Bank of Alia

Yesterday, I was working away in my house, planning a party for my Saturday English students who are "graduating" next week (woohoo free Saturdays!) when a woman from my community came by who is my semi-friend. I say "semi" because she is sweet enough but cannot stop asking me for money, directly or indirectly. I have lent her a dollar here, five dollars there, and she has always paid me back, but this time I was blown right out of the water.

"My (alcoholic) husband isn't working right now and we have to plant corn this week," she said. "Can I borrow $30 for fertilizer?"

30 dollars?! That's a lot of money in the States, never mind here, and my Peace Corps salary would make you all laugh. And it might be all right, since I know she would, slowly, pay me back, but this has already gone far enough. Next she'll be asking me for $50. She has already asked me for the shoes off my feet and the food in my house.

I don't mean to sound insensitive to poor people, really I don't. But although things are hard for this woman, she is not starving. She and her family have got by for years before there was a gringa in the community. And I can't turn my head and give them more money while the husband lies around and drinks away what the wife earns. At some point this woman has to fix the root of the problem.

She's not the only person who has come by asking me for things either. A lot of the time it's people I barely know and who, I have learned from experience, will not pay me back. I can't have word getting around that I just hand out money to anyone who wants it. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we're here to combat the handout mentality in favor of capacity-building, which is something I strongly believe in personally as well. It might not help the poor villagers in the extremely short-term, but they will have a strong economic foundation for the future if they focus on learning new skills and using them to get jobs or make money. And I'm here to teach some of those skills (English, computers) and help the community do projects for their collective economic benefit, but I myself am not a microfinance enterprise.

So I'm going to go back to the village today and tell this woman that I can't lend her any more than $10, and she will still have to pay me back. Insensitive bitch that I am.

Paz y amor.