I joined Kiva yesterday, and I'm excited. It's sort of like Opportunity International's micro-financing meets World Vision's sponsor-a-child. I loaned a few dollars to a group of entrepreneurs in Cambodia, who will be paying me back over the next eleven months. It was started by some people who wanted to fight poverty by empowering business-owners in developing countries, but who were having trouble funding the process. Their idea: get lots of people involved with small person-to-person loans. I'll be getting updates on how these businesses in which I've invested are doing, and--since it's a loan--it eliminates the worry that I'm undermining anyone's self-sufficiency by giving them handouts. I get to fight poverty with the abundant resources God has given me, by helping people help themselves. I'm an investor, not a donor. I like that. It seems less patronizing somehow.
Anyway, it's cool. You should check it out.
I think it could get addicting.
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"He gave me no assurance. No fixed land. Always one must throw oneself into the wave."
"Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? ... Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Prison Poems")
"He gave me no assurance. No fixed land. Always one must throw oneself into the wave."
"Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? ... Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Prison Poems")
This week I give God a cheer for:
parchment paper, chalkboard paint, free museum weekends, public transportation, online cultural resources, free apps to help you learn non-roman scripts, science experiments, cast iron dutch ovens, cast iron dutch oven lids which double as a skillets, power drills, gallery walls, taco nights with friends, vegetarian cookbooks, apples on sale, the way flowers brighten a room, new curtains, globes, Friday night outings, engineering paper, movie-makers not destroying my favorite book, movie-makers creating something beautiful based on my favorite book, theater pubs, Gutenberg, sunny-yet-freezing weather, new dishtowels, hand-thrown pottery, the golden ratio, secondhand stores, stained glass, and the word "kerfuffle," among other things.
1 comment:
This sounds very interesting! As you may have seen in the Giving Wisely book, it's very difficult to arrange a way for our vast Western resources to not destroy initiative and self-sufficiency in the culture we are trying to help. (E.g. what would happen to giving in our church if Bill Gates joined and started tithing to the church. That's precisely what happens when we dump large sums of money on foreign missions.)
Kiva could be a great way to make resources available, but without killing local initiative.
I have not heard of Kiva before. I assume it is endorsed by some organization I would recognize?
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