The topic of traveling seems to come up often in my conversations with the borrowers and I suppose this makes sense. I may be Chinese looking, but given that I show up at their meetings with a notebook and camera in hand, and my Mandarin lacks that distinctive Shaanxi accent, everything about me screams “foreigner.”

Their first question is usually, “How long did it take you to get to Pucheng?” Which is then followed with a concerned, “Your parents let you come by yourself!?”  The borrowers are all so humble that it always takes a while to convince them that I truly want to chat with them about their lives.

 

This week, this conversation did spur one borrower to start telling me about his dream to travel to Beijing. He has this trip all mapped out in his head. First, he will visit the Forbidden Palace and then climb The Great Wall. After which, he’ll move onto the more modern attractions and see the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube. “But, even if I had the financial means to do so, I haven’t a spare moment for such a trip,” he said. 

 

As I mentioned before, practically all the villagers grow fruit (apple and pears), corn, cotton, and wheat. The very rhythm of their life is dictated by the planting and harvesting schedule of all these crops.

 

Every spring (March/April), the farmers are thrown into a frenzy planting cotton. The most labor intensive of their crops, it will take 100 days for the seedlings to bloom into flowers. Come May, the pears will need to be individually covered in opaque paper bags.  to protect them from chemical pesticides and  bugs. (Apples get covered later in the season with clear plastic bags, as direct sunlight is needed to kill a certain bacteria). One borrower estimated that she covered 80,000 pears last month. In households where the children are too young to help or have all left home, the husband and wife sometimes cannot manage by themselves and have to hire an extra laborer, which will cost about 30 RMB a day. “That is if you can find someone!” One borrower told me. “Nobody is sitting around waiting to be hired in the fields. Young people have all gone to the cities to look for work.”

 

In June, the cotton seedlings will have bloomed and it will take another 3 months or so for the farmers to handpick the cotton. Furthermore, June is also when corn must be planted. It takes about 3-4 months for the corn to mature into edible ears. Thankfully, unlike cotton, technology can lend a helping hand, a machine can be hired to harvest the tall stalks of corn. The farmers are charged a set price for each Mu of land harvested.

 

Yet even after the cornfields are cleared and the cotton picked (by around October), the farmers don’t get any reprieve.  They must  immediately set about planting wheat. One planting of wheat will take about 7-8 months, after which the whole cycle starts again.

 

During 回訪 or client revisit trips, we’re able to visit clients individually. However, when the borrowers meet to receive loans, they gather at the loan officer’s house and I am unable to visit them in their homes.  Yet, aside from the duties of the loan officer, the lives of loan officers themselves more or less resemble that of the borrowers.

 

PCWSDA has 6 loan officers, and as far as I know, all are farmers. They live in the same type of house, grow the same produce, and their grandchildren attend the same schools as everyone else in the village. Having a resident loan officer who has complete understanding of the borrower’s lives is vital to the MFI’s operations.

 

For one thing, when your neighbor is your loan officer, it is pretty difficult to fool the loan officer and use your loan for something other than the stated purpose. But aside from preventing fraud, loan officers are also responsible for evaluating a potential client’s economic situation and repayment abilities. In a sense, they are PCWSDA’s first set of gatekeepers. Thus, having a loan officer who can effectively assess a client’s ability to repay plays a large role in lowering the MFI’s risks.

 

Yi-Long village is one of the poorer villages   Although PCWSDA began microcredit services here just this past year, there are already about 100 clients, but there is no resident loan officer.  As a result,  many of the loan officer's responsibilities are being shouldered by Yi-Long's Village Leader, Mr. Zhao.

 

Mr. Zhao may be the de facto loan officer, collecting loans and opening his home for borrower group meetings, but  what he seems to enjoy most is raising awareness about micro-loans. He hosts informational meetings at least once a month, and during the winter or rainy season (when the farmers are slightly less busy), he may have meetings twice a month.

 

Mr. Zhao says, for the most part, people are not hampered by the out-dated notion that taking out a loan is shameful. Instead, “people welcome micro-loans with open arms.”

这里的人们是用双手欢迎小额贷款！。

 

Thus far, the 5-member group guarantee system has been highly effective, resulting in an100% repayment rate for Pucheng. I was curious how Mr. Zhao impressed upon potential clients the importance of on-time repayment. He admitted that sometimes borrowers do contest the 4-times-a-year repayment schedule. They will sometimes argue that it is troublesome, but Mr. Zhao said, “I tell them repaying in 4 installments actually just makes it easier for them to make sure they can repay the loan.”

 

“We know late repayments would be contagious,” said Mr. Zhao. “That is why we work really hard to prevent even a single late repayment.”