I’ve been supporting Kiva’s microlending program since 2011.
My first ‘loan’ was a $25 contribution to a loan to a woman named Maria in Peru1. I think someone gave me a Kiva gift card to get me started.
This morning I received an email saying that one of my loans had ended in default. This has happened a few times over the years, but not as often as you might think.
I usually choose to fund women’s projects, and often they are in countries where opportunities have been few. But the first time someone defaulted in a loan, they were in the United States. The next time, Peru, twice in Kenya, once in Guatemala. All paid back some or most of my portion of the loan.
This time I clicked through to see what had happened, and it turns out the person who took out the loan (to buy a biodigester to heat her family home) has health problems and medical bills and doesn’t have the capacity to repay the loan.
I hope she is not stressed about that. Getting my $25 back will not substantially change my life. I hope she got the biodigester anyway.
Why Am I Writing About This?
Because, after 30 years of living in the USA—which has abandoned the puritanism in so many ways but hangs onto it in matters of ‘needing help’—I have to remind myself that I’m not crazy for genuinely not caring that this woman got to keep money she couldn’t pay back. Her life is so much harder than mine and my $25 was freely given.
The majority culture in the US has petrified into something where everyone is fearful that if you get yours, how will I get mine?
We’re rewatching The Expanse at the moment and in that series–and more so in the books–we spend time in the space-faring Belter culture where ‘the more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful’. They also have a philosophy that, though they all may appear to live on separate ships and stations, in reality they all live on ‘one ship’. Everything is recycled, every ship is repaired regardless of who owns it or the part it needs, because the alternative–when you live in the hard vacuum of space–is too terrible to contemplate.
But the thing is, the writers weren’t being subtle. We DO live on ‘one ship’. We ARE all harmed when one of us is harmed2. And we don’t talk about that enough in this moment in this culture3.
So I’m talking about it, not because I think I’m better than you, but because there is so much noise trying to drown out the basic concepts that got us here:
- Every person is worthy of respect
- Every person should be helped even if they don’t ‘deserve’ it or ‘haven’t earned’ it.
- If I don’t follow that rule, it comes back to bite me and mine–and the inverse is also, happily, true.
- Everything good4 we have achieved as a species comes from times when we cooperated.
So, yeah. A sick woman in Kenya defaulted on the loan.
I just put another $25 into my account and contributed to a loan to a woman in Sierra Leone, who wants to buy supplies for her food stall.
And my bowl is feeling pretty full, right now.
- I chose this project because, when I was in primary school (around age 10/11) my parish supported a parish in Peru and I met some of the nuns who worked there. I felt a connection to the country that lingered. ↩︎
- I seem to remember learning about this dude called Jesus who said something about that… ↩︎
- I know other cultures do, because I’ve lived in them and read about them. In fact, I’m sure the concept of ‘the one ship’ probably comes from a culture that we, in the West, look down upon, even though it is the only way to be decently human. ↩︎
- and sometimes bad. But Margaret Mead’s assertion that the first signs, in archaeology, of civilization is a healed femur (because it indicates that the society valued its members enough to tend to them even when not productive) stands. And yes, there are ‘helper behaviours’ in other animals too, so we’re not necessarily unique. I still think hospitals and tax-payer-funded health care systems and social safety nets applied without purity tests, are pretty good indicators that humans can be pretty damned civilized when they decide to be… ↩︎