Tuesday the group set off once again for the field. After traveling for over two hours in our two vans, we reached a much more rural village than the one we had seen the day before. We attended a center meeting held in the open but covered porch of one of the village’s more substantial buildings. About twenty or so women attended, and we sat on mats in the front with the field staff worker on our right. The meeting was called to order with the women standing up and reciting the Pledge. The business of the meeting was then conducted, with the group leaders handing the loan repayments and their passbooks to the SHARE field worker, who then noted the repayments in the passbooks and in his journal. This took some time, as it is a completely manual process. I asked whether they had thought of using handheld computers to speed up the business of recording the loan repayments. I was told that a pilot project had in fact been done, but that it had turned out not to be cost effective. SKS, the other MFI that we visited, also tried this, but came to the same result. When labor is cheap, it appears that labor saving devices have a harder time making economic sense. We then asked the borrowers a number of questions, and found out that almost none of them had had any education at all. Several of their children were in school, however. I took this as tangible evidence that the program was improving the quality of their lives, at least somewhat.

Next we traveled to a nearby village, and visited some women who had bought water buffalo with their loans, and a woman who had started a sewing business. The houses were mostly mud structures with thatched roofs. Inside the one or two room structures it was quite dark due to one of the frequent power failures. There is generally a cooking area to the left, and a small shrine area to the right of the entrance. Several people live in each home, and they sleep on mats placed on the dirt floors.

After the visits, most of the group headed back to Hyderabad. Alex and I, however, wanted to see some more villages, and so we sauntered on. First we visited a dailit village. The dailit, formerly known as the Untouchables, is one of the lowest castes, and the people live in a separate “colony” removed somewhat from the rest of the village, They do all the work that no one else wants to do. Their mere touching of an item is thought to make it unclean. The people we saw were in bad shape. In contrast to the warm welcome that our group had received elsewhere, we were greeted upon our arrival at the colony by an unenthusiastic and lethargic group. We talked to a few people, and mostly got short answers. They didn’t seem to be trying to be rude. Rather, it seemed like they were listless because they had no hope. I noticed that one woman had a distended stomach under her sari - a sign of severe malnutrition. The SHARE staff member who was accompanying us said that there were few businesses that these people could start. They could not ruin one of the “petty stores” - a kind of very small grocery store we had seen elsewhere - because the other villagers wouldn’t touch any food that they prepared. They were able to keep buffalo, but they had to hire a non- dailit person to milk them so that the milk could be drunk by the other villagers. I was surprised at how prevalent the caste system still was in the villages that I visited. Years after it was officially discouraged by the government, it still seemed to be governing most aspects of the peoples’ lives here, at least in the villages.

Next, Alex and I visited yet another village, and had tea in a tea-shop run by one of the SHARE borrowers. She had used her loan to dramatically expand the shop. Next door, we met a woman who was selling a king of mildly intoxicating beverage made from the sap of a local tree and some other ingredients. She sold the beverage in old coke bottles, and paid the owner of the sap trees a fee to be able to tap their sap. The borrower said that as it was somewhat disreputable for the villagers to partake of her product, she often delivered it surreptitiously to their homes. The limiting factor in her business, she said, was that she could not afford to buy enough used coke bottles or enough of the wood cases in which she stored the bottles. The woman said that she was going to use her next loan to buy more bottles and cases. Once again, the caste system had influenced her business. When we asked the woman why she had gone into that particular line of work, she said that it was because it was the traditional job of her caste.

That night I called Susan. We had had a few missed calls so far on the trip, and this was the first time we had connected. It was great to hear her voice!