a service business shipping goods. T lives in (-) district, a rural town in (-) province. Her family is a low-income household in the village, moreover this region often suffers from natural disasters such as storms because it is near the sea.
In 2018, T joined TH microfinance institution to improve her business. T has successfully repaid one loan from TH microfinance institution. T is a reputable person in the community.
The main hardship that T faces is lack of capital. She is requesting a loan to purchase instruments to maintain her service of shipping goods.
With her business profit, T hopes for her family to be healthy and happy, to be able to buy more supplies and equipment for her business, and for her business to do well.”
To date, $25 was fully repaid by that woman. I never know who she is, nor does she, about me, one of the persons who funded her project. Without interest, that $25 was returned and slowly became parts of new loans to another person who needed it.
These children curiously climbed on my car. Most of them do not go to school. The little girl in pink was later given a bicycle by a friend of mine to make her 15km trip to school every day easier.
Kiva is different. I mean totally different. Like old men’s lesson from giving fishing rods or fish, many charity organizations only care about collecting and distributing assets and commodities in one way. That can only make the lives of the less fortunate better for a moment and leave a lot of long-term consequences. Kiva also collects money but distributes it to the persons who need it in the form of microloans through local microfinance institution partners.
Most borrowers are underbanked, don’t have access to the traditional banking system, or don’t meet conventional bank requirements for traditional loans. These partners are in charge of giving the loan to borrowers, following their progress of repaying the loans. In many cases, they also provide further help to the borrowers to ensure that their lives will be improved after receiving such loans, and on the other side, they could repay the loans to lenders as planned.
What an intelligent way to help people!
“Yay! I’ll do it. It’s sooo smart, sooo meaningful, and delightful!!!” – I was talking to myself. “I will deposit some of my regular income to help improve these people’s lives!” – Said the voice in me.
Yet. Today, four years has passed. And $1,950 was the amount funded for 74 projects. That’s about it!
Kane, you are such a sucker!
Yes, I was a sucker. But my super self in me doesn’t let me continue being such a bad guy.
I will return the journey with Kiva. My goal is to reach around $9,000 in funding amount within the next 9 months (That means until Dec 31st, I gotta deposit this sum to Kiva and distribute them in borrower’s projects). Although this goal is not why I started this project, “Highway Happiness“, it remains a large part of my decision to launch it. I want to invite you to join my team on Kiva and change other people’s lives with me. I have no benefit at all in inviting you to join, and I have to warn you that “investing”/”lending” has potential risks. Be sure that you acquire enough information before registering and depositing to Kiva.
Although you can always join Kiva as an individual lender, that would be my pleasure to have you with me along my journey. You can visit this link or copy and paste https://www.kiva.org/team/highway_happiness into your web browser to start.
