About a year ago, Dave and I loaned $25 to a woman in Azerbaijan so she could get her retail store off the ground. We did it through a website: www.kiva.org
Our profile/lending page can be seen here:
http://www.kiva.org/lender/schlaws
The reason I'm 'blogging' about it is because we recently had our loan fully repaid! I wasn't sure if that was going to happen - you never know these days. Now I have 100% faith in this website, and I encourage you to take a look at the people you can lend to, just to see if it's something you'd be interested in! I love that I can give my money directly to a person in another country to help them out, rather than donating to some organization that supposedly spreads the money around to those who need it. The coolest thing is that you can read the background story of each person requesting a loan, and in doing so, can find someone who really pulls at your heartstrings and loan to them!
To continue the story, we took our repaid $25 and loaned it to a 22 year-old woman in Peru so she can expand her general store. So cool!
2016 Here I Come!
10 years ago
3 comments:
I've heard about this organization on Oprah a while back and thought it sounded great. I'm glad you've had a good experience with it. I think I'll look into it! This sounds like a REALLY good cause.
Yeah, I heard about it on Oprah, too, and that's why we did it the first time. I have since given it as gift certificates to people, and am obviously doing it again. I think it's SO great!! I love when they actually build up the money and get the loan...then for the next year (or however long it takes for them to pay it back) I dream about what they are doing with the money. And each month or quarter or so, I get email updates about how they are paying back the loan and how they are doing etc etc. I love that!
That is SO cool! I haven't heard of this organization. I'm glad you had a good experience with them as well, cuz like you said, you just never know sometimes. Thanks for the info--it'll be one to do in the near future with the family.
One that we've done with the boys is www.heifer.org where you can buy livestock for families so they can feed their family and earn a living as well. As part of the program, once a family is given an animal, they then give to other families some of the animal's offspring. The boys loved picking out what animal they were going to buy and talked about it for months.
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