First Half Week 2

FIRST DAY OF WORK

The CEO and Global Operations guy were here from Utah so they trained both the Manila branches with some leadership stuff. After we had our orientation and everything. Sorry my first two sentences were far from gripping or exciting but it was a good day. I am writing this while waiting for my yoga to load so I am probably being a little impatient and not all the way there. I should do yoga before I write. Actually you really should do yoga before everything in life. Back to the day, it was a lot of orientation and trying to understand how things work around here. The Filipinos love to tease each other. Imagine a bunch of 30 years olds in a room with their CEO and bosses laughing and ooing and awing when someone mentioned in a story/comment, during a leadership training, that they went to a store with one of their co-workers. They are hilarious. They like to tease us a little bit too. I am the baby or youngest but I can't remember the Tagalog word for it right now. 

FIRST DAY IN THE FIELD

A little bit of culture shock. I went with David and Mentor Bennie to a slum and two center meetings. A lot of the day was in Tagalog which can be frustrating but luckily David (who served an LDS mission in the Philippines) would fill me in with the jist of what was going on. For the next week we are just going to meet clients and get some exposure to the groups. The grameen groups can be frustrating because sometimes they aren't necessarily women who want to grow or really succeed. I think some of that can be fixed with the loan qualification process but that can be hard when you are competing with hundreds of other lending organizations. After asking them all questions I have learned that most of them are loan dependent and have been with mentors for 10+ years. Not a good sign.

One of the groups we visited was really in the slums. Pretty dang poor. Lots of people stacked on top of each other in little shacks. A lot of poop on the roads and these really freaky/sad looking dogs everywhere. This group is having a lot of problems and a lot of the loans are in default. We hung out waiting for the meeting to start at a women's house whose daughter died ten years ago when she was sick with cancer at age 6. For Christmas in 2013 her brother gave her his daughter because she was still in a rut. Her name was Aieesha or Yaya for a nickname. All the little kids love us. And when I can't speak well I just play with them a lot. We visited clients with small "sorry sorry" stores (little stores in the front of their house that sell toys, candy, gum, soap, etc.) and tried to collect some in default but they usually send their kids to the door. The boys say it feels exactly like their missions haha 

MICROFINANCING BACKGROUND

I still don't have it perfect. For more info definitely look up stuff by Muhammad Unis, the father of micro finance. His findings are the basis for these group or centers I am talking about. It is called grameen lending. A group of 40-50 women is called a center. From there they are split into 4 groups. Each group has a leader. Then, the leaders vote which one will be the center chief. They hold each other responsible for the small loans and discuss problems in the group and try to help each other. The other type of loans mentors does is called ILP. These individual loans are often much larger and given to more sustainable businesses. They have really proved they want to be successful. In two weeks I get to start meeting and mentoring with them which I am really excited about. In my opinion, these people have more influence in the economy and really have potential to increase there quality of life even if they are already doing alright. The women in the groups are often nervous to speak English, the Philippines call this "nosebleed" and use that term a lot.  

NANAY

Nanay means mother and ours is the best. You call all older women Nanay. I say it to all the women in the groups because sometimes I can not understand or remember names. Our Nanay is a pretty good cook. This morning (Thursday) was the first morning we didn't have rice. We love the chicken curry. But I am craving a good chicken breast. Here, you just try and nibble a few pieces off the bones. She cleaned my roomed today but loves to always rearrange the furniture in our rooms and the apartment. It is pretty funny. It is sad she feels inferior to us. It is a little crowded but we started pulling up a chair for her at our meals even though she was hesitant and denied us at first. The only hard thing about the food is it is a lot of rice and bread because meat and vegetables are more expensive, even though we do have them at meals there is just not always a lot of them. I also always want to try the new things and the "dirty icecream" or street ice cream is 15 pesos. 

I am going to switch things up, instead of sending a big email I will do multiple short ones with little snippets and stories. So this is only the first half of my week. Love you!!!