Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Honduras! I made loans to Honduras


I was so thrilled to see loans from Honduras on Kiva today. I had to jump on them. Honduras has a very special place in my heart. And today I got the chance to lend money to Denia Iydesa Amador Elvir for her home grocery store. She's going to purchase eggs, rice, sugar, coffee, flour, soap, butter, chicken, dairy products ham, corn and beans. I wish I could buy beans from her, its hard to find the yummy Honduran red beans here. (good thing I go down there with many suitcases full of stuff I leave there, so I fill it with coffee and beans when I come home).

I also loaned to Luis Adolfo Perez Alvares. He also has a home grocery store, and wants a loan to open another store that his wife will run.
Both Denia and Luis live in Danli, which is 92 miles east of Teguigalpa (closer to Nicarauga). It probably takes several hours to drive there, as the roads are very hilly. Tegus has more hills than San Francisco!

Its so exciting to loan to Honduras.

1 comment:

Ramon said...

Congratulations! I just looked, and there were only loans to Mexico "available" right now. Bummer. I'd have loved to add "un prestamo HondureƱo" to my portfolio.

Interestingly enough, in the mid-90s when I lived in Managua, I worked for a large, German telecom contractor on a project in Somoto, on the Carretera Panamericana close to the Honduras border. The landscape was beautiful, and the town looked nice and clean. However, the subcontractors that worked for me installing telephone cabling showed me how war-torn the region was. I still have a few AK47 slugs around somewhere that we peeled from the old tubing that was removed. The red-and-black FSLN flag was still painted on many walls, and small shrines to "revolutionary martyrs" were quite ubiquitous.

Although I've been to Tegu, I've actually never crossed the border between Nicaragua and Honduras by car. I haven't been back to Central America in years and years, and I imagine that many things must have changed: some for the better, some for the worse.

As for the beans, I think that the closest you can get to the Central American small red beans, that they use to make "Gallo Pinto" (rice & beans) in Nicaragua, are the Cuban black beans that are sold by brands like Goya. They don't taste 100% the same, but it's close...

So much for reminiscing of times long gone...