Crossing Allenby Bridge

by Michael Looft

  “Incredible!” I shouted as we stepped out of the car and looked on the crystal blue water contrasted by shining white gers. The backdrop of pine and edelweiss made me think of the Alps. “You done well, Stefan! Reminds me of where you come from.”

  “Yeah, Stefan, you’ve been holding out on us. I’ve been here almost three years and I never knew this place existed,” Sarah said as her body leaned toward the lake.

  “A friend of mine has been developing it as an eco-tourist camp. So, we are one of his first guests. It’s not completed yet, so be prepared for Spartan conditions.”

  “A real gem,” I heard Mark say, and when I looked back at him I could see the flash of pride on Tsenguun’s face. This was his country, his land.

  A European-looking man came strutting out from behind one of the gers, wearing a sleek black jacket and jeans, smiling as he approached Stefan and gave him a convivial bear hug. He turned out to be another German named Dieter, and welcomed us to his camp, with two locals helping to carry our bags into the gers. The five of us shared a single ger, with carpets and décor plusher than the ones I’d seen throughout the previous week. We took our meals in the community ger, essentially a small kitchen in the middle of the tent, surrounded by thick wooden tables. My guess was that this part of the camp remained under construction, as it seemed to be missing a few tables and a general feeling of completeness. A small desk that resembled a podium stood toward the entrance, and Dieter leaned behind it at one point to sign some documents in a subtle display of leadership. The third ger presumably housed the crew, though I never saw them go near it. It’s also where I believed our driver stayed while we were there. A small shack that could have been a cabin sat tucked away behind some trees some distance away from the camp, and I wondered if Dieter lived there, but I never thought to ask him.

  “I hear you experienced a sandstorm on the way here,” Dieter said to me in a thick German accent after Stefan introduced me as Mark’s recent visitor from the States.

  “Yes. I think that’s my first sandstorm.”

  “Stick around. All sorts of crazy weather around here. By the way, have you had much local cuisine?”

  “Not much. I wish I were a more adventurous eater, but frankly, much of what I’ve seen so far frightens me.”

  His knowing laugh gave me the sense that customer service was his strong suit. In fact, Mark had surrounded himself with friendly, fun-loving people that didn’t take themselves too seriously. Not the world I was used to. I wondered if far-off lands tended to attract affable expats who could roll with the punches, and the ones who couldn’t stomach it either moved on or stayed home to begin with. I knew a lot of people that wouldn’t set foot outside the U.S., and in that vein Mark was my sole reason for venturing out of my usual geographical comfort zone. Despite the unfolding beauty before me, I still wasn’t sure if I would have gotten on a plane to Mongolia if it weren’t for Mark. Even when his quiet ways placed him in the background, he still stood in the foreground of my mind. Like an owl casting wise glances down from the darkened branch.

  Dieter introduced me to local dishes that made me wonder if I was going to be sent home in a wooden box. Lunch consisted of Boodog, a skinned marmot sewn back up with a hot rock in its belly, cooking the meat from the inside out. I washed this down with Airag, which I’d sipped earlier in the week not realizing I was being served milk from a horse. Stefan’s vodka chaser gave me some comfort in believing that I might thwart trouble through its healing effects, as he was careful to point out. Even pondering this showed just how far out of my mind I had gone. I was putting my faith in two Germans that showed a deep conviction that these foreign objects would not harm a delicate system weakened through a steady diet of organic vegetables and farm-raised animals. Marmots were free-range, right?

  After a hike around the lake and a long rest, we were served a dinner of mutton cooked over an open fire, a staple of the Mongolian diet. I had given up hope of survival and just plowed through whatever food they put in front of me, believing the beer and vodka might help kill off whatever was already trying to destroy me from within. Of course, the others, particularly Tsenguun and Sarah, giggled at the change in my face whenever they described the contents of each dish. I couldn’t help but join their laughs as I pushed off concerns of how many nighttime visits I’d have to make to the little bathhouse hut that Dieter pointed out earlier but that I had yet to inspect. Sarah was sitting across from me, and though she and Mark sat close to each other and I noticed an arm stretched out over his thigh, she seemed more interested in my side of the table, leaving Mark and Stefan to a technical discussion on the solar panels Dieter was trying to install on the property.

  “I hear you’re developing a website?” I asked her. She nodded her head and threw back a shot of vodka–at least her fourth of the evening. “What is it about?”

  “It’s a site that allows people to loan money to other people.”

  “Interesting. Tell me more.” When she sensed genuine interest and not just sauced-up conversation, her face lit up with a radiance that almost hurt to look at.

  “Well, I was a community economic development volunteer with the Peace Corps. Just finished. Lots of people need loans for businesses but even some of the MFIs won’t lend to them.”

  “MFIs?”

  “Sorry, microfinance institutions. They’re small banks that serve the poor. The bigger ones don’t want to work with them because it just doesn’t pay to give someone a five-hundred-dollar loan, much less open a bank account for a few dollars.” Her comment reminded me of when I opened my first bank account with five dollars on my seventh birthday. Back then it might have been manageable for banks, considering they counted on roping a little boy in for a lifetime of deposits.

  “Yeah, I think Mark mentioned something about these banks. So, why won’t these MFIs lend to them? Collateral reasons?”

