Monday

We would visit every women’s group once a week to see how they were doing, to collect their loan repayments and sometimes give them business training. The Monday group lived close to a river. They had been having a problem with one of the women in the group. She didn’t show up to the meetings we had with them, so she hadn’t been given any training. But just when we discussed her, she showed up, so the group decided to support her, but with the same loan amount as last time, they later changed their minds and said she could get a bigger loan. They wanted to finish their loan early, so that they could begin with a new one. Before they received a new loan we went over their loan application with them and listened to what they wanted to do with the money. There are only four women left in the group as the previous members were not good at paying on time and coming to the meetings.

                      One of the women had asked us to find a price for a scale, but then she changed her mind and said she wanted to buy sardines instead, this means that it sometimes were a bit difficult to be sure they invested in what they put in their applications. We visited the same woman’s shop and she had a lot of space left for stock, at one point a woman came in asking for soap, there wasn’t anything left, but a phone call and ten minutes later a guy comes by with a box full of soap. Most of the women seem to benefit a great deal from the loans.