My plan for the summer weekends this year, more or less

May Day
by Phillis Levin

I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago--let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,

Be a cell where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I've decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn't matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I've decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.


Of course, I still have to survive that long, and dig myself out of a few holes first. No, I've never been too clear on how digging gets anyone out of a hole, but what that really means is "I'm going back to my problem set now." And laundry.

I've made 30 loans now, one for each year of my life.

New Kiva loans for May:

$100 to Pong Chanthy in Cambodia, toward purchase of a new sewing machine.
$100 to Khotam Bustonov in Tajikistan, for purchase of construction equipment.

I was able to make two loans instead of one this month, because I experienced my first default; a microfinance group called SEED, it turns out, was not passing along 100% of the capital raised through Kiva to its entrepreneurs. Kiva has ended that partnership and announced a default on loans made through SEED, but my SEED-based loan was almost entirely paid back anyway... the field partner was the bad apple, not my entrepreneur. I just rounded up a smidge to give myself an even hundred in Kiva credit as if it had been paid back, and off I went. I'm getting stricter about making loans only to people who are buying equipment or education, rather than the many many people who are just buying goods to sell in a store.

(Join me? You only need $25.)


As a side note, I don't think I've mentioned that Zopa is now up and running in the United States. It offers a way to make loans to those who need them in the good old US of A... and yes, I am conflicted about this. As most of you know, I do the microfinance thing in order to fight poverty, and I've been doing it since before Zopa existed. I find myself torn between making loans to those in the third world, where my money goes a long long way and can make a real difference to people's quality of life, and wanting to put money to work locally. I could be helping wlaffin here in Brighton. There are other borrowers in Massachusetts as well.

Global vs local... what do you think? I was very touched by reading Deep Economy a year or so ago, and it sold me on the idea of acting locally to fund the local eco-finance-web and keep it robust. Still... it's kind of telling that most of the requested American loans on Zopa are for paying off existing, higher-interest loans. These people are trying to do a smart thing, and yet their case isn't all that compelling to me.