Economics < Archive

Letter From El Salvador

Children play in one of the two single-room houses Andrea now can rent out.

"Andrea and her daughter still live in their original one-room house, but it now has a bathroom, electricity, and even an old TV."

Today we met Andrea, the pig lady.

Andrea told us that eight years ago a woman came to Panchimalco to give the village women loans. Andrea was interested because the woman said, "I am here to make sure no one looks down on you. I am here to make you into leaders." For years, Andrea's brother had told her that she was worthless.

To get a loan, a woman had to already have a small business or a plan. All Andrea had was a plan: she wanted to raise pigs. Pigs are expensive, so Andrea used her first loan to buy 20 chickens. She raised the chickens, sold them for a profit, and successfully paid back the loan.

With her second loan, Andrea had the confidence to buy two piglets. The piglets alone cost her around 200 colones ($US 25), and she had to have enough money to feed them. She learned to buy corn, seeds, and spoiled milk from the market and mix it into a paste called chalate to feed her pigs.

She didn't see the high price of piglets as a problem, but as an opportunity. She decided she was going to raise and sell piglets in the market. And she has done this very successfully for the last eight years.

Her success with the pigs and the trust placed in her through larger microcredit loans have given Andrea the confidence and the capital needed to achieve more over the last eight years than she had in the first 48 years of her life. She has built two small houses on her remaining land and rents them to two other families for 450 colones a month ($US 50). She also bought a second large plot of land where she grows bananas. She's saved 9,000 colones ($US 1,100) in the microcredit bank for emergencies.

The summer before we visited, Andrea took out a loan to buy the empty plot of land near her house. Soon she'll have somewhere other than her house to keep the pigs.