I’m in Bali working as a Kiva Fellow. It’s an unpaid gig but it’s definitely keeping me busy for the next 10 weeks.

Kiva is a website where you can make a $25 loan to an entrepreneur who needs a few hundred bucks to buy a cow, a pig, or food to sell at a local market. You can browse entrepreneur profiles and loan to those whose stories touch you, make you laugh, or appeal in some other way. There’s more than a 95% chance that your borrower will pay back their loan. If they don’t, you’ll find out what happened - was it a storm that killed the animals? a drought? a death in the family? an oversaturated market? - and you could stand to lose some or all of your money. The loan is approved and administered by a local partner institution, like Dinari Foundation Bali.

My work here falls into three categories — finance (forex hedging and cash flow management), development (conducting training sessions, working on IT and IS management) and storytelling (videos and blog entries, as well as borrower profiles and updates).

Working in the field is not without its challenges. It took me 30 minutes to post my last blog entry, and that was after the video had already been uploaded. Also, my daily commute is somewhat hair raising. But that aside, I’m in good health and definitely staying well fed.