community matters.

the good couple of days… busy… interesting… challenging… Yesterday we visited another project community to collect loan repayments from women receiving our microloans. This community is a smaller-scale red light area.

As we observe the process, as we notice things from yesterday’s community and today’s, we can see how a sense of community and cohesiveness with your neighbors can bring peace and hope and the confidence that life can be better. We saw that today. Poor but more organized. A more cleaned up slum but a slum nonetheless. Women who shared, laughed, talked with each other. Women who were confident, eager to pay, full of questions, loud chatter and debate, ending with smiles and a nod.

Yesterday – a bit more disorganized, messier, loud, an overwhelming amount of stuff going on. Less chatter among the loan recipients. Less organization. Less smiles. Less laughter. The difference? The environment and the community. Here, castes seem to still play a role in dividing this community. It echoes of the racial divide we still, although much diminished, have in America. Even within the poor, there are levels of poverty, levels of status, roles assigned based on your status… even today. Women are less empowered in this community as their husbands and sons run the businesses, despite the loan coming under the wife’s name. Research shows that when women get loans to care for the money, they are more responsible and put the money to use in a smart way that helps the family. But if the women are simply intermediaries… channels… they aren’t really all that empowered, are they? Perhaps there’s some more respect given to the women, but I’m not really sure yet. We have yet to come to a conclusion on that although hopefully the next few weeks of interviews and observations and research will tell. Hopefully we’ll get an honest and true view of reality in that community. Our thoughts? If not financially, how else can we empower these women to be leaders in their families, in their communities? How else can we get them to take a stand and take ownership of their lives? How do we change mindsets that have been reinforced through culture and years of history… of how “life has always been”?