Monday I woke up at 5:00 am to meet Doris at Mbengwi motor park to go to center 1 and 2 for a meeting. I got ready fairly quickly, but didn’t have time for breakfast–so I grabbed one of my precious meal replacement bars. I have been trying to save them up for when I really need them, ha ha. I was on a bike by 5:40 am, bouncing my way to the motor park. When we arrived at the center, there were a few people sitting in the room drinking palm wine–getting ready for the days events I suppose, ha ha. One of the men, probably in his late 60s, was very excited to have a whiteman there. He jumped up and started shaking my hand, then decided to hold my hand while we talked and I tried to get organized. Quite awkward really, trying to get my book out of my bag and having this older man squeezing my hand. I went with it though, he was just so happy, or drunk, hard to say. He then decided that he should teach me how to dance, because “America does not dance”. I tried to decline politely, explaining I had to get ready for the meet, but that wasn’t going to get me off the hook with this guy. The dance starts facing the ‘audience’ (clients in this case), with one arm around the other persons back and the other arm outstretched. He began to sing, and we bounced from one leg to the other to the his beat, flapping our outside arms up and down. Then, we kicked our feet out, from left to right, flapping our arms, and bending our knees getting closer to the ground. Then after about 8 kicks, we turned outwards, spinning to face the other direction, and repeated the whole dance. After about 4 times on each side, everyone started clapping and I was allowed to sit down again. Ha ha. “You very good for America.” ha ha, thanks?
Only about 20 people showed up to the meeting; none of these were people I needed to interview. So, I ended up just helping count the deposits and payments. Nothing too exciting happened at the meeting, one man couldn’t make his payment and so had to plead with those in the center to help him make his payment. No one seemed to be too interested in helping this man; the women said that he was not a good worker, always drinking and that his account should be closed. They also argued that it is his group’s responsibility to cover his losses first, before asking the center; these women would not have chosen this man to be in their group knowing he was a risky client. He was forced to stand until the group came to a consensus; as no one wanted to help him, everyone sat in silence while he stood, looking at his feet. Many scholars have argued that microcredit can result in social embarrassment and what not from the pressures of a client’s group or center to not default. This is most definitely true; however, I’m not sure that it is a bad thing. If a client is unable to make a payment due to an emergency with health or otherwise, they must simply contact either GHAPE or their group the day before the meeting to explain the situation; either GHAPE or the group will provide the client with money from the Emergency Fund. There is no interest on the emergency fund, and they can make their payment with the money from that rotating fund. If the client also must pay for hospital fees or some other expense, they can borrow from this fund for a month without interest. In other words, those that do not make their payments are those that have invested poorly or have not been working their business to the extent that is needed. Of course, the hospital bills and what not can add up, resulting in serious client financial difficulty; however, most of the clients who struggle are just hoping their group will cover their losses and allow them to continue to take out loans. When the groups reapply, those clients are rarely reaccepted by their group.
Life here is difficult for people; I speak to many of the female clients about their various income generating activities. It is seldom that I meet a woman who works in less than four different sectors and less than 13 hours a day. Men, on the other hand, I am surprised when they do more than 2. I guess things aren’t so different from North America, ha ha, kidding. Many of the women will have a small street-side shop where they sell items purchased from the market and re-sell in their area, make food items such as doughnuts, fish rolls, and roasted vegetables and fish to sell, sell second hand clothing to customers, sell credit for sim cards, work on their farm outside of town, dry maize and beans from their farm to sell, and often raise fowls and pigs. The list goes on and on. I try to get as much information as I can in my interviews, but I know if I kept asking questions, these women would be able to talk about all their activities for hours. It really is amazing these women are still responsible for raising families of around 6 children and all their grandchildren. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to complain about being tired after a regular 9 to 5 work day again. For entertainment, my mama next door will watch wrestling (WWF) late at night before going to bed; she usually only has time for about 20 minutes once a week. It is so strange how much she loves it though; everyone here loves WWF.
