Just working in the non-profit sector doesn't always feel like enough, though, and sometimes I want to get my hands on a good, old-fashioned volunteer project, be it painting schools, teaching a language or stuffing envelopes for a campaign. My life has been a little devoid of volunteerism since last May, so early this year I applied to be a volunteer translator for microlending site Kiva.org. I've been translating for them for about a month now, and I absolutely love it.
If you're unfamiliar with Kiva or microfinance, the basic idea is this: Kiva is a non-profit that brings together a community of people dedicated to eradicating poverty by making small loans (starting at just $25) to local businesses. You'll find Kiva entrepreneurs in 196 countries - from California cities to African communities so small even Google Maps hasn't pinpointed them. There are entrepreneurs asking for $100 and entrepreneurs asking for several thousand dollars.
Whatever the amount of the loan, the process is the same: a local microfinance institution partnering with Kiva makes the initial loan, then informs Kiva, which posts the loan on its site (along with a description, photo and repayment term), where anyone who wants to can read the description and contribute to the loan. Once the loan is fully funded by Kiva lenders, Kiva sends those funds to the local microfinance institution and repayment begins. As the entrepreneur makes repayments to the local institution, those are sent on to Kiva, which repays its lenders, who can either reinvest the funds with another entrepreneur, donate to Kiva itself or withdraw the money from the Kiva system through PayPal.
There's always a lot more going on behind the scenes at a non-profit than it appears from the outside. At Kiva, one of the unexpected parts is the group of several hundred translators and editors typing away each week to get new loan descriptions translated into English and up on the site so they can be funded. Each translator is a member of a language team, with access to a dashboard that shows how many loans in their source language(s) are currently waiting to be translated and some other fun facts (for example, mine is showing that there have been 590 loans translated from French in the past month), as well as a link to the system that doles out assignments. And there's a whole wiki community of resources and discussion forums to help translators sort through unfamiliar localized terms and tricky phrases.
While I miss some of the benefits of more traditional volunteerism, like face-time with interesting people - both other volunteers and the community I'm serving - I love that this is something I can do whenever I have a few minutes, from wherever I happen to be, while helping people who are trying to enrich their lives and their communities throughout the world (well, in my case, throughout the French-speaking world).
One of the first loans I translated was for a Beninese entrepreneur named Geneviève whose loan I wanted to partially fund myself. I looked for her on the main Kiva site shortly after posting her loan, then the next day, then the day after...I couldn't find her anywhere! What happened to the loan description? I wondered, frustrated. A couple of weeks and a Google search later, I realized that I hadn't been able to find her loan because it had been fully funded by a single lender immediately after I had posted it. Curious, I delved deeper and found that every one of the loans I had translated had already been fully funded (I just checked again, and even the loans I translated on Sunday evening have already been filled).
Kiva lenders aren't kidding around! They check the site frequently and lend often because they're dedicated to helping get businesses off the ground that, without microlending, wouldn't have much of a chance. Since the first seven loans in April 2007, more than 184,000 entrepreneurs have seen their loans fully funded by more than 400,000 Kiva lenders, to the tune of about $132.5 million. And the repayment rate is an impressive 98.57%.
As a translator, I'm just a minuscule part of what Kiva does, but I love being involved. I get to read about small businesses thousands of miles away and the lives of the people running them, hone my translation skills and feel like I'm making a little bit of a difference when it comes to lending a hand (and not a handout, but a hand up) to some of the people who need it most.
Kiva loans start at $25 and increase in increments of $25. To become a Kiva lender, visit www.kiva.org/lend.
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