I think I first heard about microcredit way back in 1992, when the Independent on Sunday featured an unknown Bangladeshi called Muhammad Yunus and his work giving small loans to groups of women who were too poor to access the kinds of livelihood opportunities and risk management tools that financial services provide to those who have some capital in the first place (women are agreed to be less likely to default on loans than men). Since then, he and the bank he founded have won the Nobel Peace Prize (more deserving than Obama) and microfinance organisations have proliferated worldwide.
In a British pub last week I met a couple of women who work for Kiva, an organisation that connects people through the internet for the sake of alleviating poverty. The idea is that individuals like (you and) me can use the website to check out the profiles of an entrepreneur or group of them and choose who to lend money to so that they can achieve their stated goals. Your money is paid back over 6-12 months and you get updates on the entrepreneur(s) you loaned money to. Oh, and with the Cynthia and Sheethal, I won the pub quiz (again – I am now 4 for 4).
I loaned money to a group called Emprendedores De Sicuani. They are in a town an hour or so away from where we are staying and the group is represented by Mrs. Miguela Camacuari and consists of 11 members, who are into things as diverse as food sales, cosmetic sales, natural products, clothing sales, and tailor services. They are requesting financing for the acquisition of merchandise, and goods that will allow them to generate greater incomes.
I lent them twenty-five dollars. They still need some loans to complete the amount they need. You could go to kiva.org and lend to them or to another group or individual. Kiva works all around the world, not just in South America, so you can pick a country you have an affinity with, if you choose. Alternatively, if you are a bit sceptical, check back with me or my blog in the future for updates about my repayments.
Since we arrived in South America, I have been making a bit of an effort to familiarise myself with some of the music here, though I am not talking about salsa or tango. My favourite song to date is the Argentinian Leon Gieco`s protest song "Solo le pido a dios" and I am getting into his compatriot, Charly Garcia. Unfortunately, there seems to be a tendency for Peruvian singers to meet an untimely death while we are in their country: Alicia Delgado was murdered the same day that the last piece of that ex-African American singer, dancer and pedophile died, and Julio Barreto was murdered a couple of weeks after that. A week or so ago, Zambo Cabero died too. Before that, at the beginning of October, the Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa passed away (she does a great cover version of "Solo le pido a dios"). Today though, we bumped into a very much alive Leo Dan, an Argentinian crooner from the seventies and I have a souvenir picture to show for it.
Since the two home defeats mentioned in my last footballing entry, Watford have redeemed themselves with victories away at Middlesborough and home to Sheffield Wednesday, as well as stealing a point with a 93rd minute goal at yet-to-win Ipswich.
Manchester United`s Tom Cleverley got the winner at the Riverside whilst Arsenal`s Henri Lansbury scored two as we found home form at last, beating the Owls 4-1 on Friday. Entrusted with some of the G4`s youthful talent (we also have Craig Catchcart from Man U™), we seem to be thriving in the season we sold all our best players. Now we have news that Sir Elton will play another concert at Vicarage Road, this time to raise money for us to actually BUY some players rather than survive on loans.
The next match – and the last before my birthday and the inevitable “life begins” messages – is away at West Brom. I would take even one point from the Hawthorns as an early birthday present, whether or not any goals are scored by someone borrowed.
Does he deserve an award? Yes. Does he deserve this award? Arguably. Does he deserve this award this year? No. Morgan Tsvangirai is surely more deserving. In the face of incredible provocation and violence, he acted heroically. Though sharing power with Mugabe may have been criticised by many, as Gandhi said: “There is no way to peace, peace is the way”. Tsvangirai, who this year lost his wife in what may or may not have been an accident, more obviously embodies this sentiment than does the unproven Obama.
We walked to La Senda Verde (which we had heard about from a guy called Zac in Samaipata) from Coroico, which took between an hour and a half and two hours, what with me stopping for the odd picture. When we got there we were shown around the pool area where most of the monkeys live by Rob, one of the volunteers, and the bird and other enclosures by Holly and Jessy.
We committed ourselves to two weeks of volunteering and came down 48 hours later. We were taken through the procedure with the birds – macaws, parrots and conures to name the most colourful – and it seemed very straightforward. Of note was a macaw called “Primavera”, who pulled out his own head feathers in some act of rebellion against conventional notions of beauty that he was not able fully to articulate. It was like punk all over again. All of the birds are fed fruit and vegetables for breakfast and dinner, with seed for lunch; dry pasta can be included in each of their meals. Most of them are free to fly anywhere but hang around for the food. Ducks, guinea fowl and a noble cock make a significant floor-dwelling feathered presence.
I spent most of the time after my first day with the monkeys (see previous blog entry) but Jun stayed with the birds and “miscellaneous” for her duration. The latter was everything which was not a monkey or a bird, so she fed the cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, turtles and tortoises and the bear as part of a team. (The coati – or snookum bears – were left to find their own food.) With the exception of the cats, each of these animals had a living space that needed cleaning daily too. In that way, Jun probably dealt with three to four times as many animals as I did, and all alone once Rob and Sarah, Holly and Jessy had left.
