Done and dusted...

First off, thank you to everyone who came to share in our special day. Even though we each only got 6-8 hours of sleep total from Friday morning to Sunday night, we thoroughly enjoyed the event and hope you all did as well. The Caribbean trip was awesome; a much-needed reprieve from past month or so. If you haven't yet seen, Debbie has posted many of the pictures from our trip on Facebook.

Now that's taken care of, back to business. Kodzo's been paying back the microloan ahead of schedule and as such we've already made back the $25 minimum required to lend. In the spirit of the this exercise, we'll be cycling the money back into another microloan. As interest has waned some (we're not so brazen to think that people will follow this wedding favor blog long after the wedding itself), this first recycling of the loan will be made IAW the preferences expressed in the previous polls; i.e., African agriculture. The polls have been placed to the right again...please feel free to vote for where the next $25 (or more) will go. >>>>>>

For this loan, we again chose an entrepreneur in Togo. His Kiva profile is as follows:

"Abraham Sewonou est un homme de 38 ans, marié et père de 2 enfants. Il réside à Avetonou, un village situé à environ 100 kilomètres de Lomé, la capitale togolaise. Il est un éleveur ; avec ce crédit Abraham souhaite acheter des cabris, des porcins et des ovins pour agrandir la taille de son cheptel. Les bénéfices qu’engendreront son activité lui permettront de mieux prendre en charge sa famille et dans l’avenir construire sa propre maison."

It's been a solid ten years since my last French class, and as Madame Kina will undoubtably attest, I was not the meilleur etudiant. However, I'm pretty sure this says something along the lines of "Abe is a 38 year-old married man with two kids. He lives in Avetonou, a village 100 KM outside of Lome, the capital of Togo. He is a breeder by trade. With this loan, Abe hopes to buy goats, pigs, and sheep to increase the size of his flock (?). He hopes the benefits of this loan will allow him to earn more for his family and eventually build their own home." For all I know, that could say he's raising livestock for blood sacrifice, but I think I'm somewhere in the ballpark. It's through the same field partner that funded Kodzo (who've yet to be defaulted on after over 1000 entrepreneurs and $850,000 lent), so we're pretty comfortable with this loan even though this doesn't cover any shorts that may arise from currency devaluation.

So, stay tuned to stay abreast. The polls are open for where the money is going next. We'd like to toss some ducats to an entrepreneur in the Caribbean after having seen some of the hyper-poverty that exists on some of the islands. Even those with thriving tourism economies were fairly destitute outside of the major cities. This is your show, however. We set this venture up to lend the $100 wherever our friends and relatives would like. Make sure to let us know if there is a region or sector not listed in the polls by putting them in the comments below this post and we'll be sure to check them out.

Until next time...