Bill Bryson's African Diary Read Online Free PDF Page B

been. It had a trim, modern central business district and quite a lot of nice housing. There seemed to be more bicycles along the roads and fewer street urchins.
    We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank— micro-finance institution is the formal term—that has been one of CARE’s great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea of making small loans to groups of ladies, generally market traders, who previously had almost no access to business credit. The idea was that half a dozen or so female traders would form a business club and take out a small loan, which they would apportion among themselves, to help them expand or improve their businesses. The idea of having a club was to spread the risk. It seemed a slightly loopy idea to many to focus exclusively on females, but it has been a runaway success.
    “Our ladies are very shrewd and very hard working,” laughed Peres Oyugi, Kisumu’s branch manager, as we drove to Kisumu’s Jubilee Market to see some of Wedco’s money in action.
Ten years ago, she told me,Wedco had loans on its books of 18 million Kenyan shillings—about $250,000. Today its loan portfolio has increased nearly tenfold to over 175 million shillings and it is helping more than 200 groups in Kisumu alone. There are seven other branches spread across the region.
    Jubilee Market is an extraordinary place—crowded, noisy, extremely colorful—with large, open-sided halls specializing in wet fish, dried fish, vegetables, nuts and other farm commodities. I had never seen such luscious produce more beautifully arrayed. Every stall was a picture of abundance and sumptuousness, every peanut and tomato and chili more neatly arranged and more richly colored than any I had seen before anywhere. It seemed impossible that people so poor could enjoy such plenty. I asked Adam Koons, CARE’s chief of operations for western Kenya, if it was as good as it looked. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “My wife and I do our own food shopping here. Kenyans haven’t got much money, but they are very particular about their food.”
    Beyond the main food halls was a sort of bazaar of dark alleys containing tiny shops—cubicles really—selling everything from bolts of cloth to small electrical items. There I was introduced to several of Wedco’s happily prospering clients, among them a genial but weary-looking woman named Consolata Ododa. Ododa makes a living selling small oddments—batteries, torches, plastic wallets, key rings, playing cards. Like all the women in her group, Ododa works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then goes home to cook an evening meal for her family, so it’s not exactly a life of luxury. Every two weeks she makes an overnight trip to Nairobi by bus to acquire new stock, returning in time to reopen the stall late the following morning. She had just returned that day from her latest trip, and it was for this reason that she was “a little tired,” she told me. For all this her turnover averages about 3,000 shillings a day—roughly $30—from which she must pay rent, electricity, taxes and interest and principle on her loan.
Typically she will clear $6 or $7 for her 12-hour day—hardly a princely sum, but more, she told me, than she had ever dreamed of having before Wedco stepped into her life. And so by such means do people’s lives improve, little by little.

Friday, October 4
    Fifty miles
or so south of Kisumu is Homa Bay, a listless small city of potholed streets, baking sun and an inescapable air of being at the wrong end of a long road. Most of the drive from Kisumu is along an exceedingly rough and bouncy dirt track. Interestingly, all road maps show it as a first-rate highway. This is because some years ago the World Bank gave money for the road to be paved. In the event, however, some government official or group of government officials decided to spare Kenyan workers the wearying toil of laying tarmac under a hot sun, and pocketed the money instead.
    This