We Help A Mum Of 7 Get Some Coffee

Every month we put up a small post promoting our favourite form of ‘charity’ – Kiva. But it’s not really a charity. It’s an organisation which helps people around the world to help themselves by providing small loans which traditional banking institutions wouldn’t normally be interested in. Kiva finds the people who need help, we provide the funds for the loan.

And because it’s a loan, it gets repaid. Every month our Kiva account receives payments from people we’ve lent money to and we get to lend it out again to someone else. Or take the money back. It’s our choice.

This month, with those repayments, we’re lending our US$25(lots of people come together from around the world to make up a loan) to Norma Elizabeth from Honduras. She needs$1325 to help her with her coffee crop and I love coffee, plus she’s a mother of seven kids like us, so it’s a perfect match 🙂

Here’s what Norma’s Kiva application had to say about her and her family:

Norma, 44, is a capable, hard-working woman who is married and has seven children. Two of them work on their coffee plantation and five attend school and help their siblings when they get home. Norma was only able to get a fourth grade education because her parents could not afford for her to continue. She learned agriculture from her parents and inherited land from them which is a ten minute walk from her house. The only challenge she faces is the fact that the road to her land is in bad condition and not adequate for vehicle transport of the coffee beans.

Kiva is a great way to spread the love and help someone you’ll never meet. Our family genuinely enjoys looking through the applications and picking out someone to help. The kids really get into it and it helps them to realize just how privileged they are in the world to enjoy the standard of living they do – even though by local standards we consider ourselves ‘battlers’. To date we’ve made 187 loans of $25 to people in 58 countries (from Kenya to Ecuador to Tajikistan) and almost all of it from repaid loans.

This is not a sponsored post. Kiva doesn’t ask me to promote them and they certainly don’t pay me to do it – we just like what they do and how it makes us feel.

If you’d like to check out Kiva for yourself, here’s the LINK It’s worth a look.