As I prepare for my placement in September with Fundación Realidad in Mexico City, I’ve been thinking about my local small businesses in NYC. Here are a few of my thoughts!
' /> Continue Reading >>Stories tagged with Mexico
Greetings from Zacatecas, capital city of the state of Zacatecas, Mexico!
I have spent the better part of the week camped out in this fine colonial city to continue to bring ADMIC journal updates to Kiva lenders. Yesterday, I met Maria de la Luz and learned about her family’s potato chip making business.
This should have been a fantastic journal update for some Kiva lender but sometimes the great work of a microfinance institution (mfi) like Mexico’s ADMIC is not funded by Kiva dollars. As I am sure has happened to other fellows, the microfinance partner staff...
Continue Reading >>The sale of used clothing is one of the top micro-businesses in northern Mexico. The transport of used items across the US/Mexico border keeps some families fed and clothed.
There are those who dabble in the market and may have just a few items. The items might be for sale in front of their house on a clothesline or a blanket on the ground. The individual may have another business going on- a store, food sales or the like. Their items come from a range of sources- maybe their children outgrew it, maybe they need the cash more than the item, maybe they saw a...
Continue Reading >>I spend most of my time meeting small business owners who have received funds through ADMIC, the local non-profit microfinance institution, using Kiva funds. I have this opportunity to enter people’s homes and hear them talk about the development of their businesses. Yesterday I met three women who make and sell tamales.
While the tamale recipe isn’t necessarily complex it is labor intensive. The spreading of the masa into the corn husks alone takes muscles that aren’t put into play by those of us who labor over a computer. As the cooks in my...
Continue Reading >>I promised a long time ago to write about housing in Nuevo Laredo.
So I will exercise self-control and delay the gratification of writing about my recent outing to a lucha libre pro wrestling extravaganza. I will write instead about how housing gets built here in Nuevo Laredo – more of a sweaty struggle than the lucha libre on any day – and why housing microfinance is important in this process.
Visiting Kiva borrowers and writing journals represents a big part of my work for Kiva at my partner organization, FVP (Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva, or...
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I can’t believe 3 weeks have gone by and I still haven’t blogged sharing with all of you my experience so far. I’m truly sorry for this but I’m hoping to redeem myself and be able to write and describe everything I’ve lived this past days. So back to the beginning…..
I...
Continue Reading >>Two weeks have passed since I started work at Fundación Para La Vivienda Progresiva, or Foundation for Progressive Housing. I am still very much in absorption mode, so for now I will rely on broad strokes to paint the picture of what FVP is all about.
The organization is located right across the border from the U.S., with offices in the border towns of Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Acuña, and, soon, Piedras Negras. In short, FVP helps people in the border region to build housing and to start or grow small businesses. Housing is in its title...
Continue Reading >>This is my first blog entry. Many Kiva Fellow arrival tales involve foreign airports, sweaty travels across long stretches of rural countryside, and the onset of intercontinental jetlag. In contrast, I am probably the first fellow who arrived at his placement by Greyhound bus.
I write you from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, across the border from Laredo, Texas. On one of the local radio stations (local to Texas? local to Mexico? Hard to tell, since radio waves don’t obey borders) they refer to them as “Los Dos Laredos” – the two...
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