Wandering Shepard: Biz Na$ty

So I’ve spoken a little bit to the day to day happenings of Niquinohomo, but I’ve neglected to mention exactly what I’m doing in my 11 weeks here. Aside from language training, there’s also technical training for the small business sides of things here. For those of you that don’t know, my soon-to-be official title is Business Educator and Advisor (with a lot more emphasis on educator from what I hear). But right now I’m just un aspirante, or trainee. In order to become a full on Volunteer, I have four goals I need to accomplish during training:

1) Cultural Integration

2) Community Bank

3) Youth Group

4) Teach 3 Emprendedurismo classes

Cultural integration is pretty straight forward: can you successfully integrate into your community.

Goal 2, the community bank is a pretty interesting concept. It’s astonishing to me, but there is no concept of saving money down here, be it for a future vacation or an emergency. People just live off what they have, not thinking about tomorrow. It’s also incredibly difficult to get loans from the bank in Nicaragua. The combination of these two factors, as well as a couple others makes it very difficult for entrepreneurs to gain enough capital to start any sort of business. This is where the community bank comes in. This is an informal group of community members, preferably of the same tax bracket/income. Each week, or whatever period they choose, they put a set quota into the community bank. Everyone puts in the same amount each week, to pool their money together. The pooled money steadily grows with each period, allowing each member access to more and more money for any small business ventures. Only members are allowed to withdraw money, but like any bank, there is an interest on any loan. Although you’re “paying” interest, that money evenly divided amongst all members. The rate of defaulting on loans is extremely low, because the threat of social persecution is worse than anything an actual bank can do. After all, if you don’t pay off your loan, you’re causing your neighbor to lose money. And the return rate on these banks is very high, I think the number is 45% or something ridiculous. The banks have an end date, and the cycle begins again, to prevent the banks from getting to big for locals to manage. So to get use to the process, all the business aspirantes have created a bank ourselves. As of a last week, Bank BizNa$ty 56 is open for business.

I don’t want to bore you all with the details so it’s a little condensed, and I’ll save the other goals for another time. Email me if you want to know more. But just in case you think its all work and no play, here are a couple of photo’s that prove otherwise. We’ve started to feel comfortable and do a little exploring, and this is at the Mirador in Catarina, with the Lago de Apoyo in the background.