Chris Laurent worked for 14 years in the financial sector before volunteering with FSD's ProCorps program for 12 weeks outside of Cochabamba, Bolivia. His work supported the operational development of a struggling microfinance institution that supported rural farmers. Through his experience in Bolivia, Chris returned to the United States and began a new career in international microfinance. Below is an excerpt about his experience with FSD.

Overwhelming Poverty

In substantially all of Bolivia’s rural, desert, mountainous, farming communities, the demand for action on social and economic development issues is immediate, plentiful, and devastatingly basic, and yet the supplies of substantive, noticeable progress and hope are lacking and pitiful. Although only 60 miles east of the city of Cochabamba, the drive over muddy, dried-river-bed, pothole-filled, dirt “roads” to the three provinces I served – Carrasco, Tiraque and Arani – takes three hours. The Bolivian government cites poverty incidence rates of roughly 64% for the country (compared to 12% for the U.S.), 45% for the city of Cochabamba, and 96% for these three provinces.

The only outsiders to these communities are the electricity bill collector and a lonely microcredit loan officer. There is no electricity, potable water, toilets, or running water in half the homes. No hot water. No heat. No trash processing. Homes consist of adobe-walled, straw-roofed homes without windows, floors, lights, or insulation. No refrigerators or freezers. No TVs or technology, including phones, cell phones, computers or computer access. No mail. No banks or ATMs. No grocery stores.

The windows of opportunity for empowering action are plentiful, yet my context and perspective were shaped through my three months in these three provinces as a volunteer in microcredit with a tiny microfinance institution called PDAI. Twenty-four years ago the NGO Asociación Programa de Desarrollo Agropecuario Integrado (“PDAI”) set out a “mission” to empower and develop these three, remote, underserved, impoverished farming provinces by offering (i) on-site microcredit loans and other financial services, (ii) agricultural consulting services, and (iii) localized consortium pricing and transportation services for buying supplies and selling product economically.

Like all of the major banking institutions in the last twenty years with similar visions, PDAI has almost completely aborted all aspects of their original mission in order to remain fiscally afloat. Crop growing conditions, market pricing, and customer availability pose major challenges for financial institutions trying to offer capital to rural communities. The result is that hundreds of communities across Bolivia exist without access to financial and support services that are crucial to climbing out of poverty.

Over the last 24 years, PDAI is finally experiencing breakeven operations. However, they were forced to shift over 80% of their loans away from the below poverty-level rural farmer to the at-or-above poverty-level, peri-urban microentrepreneurs in Cochabamba -- a significantly better credit, accountable, and educated borrower. Worse, the 20% rural customer base they do serve are known families and not those most poor or desperate. PDAI’s collections rates reflect this risk disparity, collecting 85-90% of peri-urban loans and only 40-45% of rural loans. Struggling to keep afloat due to extremely low cash reserves, PDAI’s natural, survival-driven operations are often short-sighted, understaffed, and inefficient.

Seeing firsthand, the abandonment of rural communities, I collaborated with PDAI to revive their original mission and to assist them in achieving sustainable and efficient operations by providing in-depth operational, financial, and strategic consultations and detailed recommendations to the PDAI GM and Board of Directors.

A Day in the Life of a Rural Loan Officer

One day, a PDAI loan officer and I visited a delinquent PDAI borrower, who was in their high hilltop fields harvesting potatoes. In that single encounter, I came face-to-face with their plight:

Taking us probably an hour and a half along a desolate, pothole-filled, dried riverbed-crossing, dirt “road”, we arrived in the rickety, shock absorber-less PDAI 4x4 at the base of an impassable half-mile path uphill to the home of a PDAI borrower. Two other PDAI borrowers supposedly lived in some of the adobe and straw homes along that route that morning, but each looked to be abandoned. So, in the scorching sun, we walked up to another house, and found no one again. We then walked toward the hilltop potato fields another half-mile above us and saw a group of 20 people harvesting the dry land.

We shared the rocky path up to the desolate fields with four emaciated donkeys laden with 100kg (220lb) bags of potatoes. On the hilltop, we saw the woman of the house sitting in the dirt sorting potatoes, her husband sewing the bags, their four children and ten neighbors scattered all over the hill harvesting the potatoes, and five other neighbors loading and securing the bags of potatoes to the feeble donkeys. This labor arrangement has been common for Incan communities for over a thousand years whereby equipment and labor is shared between farms to optimize resource usage.

