Saturday, November 22, 2008

I have a Friend... A Kiva Friend...

I have a Kiva Friend. I have a lot of Kiva Friends from Germany and England and Australia and even here in Canada. A lot of my Kiva Friends live in the US and one of them goes by the name of Wood Fairy Glenda - at least - that's what she calls herself on my favourite forum KivaFriends.org.
She just shared with us a link to a newsletter published by a group she belongs to called Wisconsin Trails. The article Giving Big on the Micro Scale tells the story of micro-credit with Kiva and has some wonderful interviews with 4 ordinary people who are making this a better world to live in.

"Thirty-eight-year-old single mother, Jessica Wisdom, wants nothing more than to teach her four-year-old son that the world is far larger than their Watertown backyard."

"Glenda Denniston, 68-year-old Madison widow is relentless in her pursuit of world experience, of volunteerism. She is not rich, but she travels the globe on service trips every chance she gets—often more than once a year. As you read these words, Denniston is building latrines in Nicaragua through El Porvenir (an organization similar to Habitat for Humanity)."

"Stewart Bass, age 14,... for then-12-year-old Stewart Bass, it all began with the movie Pay it Forward in Sunday school. After the viewing, the teacher gave each of his students $20 with the caveat that they pass the money on to strangers, no strings attached.
“I didn’t know who to give it to,” says Stewart. “That’s when my dad told me about Kiva.”"

Huron Smith. age 65... says "“I’m a citizen of the world,” he continues. “I’m a human being. We’re divided by national boundaries, of course, but why not pick some other division? Why not say, well, why would you loan to a woman, you should just loan to men? The thing is, we’re all in this together. Their pain is my pain, just as if it were in my own country.”"

Please read the whole article. These excerpts do not tell the whole story.

I too am very concious of the fact that I lucked out in the birth lottery - that I could have been born in Africa, or Afghanistan, or Cambodia, or Indonesia, or Guatemala, or Peru or, or, or...

Give Thanks, and lend through Kiva to share your good fortune...
later man, jan

edit: Glenda says it is a shame they cropped her photo because it doesn't show her holding her Kiva piggybank.

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