Once we arrived back at the office, I helped Loveline post some business profiles. The new loans from GHAPE should be up by next week. Click here to see if any are available now. The process was…slow. The internet constantly cuts in and out, or just slows down so that practically nothing will load. We decided to hold off till Tuesday, hoping the connection would improve. We also had a few questions for Kiva, some of the website options for repayments are not exactly made to represent the kind of loans that GHAPE gives properly. For example, for the first three months of returning clients, they only need to pay the interest on their loans, no payments on the principle. One interest payment is made the day they receive the loan; some of their policies seem quite strange, and apparently Kiva, as no other NGO requires any payment on the day of disbursal. Why not just deduct that amount from the loan you are giving them? There are a lot of little things here that if changed could make the organization much more efficient; however, it’s difficult to convince anyone here that there could be a better way to do things. The response is always ‘well, we do it this way though’; I realize that, but it takes you 4 times as long. Loveline can be quite loud and unwilling to hear the opinion of anyone else, but I have found that with persistence and raising my voice a little when she tries to interrupt me, I am getting through. Good thing I lived with Pieter so long, ha ha, I have learned to deal with those kinds of interruptions (kidding–I love you). After convincing her to change a couple of things, mostly during the staff meetings, because others will agree with me, she has seen a difference in certain activities. So, it is getting easier to break through her stubbornness and make GHAPE more efficient and productive.
Steve and I went out for dinner on Monday night to the International Hotel to catch up and have some steak. It wasn’t exactly steak, but it was beef and delicious, ha ha. We talked a lot about inefficiencies in the organizations here; to a degree, it seems there is just a lack of common sense involved in a lot of the business plans and workings here. The main national phone company on Commercial Avenue has no sign outside or indication of its where abouts; it relies on word of mouth for products and phones, and I will not even begin on their customer service. Both Steve and I experienced awful service, yelling, arguing, and waiting at the Camtel office. Surprisingly, we had very similar experiences. I was somewhat concerned last week when Loveline put me in charge of making the website, marketing for GHAPE, writing proposal letters, and creating project plans. I have never done any of these things before, but neither has anyone in the office. Loveline asked me to write letters requesting money from NGOs in America. I informed her that we could not just ask for money; we had to tell them what it would be used for, let them know how much we want, give them something in return (such as updates), include information about projections and targets, and provide other information of interest, such as annual reports and background. I don’t think it really mattered to her though, she just nodded and said something to the effect of ‘good that you are here to do this, you know how to do it then, let me know if you want me to read it after.’ Not exactly the response I was looking for. I have been following up, asking how much money they need and what their plans would be, but I don’t think she knows, so, these proposals may take some time to finish up.
Tuesday was somewhat uneventful; just worked on uploading profiles with Loveline. I started to feel quite ill in the afternoon; I had a fever and I was nauseous and sweating. Loveline scared me a bit, saying I probably had gotten malaria from my hike up Lefo (my legs are now covered in mosquito and other insect bites). After work, I decided to do my pilates dvd to see if that made me feel any better; I felt a lot better after that and having dinner. I’m assuming that I’m just somewhat over-worked and tired considering I get about 5 to 6 hours of sleep on a good night. I have beans almost every night for dinner now at home; I cooked them with tomatoes, onions, garlic, maggi, palm oil, peanut paste, salt and curry powder this time. I am getting a little bored of black beans, but the new flavouring was….different. Ha ha.
Every day that goes by, Loveline and I reassess how much time I should be spending at Belo, the new branch about an hour and a bit outside of Bamenda. It went from three weeks in the beginning to now around 3 or 4 days. I would have like to spend more time there, but, I would be sleeping in the office and there are no Kiva clients there yet. Originally we were hoping to upload some for December, but that is not really an option at this point. It doesn’t really make sense to have any Kiva clients out there; there are only two staff for 10 centers and they don’t have internet access. I would have to train both of them and they would need to spend their evenings working at cafes on Kiva stuff. It just makes more sense to keep the Kiva clients with the main branch for now; again the efficiency thing that just doesn’t really get through. Still working on the Belo thing with Loveline.
All of Thursday was spent problem solving issues with Pa2 and trying to make a CSV file of all of GHAPE’s clients on Kiva. It is taking us so long, we only made it through about a quarter of the centers. We need each client’s Kiva number, and the total amount they have paid back on the principle. After adding each clients payments up four times, finding duplicate clients in the system, and finding out that the CSV files load in all different currencies, we concluded that Thursday was a bad day. Ha ha. I was going out for dinner with Kat and Sunde after work, but decided to invite Loveline and Bridget along too.
