Kiva

It all started one year when I was sent a link to a site called Kiva. The idea behind Kiva was to do something about the lack of micro-loans available for people who didn’t have the wherewithal to get loans because they were bad credit risks or lived in places which didn’t have traditional banks. When you go on the website, you can pick a country, a type of person or a group, a goal the person asking for the loan is working towards — it offers information that allows the lender, you and all the other people interested in helping the person/group, to feel like you know where your money is going to go and why.

I loved the idea and loaned my first $25. I supported someone who needed basic necessities; they weren’t looking to live a life of luxury; they wanted their family to be safe and healthy. As I got repaid pennies at a time, it felt good. To know I had helped someone, hadn’t made them feel like they were a charity case, and that I could actually make a change in someone’s world with the limited resources I had.

That’s when the idea hit me. I could do this with my classes at Thanksgiving. I teach middle school and 7th and 8th grade is the perfect age for this kind of experience because middle school children feel things deeply and they have very definite ideas about what is right and wrong, and helping people definitely falls on the ‘right’ side. So I saved up over the spring and summer and took the money being repaid from the original loan and added it all together until I had $100. I had decided I would give each class the chance to loan $25 to the person or group that got the most votes. The catch was they had to convince the class to vote for the person or people they chose.

Each borrower on Kiva has a comprehensive list of details about their project and how it will affect their life, as well as details about the country in which they live including GDP and average yearly earnings so there was a lot of research for the kids to do and a lot to write about. I wanted to give them the freedom to choose what details they thought were pertinent, give them the chance to be in charge for once.

I asked each child in my four classes to pick a person of group they felt was most deserving of our help and to create a few paragraphs they would present to the class. At the end we would vote and whoever ‘won’ would have the money loaned to them.

I could never have imagined the excitement and the ferocity with which they argued for the person they felt was the right choice to get our $25. I watched children who barely spoke English presenting multiple paragraphs to a dead silent and completely respectful audience. I watched my ‘troublemakers’ nearly in tears, trying to persuade their peers. I watched my ‘quiet’ children standing up for something they believed in with more of a voice than I’d ever heard them have when it came to standing up for themselves. I watched each class debate the merits of each argument and vote and sometimes have to do it again because there was a draw. They never got frustrated and nobody was a sore ‘loser’. When we finally had a majority in our vote, they literally clapped and cheered. I had my computer hooked up to the projector, and they watched as we loaned out $25 and brought our person/people closer to their goal, and I can honestly say it brought tears to my eyes every single time. It still does.

But that wasn’t where it ended. I printed the pictures of our four winners and posted them on the board. I shared when the site gave us updates; we tracked how much of our loan had been repaid and we were all thrilled to watch as roofs were put on buildings, bathrooms were built, businesses were started, and children went to school because we had taken the time to do something to help.

What you have to understand about my students is that our city is one of the poorest in our state and we have a majority of immigrant and first generation families in our schools. My students are almost all bilingual and almost all of them live at or below the federal poverty level. When I say my students struggle, I mean I get texts that they are going to be late because they have to go to their aunt’s house to shower because they don’t have hot water. I get messages that they need coats in the winter and my friends have always stepped up and donated old jackets and warm weather gear their own children had outgrown. I get calls late at night asking for help with family situations that are escalating because I am a stable adult. I get emails asking for recommendations for high school programs and colleges but also for housing programs and jobs because many of my students start working at 14 as soon as they can.

With all of that, not once did a single child question why we were helping families and individuals in other countries. My students understood that the goal was to find someone who needed the $25 more than we did, and in that experience they appreciated the things they had. They hadn’t realized that not every country has schools you can go to without paying for your education. Many of them came from islands where fresh water sometimes comes from the ground instead of a faucet, but it is there. Some come from places where when it rains the roads wash out and there is no school until the roads are passable, but they still get to go free of cost. My students have a broader world view than most middle schoolers do, but they haven’t let it make them jaded or mercenary, and I deeply appreciate that about them.

With the passing years, the first class I did this assignment has gone through high school and is now completing college and they still stop by or keep in touch and when they see the bulletin board with the pictures or see my Facebook updates they reminisce about doing their proposals and voting and how much fun it was to feel so good abut doing something for someone else. When ‘Giving Tuesday’ showed up as the day after Cyber Monday, I switched and started the project on the day after we got back from Thanksgiving break instead of before, but other than that the assignment has changed very little in the last nine years.

What amazes me though is that as much as my students have changed over the years, their approach to the assignment has remained essentially the same. They still have a love hate relationship with the fact that sometimes the person they want to advocate for gets fully funded before the voting is over with, it’s hard to see your work be moot because people can’t vote for them anymore while also being happy they got funded so they can start on their project. They still get excited when they find the person or group that moves them to want to help them meet their funding goals. And they still laugh and cheer and clap when we vote, and they see the $25 go into the total on the page as I donate it while the class watches. I think they also appreciate that they are loaning money that has been loaned and repaid for nine years. We have had a single default in all those years from an elderly man in a country that was at war. We all understood he simply couldn’t repay the loan under the current circumstances. Realistically, someone not repaying the loan was as good a lesson as any other year had given us.

I can’t think of anything more selfless, or genuine, or thoughtful than a group of 12 to 14-year-olds stepping outside of themselves to do something extraordinary, and I get to see it happen every year.