group meeting

So, after a little rebellion, a little football-watching, a little beer, and a lot of sleep, I snapped out of my funk and came back to Chennai on Tuesday morning, where I met E and M at the OI office. They seemed surprised to see me, especially E (and especially because I got there earlier than they did, and I had come all the way from Mamalapuram). We fine-tuned the survey a bit more, then we went to a borrower group meeting to observe and to pre-test the survey afterwards. The basic idea with pre-testing is that you make sure the questions make sense and are interpreted correctly by the people who are answering them.

The group meeting was very interesting. As I mentioned before, all OI borrowers are women (technically, OI is just the sort of an umbrella organization--the actual MFI is called IMED, which stands for Intermission Micro Enterprise Development or something like that). Anyway, the women form groups of usually about 20 borrowers, and they each get an initial loan of somewhere between Rs. 1000 and 4000 (US$22 to 89). Group leaders are responsible for collecting weekly repayment (probably Rs. 20-40 per week) on Sundays and depositing the money into the group's joint bank account. IMED is given checks drawn against the account which they cash every week to receive the repayment (BJ says this repayment situation is far from ideal, but there were a lot of problems with how IMED was working, and that's why Jim and BJ are there working on fixing them). Anyway, during the meetings, they take role, pray (it seems a little weird to me, because a lot of the women are Hindu, but IMED and OI are Christian organizations, so it makes sense), and the loan assistant person from IMED does a training session. The meeting we went to had a lesson about confidence. It seemed pretty cheesy based on what was being translated to me, but these are women that are generally in need of confidence and impowerment, so I think it's a good thing.

All of the women were incredibly kind and open. They all sit on the concrete floor (the meetings take place in one of the borrowers' homes) but they gave us chairs to sit in and welcomed us very warmly. Afterwards we used our OI helper to translate the survey and administer it to two of the women, which went pretty smoothly and was extremely helpful in making a few additional edits. They insisted on giving us tea and cookies (best tea I've had since I've been here, and the cookies tasted like those Girl Scout shortbread cookies, which I love) and had us all sign the group's guest book. It was really cool to be at an actual microfinance group meeting, to meet the women and hear about their microenterprises and their lives. One woman told a story about how her husband is a drunk and beats her and her children, and it was clearly very upseting to her, but moments later she seemed joyful and silly, joking with the women around her and telling E (through our translator) that he needed to shave (she was right).

So, I'm feeling really good about our project again and very excited about meeting and interacting with more borrowers. It is a huge privilege to be able to attend their meetings and survey them, and I'd like to learn to say that in Tamil so I make sure it gets across. We emailed a potential translator today, we have an appointment with someone that can help us hire enumerators on Friday, and we have our release form written, so things are really coming together. And the cool British couple is in Chennai tonight, so we'll go out and have some fun.

I'll try to post more pictures soon. I have some of Chennai and some of us being goofy. Only one of the computers in the internet place near us will talk to my computer, and it isn't working right now, so we'll see how that goes.