Or “expert,” I should say. Malu Garcia is at the center of HOPE’s expertise on savings models that can alleviate poverty for the poorest of the poor. She specializes in training and equipping local staff who will be directly training savings groups, and she’s been traveling through Asia with me, assessing and providing additional training for our savings partners here. It’s truly a joy to serve alongside her. Here are a few more details about Malu:
• Malu has been working with savings programs since 2001 in conjunction with the Chalmers Center for Economic Development and Food for the Hungry. She defines training as “multiplying yourself in the lives of others.”
• Malu first joined HOPE’s team in October 2007 when she moved to Rwanda to help launch HOPE’s first church-based savings program with the Anglican Church. She traveled to each of Rwanda’s dioceses to promote the savings program, trained national coordinators, and built a foundation for a strong relationship with the national church. Today, the program is nearly 100,000 savers strong. Continue Reading…
“Hello – My name is Fabia, how are you today?” That is all it took for my wife, Anne, to decide where she would purchase her gas once we had moved to Kigali, Rwanda. Today, we both make a real effort to return and visit Fabia. It is not because of “high performance petrol” but to enjoy and encourage the kind interaction that comes with Fabia’s consistently great customer service.
Block by block, Aleyda Torres Constanzo built her Christian school “Light of the Future” in the community of La Romana, Dominican Republic. Progress was slow and measured, but destruction was unhesitating when Hurricane George tore it down in 1998, just two years into the school’s operations. Aleyda’s students finished the school year in a classroom covered by a tarp. “Parents didn’t let that deter them from sending their children here,” she explains. On the contrary, “What they saw was the quality of education and the determination that we had.”
I need to admit something: Sometimes I intentionally look away from photos of children living in poverty. Not the really sad ones – I mean photos of adorable kids with big eyes and bright smiles. And it’s not that I don’t like kids. I love them, actually. I’m that crazy lady who inevitably asks to hold someone’s baby, whether I’m in my parents’ church or a church in a Congolese village, and I’ve been that way since I was about four years old myself (Did you just get a mental image of toddler me carrying a baby half my size?).
