Siembra & Cosecha Group - FAPE - Guatemala

Lucia Cuzal and Trinidad Aguila displaying some of their weavings

While I was visiting Kiva entrepreneurs with FAPE, the last visit I made a couple hours along the Pan-American highway from Guatemala city was to a group of women who took out a loan together for $1,100 split between their three businesses.

To see their loan profile on Kiva.org check here.

To find their small village, I had to drive along the highway about 90km where I was supposed to find one of the local loan officers who would be waiting for me on his blue motorcycle, and then follow him to their home. His name is Saturnino.

I followed Saturnino a few more kilometers through some construction and then turned off on an unmarked dirt road which we followed a short distance through recently planted fields and past a few outcroppings of two or three houses before stopping along side the road and taking my highway gear off.

As we walked down the small footpath from the road to the few small cement houses facing each other where Trinidad and Lucia live, there were several children running around excitedly shouting to each other and flashing quick smiles at me wondering why somebody obviously from so far away dressed in strange clothes had come to visit them.

After Saturnino introduced me to the Lucia and Trinidad and I got a chance to explain to explain who I was and why I had travelled so far on a motorcycle to visit with them, we started off talking about Lucia's business. This sounds much easier that it was as each question I had about her experience as an entrepreneur selling her weavings had to be translated by Saturnino and rephrased in Kaqchikel, one of Guatemala's 23 indigenous languages, before she could respond, which in turn had to be translated from Kaqchikel back into Spanish for me.

Lucia and some of the table clothes that show off the quality of work that comes with 40 years of practice

In general she said things were going well. Weaving has been apart of her life for 40 plus years and it is always a challenge to overcome when prices seem to stagnate, or the middlemen that transport the product to market seem to be demanding too high of a cut of the final price, but with the injection of a few hundred dollars in loan capital, they've been able to buy supplies in higher quantities, saving on bottom line cost, and avoiding having to wait for sales to buy more raw materials and continue working.

Sometimes her oldest daughter helps with the weavings of the table clothes and napkins which frees up some of her time so she can work on huipiles, the elaborately woven and often embroidered traditional blouse worn by indigenous women. Huipiles are something she is very proud to make and sell, but because they take several months of labor for a single one, the selling price required means that they don't sell very quickly. Many Guatemalan women only buy one new blouse a year as the price is equivalent to several months of income.

A small piece of a huipil in progress

When I began speaking with Trinidad, she reiterated much of Lucia's story as their history in business if very similar saying they live next to each other and share much of the same work. Trinidad was however adamant at the end of our interview that she wanted to record a short message of thanks to spend those responsible for funding her loan. That message can be seen here.

After we had said our goodbyes, Saturnino and I hopped back on the bikes and drove another kilometer on a pretty punishing dirt road to where Christina Marroquin, the last of the three group memebers, has her small corner store.

I'd spent so much time chatting with the other two women that we didn't have much time before Saturnino had to get to another appointment, and I'd need his help getting back to the highway so unfortunately I had to be pretty brief chatting with Christina.

Christina and her husband behind the counter with some of the inventory bought with their loan

I was pretty surprised to see the amount of items she had for sale. Normally this far out, or in small villages the stores really only have the essentials. So to see everything from toilet paper, to hair gel, and canned beans, I felt like she knew what she was doing.

According to Christina though, it wasn't always like this.

She'd started out years ago with only $50 or $100 worth of money which she invested and had coninually reinvested the profits in order to carry more inventory, and more variety.

Speaking of all the variety, it turned out she even had one of my favorite chile flavored suckers!