Josh Weinstein
As part of my Kiva Fellowship, I am creating an official blog. Please continue to follow my posts at this new blog. I will continue writing for The Inductive. Thanks for your support.
http://joshweinstein.wordpress.com
A road in Pontevedr
See the original here at the Kiva Fellows blog.
I spent the last three days in "the field," a term used to describe the front lines of microfinance where the money is distributed to the clients of the banks. Beginning early Tuesday morning, I set out for the town of Valladolid, a rural municipality about 50 km from Bacolod City. The road snakes along the coast through increasingly less urban communities, until reaching Pontevedra, where the NWTF (Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation) Valladolid branch is located. Linda, the branch manager and former loan officer, took me to see the first of 15 borrowers we would try to track down over the course of the three-day trip (with a 67% success rate). Riding in the metal grates on the back of a tricycle, where I'd spend most of my trip, we rode to small village called a barangay to interview several women about their business and loan. The community here is small, and stopping for directions usually produced a guide that brought us directly to the home of the borrower. Home constructions vary from 2-3 room bamboo nipa huts, to shanties with roofs of corrugated aluminum and floors of dirt, to cement frames with electricity, running water, and decorations on the walls. Over the course of the week, I'd see all types represented. Housing loans are popular among borrowers, and many homes have been built with loans from NWTF.
Here in Bacolod City, and the rest of the Philippines for that matter, traffic laws are non-existent. There seem to be no rules governing how you act behind the wheel – only that the horn is your friend, and is especially useful for letting the other guy know that you don’t intend to stop. Last night, I went swimming with one of my coworkers and her mother at a resort in town (with an Olympic size pool, complete with a water slide, 30-foot statue of a giraffe and an elephant, and a zoo with an old crocodile that, according to my host, may or may not be dead). On the way to the pool, we narrowly escaped a few accidents. When Beth, the mother of my coworker, Liz, unsuccessfully tried to pass a jeepney with a bus barreling down the other lane, she shrugged it off. “Whoops – almost didn’t make it,” she laughed. When I relayed the fitting description the owner of a bike shop in town used to describe the traffic patterns here – “organized chaos” – she and Liz laughed again (Filipinos like to laugh, particularly here in the city of smiles). “That may be, but everyone knows the rules here.” And, as far as I can tell, it seems to be true. When you drive here in Bacolod, honk your horn when you come to an intersection. If you get there first, or see even a slight opening, go for it. Drivers here are masters of the quick brake, mostly out of necessity. Later that night, we missed hitting a family (husband, wife, and kid) by a few feet. Who is at fault is inconsequential. It is OTSS at work, favoring several obvious traits – quick reflexes, heavy foot on the brake, heavy hand on the horn, and, what one conspiracy-theorist expat I met at a casino in Argentina called, some huevos. Pedestrians are equally vigilant, and just as intrepid. When you see your opening, go for it, but remember that the drivers will never, ever stop for you. Frankly, I don’t understand how the bodies aren’t piling up, but maybe my new friends have a point. If the individual understands the system (or lack thereof), then everyone benefits. For example, people here don’t really text while they drive, because it’s a death sentence. The system works, as long as everyone understands and plays by these anti-rules.
The motivations for travel on a Trans-Pacific flight run vary more than your average domestic flight. Businessmen hammering out last-minute presentations to their Chinese counterparts to your left; a sex tourist that looks, talks, and thinks like a sex tourist to your right. And you, physically in the middle, but not necessarily anywhere along the same spectrum or plane. The sex tourist and small business owner from southern Indiana sitting next to me is 48 and right now is en route to Bangkok to meet up with 25 year-old Filipino girl with a 6-year old daughter he met on filipinoheart.com. When she was 19, she met up with a 50 year-old American who, according to my neighbor, "knocked her up, denied the baby was his, and called her a slut." He left the country, leaving her with a newborn baby to raise on her own. Now the sex tourist is heading over there for a week of fun in the sun and a proverbial test run, figuring out whether a) she is the one, and b) whether she is currently married, which means an extra $5,000 for an annulment to get her to the US. The fact that she has a 6 year-old doesn't seem to bother him. I might be giving him too much credit, and maybe he has no intention of bringing her back at all. But she certainly seems to think so. According to the guy, she's just looking for someone to love her ("they all are"). The good thing for her is that the sex tourist to my left actually seems genuine about bringing at least one of these girls back - his two buddies already have Filipino wives from previous flings.
The best use of a personal blog is to present a little bit of your background, what led you to this point, and where you are headed. I graduated from college in 2006 with Joe and Chris, and together created The Inductive as a means of contributing our voices to the global dialogue. It has had the added benefit of being an excellent way of keeping in touch. So, if your friends live in different places around the world, my advice is to start a website.
In December of 2009, I'm heading to the Philippines as a Kiva Fellow and will be working with a microfinance institution called Negros Women For Tomorrow. Founded in 2005 and based in San Francisco, Kiva is a P2P lending platform that allows individuals across the world to invest in entrepreneurs in developing countries, providing microloans to help start a new business or grow an existing one. Kiva is the first organization to truly harness the ubiquity and community-building power of the Internet to both raise money and draw attention to the burgeoning field of microfinance. While it has existed for decades, microfinance has experienced a surge in growth and academic interest over the last few years, in no small part due to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus in 2006. As I type, Kiva is nearing $100 million in loans distributed - a tremendous feat when you consider the relative youth of the organization. Kiva harnesses our hunger to participate in global development and the fight against pover by offering an innovative solution that utililizes all of the best parts of capitalism, technology, and globalization. Organizations like Kiva and its partner institutions (MFIs) have the capacity to improve the lives of billions of people. Needless to say, I am excited about becoming a part of such an incredible organization.
In my spare time, I'll be traveling the world, trying to see as much of it as I can and, God willing, dutifully reporting my findings back to you, the reader, as I uncover its secrets. I hope we all enjoy ourselves.
Josh is a visionary renaissance man forming the spiritual backbone of The Inductive, contributing the structure and architecture of this website, and also, more sporadically, content in the form of articles and the occassional blog post. He is reasonably well-traveled, though not nearly enough to satiate his desire to see Mother Earth and understand the ways of all of her peoples. In his spare time, he reads magazines in an effort to arm himself to the teeth with the weapons of knowledge in preparation for the battles of debate. His favorite album is Aja by Steely Dan, followed closely by Labcabincalifornia by The Pharcyde. This photo was taken while standing on a tank at a military base in Josh's homeland of Israel in 2006.
Joshua Weinstein