In Quechua, they greeted us familiarly when we arrived and then proceeded to talk of the harvest and their outstanding loan. Tensions quickly mounted as they discussed the loan balance and accrued interest. The loan officer calmly attempted to display his loan spreadsheets, but the family could not read. The loan officer then attempted to teach the concept of interest by grabbing a stick and drawing the numbers and showing the math in the sand, but the family could not add or multiply. The mother then called her 8-year-old daughter down from the hill to read the spreadsheet and verify the math, but the daughter shrugged, fearing the consequences of her mother’s visible anger.

The mother eventually understood that her original $500 loan (at 20 percent interest) had grown to $750 because of 2.5 years without payment. She began to weep uncontrollably. She had $250 (from her side artisan trade) to pay down the loan, but the remaining balance would keep growing in interest. She probably couldn’t even remember how the original $500 was spent, now so far removed from the family’s original intent and plan. A lifetime had passed for them in that two and a half years of struggle with the land. All that remained in the moment was a sense that we, the rich, the loan officer and I, were stealing from them, the poor.

Still in tears and now completely broke, she ordered her daughter to go down to the house and return with chicha (a homemade, pungent corn alcohol), coca-cola (a treat there) and soup for us in a customary Incan gesture of friendship, welcome, and appreciation. Quietly, we stood, shared, and enjoyed our gifts and then we parted for the mile walk downhill to the red 4x4. Arriving at the PDAI field house five or six hours after beginning, we returned sun-burned, sweaty, and dirty, yet nourished and $250 richer. A day’s work?! Mission accomplished?! Physically sated, I felt horrible and drained. My soul ached...

One day we found a different borrower who wanted to repay his loan, and in the process was so proud that he wanted to welcome us with food and a gesture. One of his six children – a 4-year-old girl pulled from the field and dressed up for the occasion – came up to me with a bowl of the traditional soup – sopa de mani – and handed me a small conch shell. A 1,000+-year-old, indigenous gesture still only common in the Andes...

From the PDAI main office in Cochabamba, I have frequent experiences of rural PDAI borrowers making the substantial pilgrimage to pay off old loans, or to tell their personal stories with tears in their eyes - nervous sweat on their foreheads, dirty, ripped, smelly clothes on their backs. Uncovered, cracked dry feet, sun-scorched, leathery skin on their arms and faces, and foreign, mumbled Quechan words on their lips. Unable to read or speak Spanish. “How can this exist?” I would always ask myself...

Changing Lives

When I returned home to the United States, the impact of my experience was always with me. I couldn't leave it behind, tucked away as a romantic adventure to save the world. A new path was quickly unveiling itself - one of clear purpose and direction. A few months before I began my new career in microfinance, I wrote these words to myself and my community as a reminder:

Beyond all this, examine your life and take action in your life according to your fundamental values! Doing so breeds life, love, dignity, energy, hope, and peace. Doing so leaves you forever changed and forever richer and forever at peace in the knowledge of your effort. Not doing so festers a slow death. There are almost no people in need that do not deserve the attempt of well-intended, well-crafted assistance. Sadly, there is no shortage of people with shrouded dignity in need of empowerment, support and love in the world. Fortunately, there are many tools and methods to provide that empowerment, support, and love. Various means are better and more effective and efficient than others, and various means call to some people and not to others, but they are all answering the cry of our interrelatedness and interdependence.

The only wrong mean exists in sitting on the sidelines - not acting or answering that cry, either out of lame excuses, option paralysis, or hopelessness. Waiting for the world’s experts to convene and unitarily declare the perfect solution is foolish, as it will likely never happen. Even if fresh concepts, initiatives, people, and money are promised or “on the way” in the future, that does not mean that a hurting and impoverished soul is not still in need today and could not benefit from your empowering support.

The average Bolivian I met is living in poverty on less than $3 a day. She is living without potable water, heat, floors, cars, computers, TVs, or newspapers. She is illiterate and educated to no more than a third grade level. Yet she knows of American culture, geography, history and politics. She is curious about America. It is a land of opportunity - opportunity she will not experience.

The average American I know does not think about Bolivia at all. He is well-educated, yet lives blind to the plight of more than one billion lives plagued by appalling poverty. He may catch a glimpse of it on the TV, but he quickly changes the channel and is consumed by other thoughts about options he wants on his next SUV, the latest PlayStation model for the kids, or the next IPhone. More is on his mind.

It can change today for each of us.