After the regular 10 and a half hour work day in the office, we tried to forget about work and go for a nice meal. On the menu was pepper soup, goat cooked in a spicy carrot, bean, and jalapeno broth. It was served with cooked plantains, and a tomato meat sauce. It was pretty delicious and spicy. The goat was cooked with the skin on–which threw me off at first. Goat skin was not bad though, a little chewy, a little fatty, and the outside had a bit of a peach skin texture. Sounds delicious hey? Ha ha. All in all, the soup was pretty good; the meal was hilarious though. They first came around, as is customary in many African countries, with a big bowl and jug of water so that everyone can rinse their hands before eating. Kat had never seen this before and looked a little confused, ha ha, she laughed and tried to follow my lead without making it seem strange. During the meal, we ordered a litre of wine for the 5 of us to share; of course, they had to rexplain the concept of drinking alcohol and how if you drink too much you can get drunk, ha ha. Apparently if you are going to ’shake skin’ (dance in pidgin), wine is the liquor to drink though. We then practiced learning Pidgin, and how to respond to people that yell ‘whiteman’, ha ha. When kids yell whiteman at one of the VSO volunteers, he responds with ‘black child’ ha ha. A lot of the kids sing a song when they see white people; its mostly just ‘whiteman, whiteman, with a long nose….’ (it goes on to mention some other stuff, but I can’t remember the other lines, ha ha). Anyway, dinner was great, we all had a blast; it was nice also that the hotel was able to pick us up and drop us off at our homes–have to talk to Steve about Dreamland.
Friday was hell; Loveline and I tried to finish up our CSV file and organizing all the numbers. We kept running into serious errors in the records though. One case was a woman who had received her loan, but the photo on Kiva was different. Not only this but the woman had apparently given the wrong name on her application form; although one of the credit assistants had noticed it, he forgot to double check before the profile went up. So, this woman’s photo and name were different; but she had received the money raised by Kiva. In general, in a situation like this, we email all those who lent to the borrower and Kiva about the mix up; transparency is really important when working through the internet and whatnot. However, Loveline’s response was simply to refund the loan, giving all the money back to the lenders for the mix up. Of course, this is what an MFI ’should’ do in case of a mix up; but I would rather apologize and keep the capital. GHAPE is extremely low on capital right now; they are maxed out for loans and although desperately want to expand, there is just no way. So, needless to say, I would rather apologize and see if Kiva would let us keep the loan and send out a quick email to lenders about the mix up; this happens quite frequently on the site. We refunded the loan, and a couple others instead. After becoming quite frustrated with all the mistakes and amount of money we were having to give back to Kiva because of mistakes, I started talking to Loveline about really double checking your work before sending it in to Kiva and before distributing loans. Loveline tried to argue with me about how they don’t need to and there will always be human error etc; but, the situations I am seeing are preventable. Yes, human error occurs, but we could cut down the errors a huge amount with a bit of effort. After being yelled at for a while, I finally got into the Cameroon, more specifically Loveline way of doing things and started yelling back. I explained that human error was bound to happen, but if she wasn’t willing to put in a bit of effort to cut it back and save GHAPE up to $2000 per month, which is $24,000 a year, what was the point in me spending all this time creating proposals and what not. I told her until I saw the same kind of commitment on her end towards cleaning up their work practices I wouldn’t be doing these extra marketing and fundraising activities for GHAPE; I am not required nor am I technically supposed to be working on their marketing and fundraising. But it is what’s needed most, so I decided to help out after work and at lunch to try to make something happen there. She asked if we could change the subject and continue our work. At the end of the day I asked her if we could agree on some things, she said sure. I said “There is no harm in double checking our work” and without prompting, she just repeated my words in an almost defeated tone. Then we repeated that “We will start double checking all of our work”, and she agreed that what I had said was very true and we would work together to implement a new check list for practices with Kiva loans and loan distributions to avoid losing so much money. All in all, it was a successful day considering how much we lost.
That night was another Dreamland night, the VSO had a buffet to go to, so Kat, Sunde and I ate while we waited for them to come back. It was somewhat awkward when Sunde asked Kat and I to help pay for him to go to University. I haven’t been approached by people begging at all here; but people wanting help to get to America or go to University is very common. Thankfully I don’t have to lie when I say I don’t have any money to pay for those costs.
