What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [34]
On her return to Wilmot Flat, Dana focused on teaching her adopted New Hampshire village about her newly adopted village in Ghana and what she intended to do with her new organization. Eager audiences of friends spread the word of her adventure. She began making presentations to any group that would have her, including church groups, women’s groups, gardening clubs, schools, and the Rotary. As exciting as it was that people began to send small donations, Dana knew she would need a large infusion of capital to launch the program.
She looked around at her options. She owned a late-model Volvo sedan and an old Volkswagen bus. As a single woman, she didn’t need both. She sold the Volvo for $18,000 and committed $5,000 as start-up funds for WomensTrust.
When she returned to Pokuase in October 2003, she carried her bed linens, an umbrella, micro-finance procedure manuals, a video camera, and her seed money. She also brought something profoundly heartening: the support of Wilmot Flat and a sense that the two villages were about to become bound to each other.
In Ghana, George Badoe had studied the micro-lending manuals Dana had left behind. He had readied a system of journals and ledgers to track loans and repayments. Agnes had designed an application for borrowers, which, working from Yunus’s model, required women to form groups of four to six to apply. While each member of a group would receive an individual loan, none would be eligible for another loan until the entire group’s loan had been repaid. That was something Yunus had discovered encouraged high repayment rates. Dana and the Badoes drafted a constitution, opened the necessary bank accounts, and registered the new entity with the national government in Accra. Dana also received her first unpleasant lessons about the unspoken costs of transacting government business in Ghana. Bureaucrats wanted to be paid, too.
In November, seventy-three excited women showed up at Topido, formed groups, and signed up for four-month loans, ranging from twenty-two to thirty dollars. A total of $2,022 was loaned, at an interest rate of 15 percent. The first-time borrowers had their pictures taken for the bank passbooks they received. For many, it was the first photo ID they had ever had. Two-thirds of the women signed for their loans with thumbprints.
The Badoes were doing such an efficient job that Dana believed, naively, that she could make a two-week visit every six months and return to the business of earning a living while furthering awareness of her project. At home, her hope that her village in New Hampshire would take an active interest in helping Pokuase was affirmed. One night in mid-January 2004, she spoke at the Wilmot Public Library. Though it was the coldest night of the year, with wind chill temperatures approaching forty below zero, local residents packed the library to hear about Dana’s adventurous projects.
During her next visit to Africa, she was introduced to the plight of the elderly in Pokuase. To illustrate what she encountered, she returned with photographs of an elderly woman breaking stones in a quarry for a living. The woman’s only tool was a small hammer. She placed the product of her effort in a basket and, at the end of her workday, received