While the other volunteers were still there (they arrived a week before us so left a week earlier) we had a few quiz nights based on information from the QI Animal Ignorance book that I originally borrowed from a Brisbane library and then ordered on Amazon and asked Julie to bring out. Jessy was a big fan but it was Rob who shocked us all by guessing the animal correctly from only this information: “When George Shaw made the first written description of [this animal] in 1799...” Do you know the answer?
As well as caring for such a great variety of animals and playing silly guessing games on a few occasions, the La Senda Verde experience was bolstered by the opportunity to see a few of the local birds and butterflies in their natural settings. Vultures flew overhead but I had already captured them and the crested oropendola on my Nikon (though I only identified the latter in La Senda Verde`s owner`s animal encyclopedia). My holy grail was the very large blue butterly which was quite common to see but hard to photograph as it rarely seemed to settle within sight. I did capture an image on the last day but the animal itself was damaged and the pic not the best. A tiny blip that doesn`t register. Ah, good days.
If you are one of those nutters who takes the word of the vicious Old Testament literally, you will believe that in the Garden of Eden there was no death. Kentucky`s Creation Musuem shows vegetarian dinosaurs alongside Adam and Eve as a way of fitting real knowledge into a mythical setting but at La Senda Verde, I was reminded of this paradisical state as dogs, cats and birds waited together outside the food preparation room every morning to receive their breakfast.
The other likely visitors were the squirrel monkeys – Jimmy and Elvis - who would launch themselves out of a tree at you in their version of foraging. My main responsibility as a volunteer at the animal refuge was another species, the capuchin monkeys, which were at the other end of the land divided between two rivers (and now bordered on one side by a disastrous gold-mining project that the locals are organising against). At 8 every day I fed them porridge prepared by the owners (Vicki and Marcelo), had my own breakfast at 9, cleaned the capuchin tables and houses at 10, fed them a mostly-fruit lunch at 12 and then a mostly-vegetable dinner at 5. In addition, I usually fed the spectacled bear (Aruma) and cleaned his compound twice a day.
The animals are all rescued, normally from abuse, poaching or orphanship. The young capuchin were untethered and playful though one – Kimbo – tended towards the cry-baby side too. Then there were 8 adult capuchin; Naranja, Luna and Sereza were timid females who tended to avoid eye contact with me, Danny and Martin were males who I could interact with, while Mirka was a one-eyed female who took to me immediately. My favourite is a toss-up between Mirka and shoelace and button undoing Martin, though the best moment was when Luna groomed me. The other 2 adults were Ciruelo, the alpha-male, who escaped early in our stay but returned on more than one occasion and was eventually drugged and re-tethered. He went for me more than once without success yet was friendly enough when it came to feeding time. The other male was Pekos, the only caged monkey, who had escaped once and severed a previous volunteer`s tendon, apparently.
Feeding him consisted in a safety-first process something akin to the part in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter goes through a routine supervised by two (later cannibalised) policemen.
There were three other species of monkey. The 5 spider monkeys utilised the whole of the refuge, one rushing into our cabaña while I was still in bed one morning and sitting with me briefly before leaving again. That was Zambo, who is the largest male and somewhat excitable: he frightened young visitors a few times. He habitually sat in great poses though and he was my favourite of this group, though the younger ones were predictably cuter. There were two owl-monkeys which (as the name implies) were nocturnal and therefore we did not have much to do with them. Finally, there were two red howlers, one of which was a baby which arrived just before us and clung on to the other (older but not yet mature female) who tolerated it for a few days and then left, not to return while we were there.
The work was hard after the other volunteers left, though more of it fell on Jun, but there were great rewards in the relationship with the other primates. If you ever find yourself in Bolivia with time to volunteer for a worthy cause, La Senda Verde comes highly recommended by this apeman.
On our first day`s walk in Coroico, we saw tens of what I later found out were turkey vultures and black-headed vultures. Although in their scavenger role they share many traits, I learned that there is some debate as to how similar they (or any of the seven species of New World vultures) are to Old World vultures. The similarities may be more to do with convergent evolution than taxonomy but time will tell whether the birds we saw hopping ungracefully and soaring magestically are more closely related to other vultures or to storks.
Some things that are known are that as well as reguritating to feed their young, they also vomit as a defence mechanism. The half-digested carrion will sting if a potential predator gets close enough. Alternatively, getting rid of a heavy meal will provide the vulture with the lift it requires to make a speedy escape should the need arise. Another charming fact is that these vultures piss or shit on their own legs in order to cool themselves down.
I touched on the subject two years ago but after blogging about football for the first time in four months and subsequently (I was tempted to use the word "consequently") seeing the Horns go down to two home defeats in four days, I could not keep the nagging superstitious idea out of my head that somehow my actions had precipitated this downturn in our fortunes. As someone who finds it hard to understand reflective religious belief, I simply shake my head indulgently at my own hypocrisy.
