In February of 1993 the Madison Indochina Support Group was formed and took on as its first project a request by the Women’s Union of Quang Ngai Province, to raise $3,000 to create a revolving loan fund in My Lai, Vietnam. This loan fund, based on the concept developed by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, provides small loans to very poor women. Health care and family planning are incorporated into the monthly meetings of the recipients of the loan fund. At the end of the loan period the funds are repaid and then loaned out to another group of poor women.

Training session for new borrowers of the My Lai Loan Fund. These training sessions last five days and cover all the information, from animal husbandry to paperwork, these women will need to succeed in their businesses.

Since that small beginning the Madison Quakers, who took over sponsorship of all projects the following year, 1994, have established loans in seventeen villages and have provided over 2,500 loans to poor women. Investment for each loan fund now averages $8,000 per village and for the last five years most loan funds have been established in ethnic minority villages in Quang Ngai Province.

Numbers alone, however, cannot communicate the real impact these loans have on the lives of poor women. The story of Mrs. Pham Thi Huong, below, illustrates the potential these loan funds have for profound change on the lives of women who receive them.

MRS. PHAM THI HUONG
In the year 2000 we established a loan fund in Truong Khanh village. Whenever we fund a new project like this our project coordinator, Mr. Phan Van Do, and I return to the village to meet with some of the women who have received loans. One of the women we met that year was Mrs. Pham Thi Huong. She took us to her cow pen to show us the cow she had bought with her loan. She told us she had already had the cow artificially inseminated so when the calf was born and weaned she could sell the calf and repay the loan. She could then keep inseminating the cow to build up a herd and would then have a sustainable business.

Do had told me the night before we visited Truong Khanh village that in April, 1969, this village had also suffered a massacre by American soldiers. When Mrs. Huong finished telling us about her cow Do asked her about the massacre. I watched as she talked to Do about the massacre and then she began sobbing and couldn’t finish. She said she had survived the massacre but her aunt and two children were killed. The massacre at My Lai took place over a period of only four hours. The massacre at Truong Khanh took place over a period of two days. The American soldiers kept returning to shoot anyone they saw but were mostly concerned about hiding the evidence of the massacre. So they burned and partially buried the bodies. It was days before the villagers felt safe enough to come out of hiding to unearth the bodies to bury them properly. Bodies rot quickly in tropical heat. The last thing Mrs. Huong said to us before she broke down was “I cannot forget the smell of the decomposing bodies of my children”.

As Do and I stood with her in front of the mud hovel she was living in it seemed to me she had died along with her children. She was walking and talking but dead inside. And understandably so, because what mother could live with that memory. But I was wrong.

RESURRECTION
Two years later Do and I returned to Truong Khanh to again visit with some of the women who had received loans two year before. Mrs. Huong and Mrs. Du, Chair or the Truong Khanh village Women’s Union, were eagerly awaiting us on a motorcycle outside the village. They enthusiastically led us around the village showing us the improvement in the lives of the women over the previous two years. Mrs. Huong was a different woman. She was talking and laughing and her eyes were bright and shiny and alive. Do asked the neighbors what had happened to cause such a dramatic change in her and they said that once she was able to sell calves from her cow that at long last the crushing burden of poverty she had been living under had lifted enough so that she could begin to heal.

Over the years I have seen this kind of dramatic change in the lives of women who have received loans. What this has shown me is that these loans to poor women offer more than economic aid, they also provide what can only be termed spiritual aid.

Click here for more photos of women who have received loans.