A New Beginning

Saturday afternoon. It is almost lunch time and I am incredibly content to be sitting in the Okudzeto House instead of at the IT Centre. I have felt like since we got here it was GO GO GO! We not only moved twice in the first week, but we also spent a few days away in a neighboring village, another day making a trip to the market, and we then spent the entire weekend in Accra and Cape Coast. This week has marked the first entire week that I have stayed in Atorkor.

Our new house, the Okudzeto House, is an improvement from our last. Still, it has some strange oddities that are just a simple reminder “this is Africa…” From the outside the house appears large, two story, and rectangular. Around the entire circumference of the house, upstairs and down, are blue shutters. It looks estate like. Our team occupies only the upstairs, with no way of getting into the downstairs. Still, the appearance of the house is one of the nicest you will find in this village.

Once inside one will have a simple yet unanswerable thought, “Why?” Growing up with a dad who builds houses, this question is even more prominent in my mind. To explain: When you open the door to the inside of Okudzeto, you will find that you have been tricked. You will realize that your living space is actually much less than you imagined it would be, because there are really only three small rooms. These small rooms are in the middle of a hallway that goes all the way around the entire upstairs. People in Africa must love doors and windows, because the three rooms, which are in a line, all have doors into one another. They also have doors on both sides into the outer hallway. In addition to the doors, our rooms have shutters as well. Shutters which simply open into the outer hallway. Thus, in order to get the musty smell out of the house, and the light into the rooms, we must open two layers of shutters, the outer ones to light the hallway, and then the inner ones to (hopefully) light the rooms. To get a breeze is difficult. There are no screens on the outer windows, but some of the inner windows do have screens. Unfortunately, due to poor planning, the screens block the locks that close the shutters to the inner rooms. Thus, windows that do have screens all have two large holes in them, one on top, and one on bottom, to enable a person to unlock and open them. These also enable the bugs to join us and keep us company.

Enough about our residence. We have beds to sleep in and a roof over our heads. We have dry cereal to eat in the morning and a pot to boil water for coffee :)

This week was a whirlwind of activities. We finished collaborating with our four local teachers on Monday, finalizing our orientation + 10 course lesson series for our new clients. This allowed us to gain a local perspective on many aspects of our lesson plans. What are the best real life examples we can include? In what order should we introduce certain concepts? Realistically, how long will this take to explain? The list goes on.

Not only did our teachers help design the very lessons they will be teaching, they also created the ‘Lumana 20’ The Lumana 20 is a list of 20 promises that we will endorse in the community and throughout our loan cycles. They include items such as ‘I will keep a clean home,’ or ‘I will feed my family and children at least two full meals a day,’ or ‘I will use designated areas when I go to the bathroom.’

On Tuesday we had orientation day. Although we thought we had a pretty good idea of how many people would be there (Everyone who was invited to orientation had been through two interviews) we had a flood of new potential clients also arrive. We ended up not only doing the orientation, but also doing many more interviews. As a result, we have reached our capacity of 80 clients for this education and loan cycle, and have at least 20 more on a waiting list for our next cycle.

We took Wednesday off, since it is market day for most of our clients and they will be away at market selling their goods. On Thursday, lesson 1 began. Many of our clients opted to create their own cooperative groups, and we thus had to re arrange everyone into new classes with different teachers.

We decided as a team that we should always let our clients choose their own groups, as they are ultimately responsible for everybody’s loan in their group. To explain, if one person in their group defaults, they are ALL liable for the repayment of the loan. This acts as a type of collateral for their loans (social collateral), since they do not have financial collateral. We know that people will only create a group with others who they trust, and this acts as the first qualification clients will have to meet before receiving a loan. If no one in their own community trusts them, they will ultimately not ever have the chance to receive a loan. This is one way in which Lumana is protected from defaults due to irresponsibility.

Not only did we rearrange classes, but we also decided to do both morning and afternoon sessions. This helps us to accommodate the different professions within the community. Two teachers now hold their classes from 10-12, and the other two hold their classes from 1-3.

I sat in on classes Thursday and Friday, taking a desk in the back of the room and listening to our teachers give their lessons in Ewe. I could not understand what they were saying, but it was a great experience to see them draw the illustrations on the blackboard that we had discussed during our collaboration. In this way, I was able to follow what was going on. They all did a great job engaging clients and answering their questions. We take Saturday and Sunday off, and lessons will resume on Monday.

The Lumana Team is really excited about our next loan cycle, and we are all keeping busy on individual business related projects in whatever spare time we can find. (Accounting, Finance, 501©3 paperwork, expansion proposals, newsletters, etc.)

Last night our crew had an exciting ‘evening in.’ We all put on some comfortable clothes and gathered in the small common room of the Okudzeto house. We then hooked up the projector and Eric gave us a finance lesson. He described all of Lumana’s different financial statements, how they are connected, and what they can be used to describe. Sammie was particularly excited to learn about ratio’s while Karin and I could not stop laughing as we went over the budget. What kind of crazy people spend their Friday nights learning about budgets… and enjoy it???

Another week in Atorkor.