Microfinance Nonprofit Offers Tours to Meet Oaxacan Women in Their Small Businesses Brian J. Cantwell - The Seattle Times
go to original October 13, 2013

Fundación En Vía works through microfinancing to support the small business endeavors of almost 300 women in five rural towns across the Oaxaca Valley. For visitors, the foundation offers guided half-day cultural tours to meet the women and learn about their lives, their businesses and the benefits of microfinance.

OAXACA, Mexico — We’d just stepped into a farm shed with bamboo-stick walls when the Mexican weather gods decided to give full meaning to the term “rainy season.” As a September deluge boomed like a kettledrum on the low metal roof, Anastasia Soriana Martínez, the smallest and most serene person in the shed, introduced us to her pig.

Over the aural onslaught, our group of gringo tourists was just barely able to hear that this pink and white swine sloshing unconcernedly in a rapidly widening mud pit beyond the shed’s eaves was Martínez’s latest business endeavor. Her source of capital? A microloan from En Vía, the local foundation that had brought us on this visit.

In fact, 100 percent of the 650 pesos — about $50 U.S. — that I and three other U.S. visitors had each paid for this six-hour tour would finance more business loans to women such as Martínez in small towns across the Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico.

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