And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality
Closer to the heart
Over the last month or so, I've embarked on a new project which has exceeded my wildest expectations: Community Banks.
It all started back in August when I helped lead a series of Community Bank trainings in the Amazon and in the Andes mountains. I invited members of my community to the three-day training. Then, at the beginning of October, with the help of two Quichuan Indigenous people, I launched my first Community Bank in a Quichuan village.
A Community Bank is a system of savings and loans whereby members make a weekly contribution of $1 into the Community Bank's safe box, and then take out small loans that they then have to pay back with 10% interest. All the money they pay back goes into the safe box. The Community Bank members own and manage all of the money. At the end of each Community Bank fiscal year, all the money is returned to the members, and then they start saving up all over again.
There are around 200 such banks in all of Ecuador, but only 3% of them are in the Amazon where I live. So it was great when 20 people joined the Quichuan Community Bank in the village adjacent to mine. But it was absolutely astounding when, one month later, I launched a second Community Bank, this time in my village, and 44 people became members. For a Community Bank, this is a huge amount of people; so big, that we will have to create another Community Bank in order to accomodate all those people.
Members also create a name for their Community Bank, and this name is maintained in the Bank's official records. The Quichuans decided to call their bank Nuestro Banco (Our Bank). But amusingly enough, the Bank members in my community decided to name their bank after Supernova: "El Banco Communitario Villasenor". That got me cracking up.
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