Small loans, big smiles in Mexico’s Oaxaca

Monday, October 14, 2013

OAXACA, Mexico — We’d just stepped into a farm shed with bamboo-stick walls when the Mexican weather gods decided to give full meaning to the term “rainy season.” As a September deluge boomed like a kettledrum on the low metal roof, Anastasia Soriana Martínez, the smallest and most serene person in the shed, introduced us to her pig.

Over the aural onslaught, our group of gringo tourists was just barely able to hear that this pink and white swine sloshing unconcernedly in a rapidly widening mud pit beyond the shed’s eaves was Martínez’s latest business endeavor. Her source of capital? A microloan from En Vía, the local foundation that had brought us on this visit.

Source: Seattle Times (link opens in a new window)

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