Read About a Woman Helped by our Efforts!

PCI REVOLVING LOAN FUND IN GUATEMALA:

THE SUCCESS STORY OF MARIA PERÉZ

Good morning, my name is Maria Ernestina Pérez. I live in the village of Las Palmas in the Municipality of Olopa, a Department of Chiquimula. I am an active member of the Women’s Association of Olopa (AMO) and I want to share with you all the story of a project that enriched and changed my life.

Everything first began when, through negotiations by our board of directors, we requested help from an organization to give us a small sum of money to better manage our plots of coffee crops -- in order to bring in a better harvest and so that we could make more money to live on. Then, one day a technician arrived in the village and told us the project had been authorized and that an international organization called Project Concern International (PCI) donated the money to create a revolving loan fund for women coffee growers. I was very happy because it was an opportunity to improve my quality of life and to give something better to my children. Then I, along with many more of my friends, accepted the obligation to manage the credit as a revolving fund.

With this money, I bought fertilizer to help along my little parcel of coffee crops. We were also given training by the technician on the proper way to fertilize, prune, fumigate, and cut away the shade on the coffee plantation, and only after that could I fertilize my coffee crops properly. Only the rich have properly tended crops because they have money, and since I didn’t know how to correctly manage my crops, one year my land would produce coffee and the next year it wouldn’t. I can say with much satisfaction that the borrowing went well and when the technician would arrive on the scheduled repayment dates, I could pay on time.

I dedicated myself that season to attend to my coffee plants, I fertilized them, I pruned them and my little parcel of land produced a big crop. I sold my harvest in cereza (raw -- in the red “cherry” fruit that surrounds the coffee bean) and they gave me Q 40.00 ($5.20) for each can of coffee. With that sum of money, I finished paying off my debt to the revolving fund and I still had money left over.

With that amount, bought a sewing machine – I never thought that I would ever be able to buy one of those machines. Now, little by little, people in my community come to me to make them dresses and other things for them. With the money I earn from that, I have enough to give a little something to my children. This has helped me very much because before this program we only had to manage the small sum of money we earned from our small coffee harvest.

When people ask me to tell them how I benefited from the revolving funds project, I say that I am grateful to God, the Women’s Association of Olopa (AMO), PCI, and the two good women who believed in us—Mrs. Sonia Paz and Pascale Wagner (PCI’s Guatemala Country Director). Thank you for supporting me and pushing me to change for the better.

Like we always said when one of the technicians would visit us—he would ask us, “How are you?” and we would say, “Here it’s always the same!” But now, things are not the same, we are changing our lives, me and my family and the women of Olopa.