Since September I’ve been in a book study group with a few other guys from Two Rivers. We started off with a pretty hard-hitting read, The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision.
The book had a lot of convicting things to say about how Western Christians practice their faith in view of the rest of the world. We came away from the book with the feeling that we as a group needed to do something beyond just sitting at a table talking about the world’s problems.
One topic discussed pretty extensively in the book is called microfinance. I had never heard of it before reading the book, but the basic concept is this: By donating money, we may be able to feed a hungry person in a third-world country, but we will do very little to pull him out of poverty—which is the root problem of hunger. And sometimes our donations can actually work against us, perpetuating his poverty by making him dependent on the donations like a deer at a park who no longer knows how to feed itself.
Microfinance, on the other hand, involves giving small low-interest loans (usually less than $1000) to help someone start a business. This money is then repaid over the course of six months to a year, at which point it can be reinvested toward another entrepreneur. So now the money has been used to provide a source of income for someone, and even a source of jobs for the community if the business does well enough, as many have. And after the loan is repaid, we can use the same money over and over again to give that opportunity to others.
Of all the concepts in the book, microfinance is the one that resonated with us the most. We got a group account at Kiva, a very well-run microfinance organization, then pooled our money and started lending. We made our first loan to a grocery store in Uganda that requested some capital to purchase more produce and mineral water. So far they’ve paid back 75% of the loan amount and are right on schedule to pay back the rest.
But we still felt like we needed to do more. Just as it is a danger to focus only on your immediate surroundings and ignore global issues, it’s also a danger to focus on the rest of the world to the exclusion of your neighbor. How can we help Des Moines?
