Another day, another meeting

Good Morning!

Once again, I woke up with the plan to go to a few more meetings. These were the usual bi-weekly meetings where the loan officer heads out and collects the payments. Each loan with Esperanza lasts 6 months and consists of 12 payments, thus every 14 days the associates (as Esperanza calls them) must meet and make their payments. The payments include interest and a required amount for savings and if they want, they can choose to save extra. Today was a bit different, as I went out with Robert again on his bike. Only this time we headed pretty far out of the city up the side of the mountain. It was fine until at one point Robert slows down and turns onto this.. lets call it a clearing. It wasn´t even really a dirt road what with all the rocks strewn across it. It did a little dance with a river flowing down the side of the mountain as the two criss-crossed each other over and over again as they wound down the mountain. Unfortunately, we had to go up first, and it took us a good 15 minutes to get to the meeting which was probably only a half mile up the mountain. We had to stop 3 or 4 times because either the bike lost grip on the muddy bank or it was just safer for me to cross the river over rocks than on the back of Robert´s bike. We were stopped at one point because the bank of the river was too narrow for us and 25 cows to both pass thorough, but needless to say we eventually got to our destination. There, about 5 women were working on sewing children's dresses. Slowly but surely (we got there about 20 minutes early) the rest of the members showed up, 19 in all. Only one was missing, which is quite impressive for this area, seeing as how tough it is to get around (they all came to the meeting by foot) and for the group size. I have been to meetings in apartment complexes, where the most anyone walks is two flights of stairs, where all but 5 of 15 members don´t show.

The meeting went well, I got my two interviews done, and once we were finished we were off to another meeting where I did one more interview. We came back to the office where I worked on a few loose ends for past stories (for the first week I screwed up some of the interviews, like forgetting my camera or not writing down which loan I was interviewing for and now I am trying to fix that all...) and then headed off for lunch. Now, I will write the three stories I got today, do a few more loose ends and then prepare for tomorrow. Below are photos from the day.

The road we drove on

Women sewing dresses