  “Sometimes, depending on the type of loan. It often comes down to basic supply and demand. MFIs have a different mission than regular banks. Serving the poor is expensive, so attracting investment is difficult. To fund their loan portfolio, many of them have to borrow that money in the market just like everyone else.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Yeah, so they reach their limit on how many people they can serve. My site will help them get access to that capital not from the financial markets, but from everyday people over the Internet. If somebody needs a loan for five hundred dollars, I would put that up on the website and somebody else out there from the U.S. or wherever would fund it.”

  “How much interest would you charge on the loan?”

  “I’m not sure yet. That’s a big question. I would love to charge no interest at all, but that doesn’t seem sustainable without some kind of fee. Anyway, it’s still in the design phase and I don’t have all the details worked out yet. It’s also a little out of my reach when it comes to programming. I can do a little, but this would require transaction processing, and that’s way out of my league.”

  “I’m sure Mark can help you with that, though.” I winked at her and she shot Mark a quick loving glance.” I’m not sure how much Mark told you, but I used to be in banking and I’m very intrigued by this idea, Sarah. I think you’ve got something here–giving people access to finance through the general public and bypassing the banks altogether. How do you intend to attract investors? I mean, the people who are going to fund these small loans?”

  “I plan on posting a picture of the entrepreneur and a story about them–just a few paragraphs about their business and family life. I figure that even if somebody’s half way around the world, they can still connect with someone else in need and lend them a hand. A picture and a story can be quite captivating, don’t you think?”

  “Disruptive! I think it might just work. Let me know if you ever need any help. I mean that.”

  “Well, thank you, Harry. That means a lot to me, and I might just ask for that someday.” She leaned back with a soft smile and tilted her
head at me. I could sense we were two souls seeing through all that surface clutter and saying, “good to meet you” to one another. Elena referred to those as Namaste moments. It wasn’t much different than the time I sat down with Mark at the cafe nearly a year earlier. Sarah’s mention of these MFI banks intrigued me, and I wanted to learn more about them. Of course, all of that was on hold because the Boodog, Airag, and whatever else I piled down my throat hit me like a mule kick after we returned to UB, forcing me to spend the next several days no more than ten feet from a toilet.

  CHAPTER 4 | MONGOLIAN Microfinance

  Once I recovered from whatever hammered away on my vital organs, I decided to leave Mongolia before it killed me. I was determined to first establish a connection with these MFI banks. If MFIs were indeed working with the poor, people like Bold might be able to receive the loan they needed through some creative financing avenues. A handful of them operated in Mongolia, and Sarah knew them all. She made appointments for me to meet with the chief executives and since they all held a decent command of English, I could travel there by myself if I wanted to.

  Of course, I hired Sarah to accompany me to the meetings, though she refused to let me pay her. My intuition about her proved correct as everyone we met lit up when they saw her coming through the doors. She also spoke their language quite well, or at least it seemed that way from the pleasantries she exchanged with each person she encountered. Like the rest of Mark’s new friends, she represented a breed apart–whip-smart young people hungry to tackle poverty head on using sustainable business models rather than sink-hole aid programs. Of course, I was still skeptical of the efficiency of sitting around drinking tea and trying to sell forty-dollar cook-stoves to people lacking the wherewithal to buy it.

  Despite their forward-thinking brand of poverty alleviation, the Mongolian MFIs seemed to have a similar hierarchical undertone to the world I had come from, where age and gender remained key ingredients to the ladder of success; although recent events in my life were revealing widening cracks in that old paradigm. At one meeting I found a University of Chicago trained MBA hunched next to his imposing father who played the role of board chair like a great Khan letting his fledgling son lead a small band into battle–a son who would no doubt rule over more kingdoms than the father. The head of another MFI, an octogenarian expat from the UK, bragged of driving out the local staff and replacing them with “good” people–ones who resembled younger versions of him. I could country bash with the best of them, but I found it a bit queer that a man who’d spent the past five years trying to help people would say, “This whole country is a bloody mess. What it really needs is a benevolent dictator like they have in Singapore. That would shape them up!” I passed on investing with either of those organizations.

  I did find a small MFI pliable enough to take on a term loan just below market rates. This put me at ease because my fallback was to loan money outright to Mark’s organization, but that would have been a much smaller sum since I was leery of the risk given their lack of lending experience. After spending three days in due diligence meetings with their able leader named Zorigoo, along with his staff and the clients they serve, I struck a tentative deal to let them use my money for a year for business loans, with a portion set aside to allow some of Mark’s clients to finance his clean energy products without the need to conjure up a fake business. I set an effective date for the following month to finalize the terms to give me a chance to do a little more homework–specifically on the whole microfinance industry–before committing any philanthropic capital.

  Spending time with Sarah, I learned a great deal more about economic development and the various actors working in Mongolia. The entire concept of helping people through small banks devoted to the poor appealed to me: micro-finance vs. macro-finance. This meant no big government aid programs or giveaways that often amounted to bureaucrats lining their pockets and wasting time and resources. Knowing that people got to use my money and had to pay it back in return without losing their shirts comforted me because there’s nothing worse than enabling other people to sit on their asses and do nothing on someone else’s dime, especially mine! I felt some connection to this avenue of finance beyond what I expected. After thirty years hyper focused on mitigating risk, I wasn’t about to throw good money after bad just because some little baby made me cry. My reasoning faculty still held the reins, though I sensed I was stepping into a potential minefield that I knew little about.

  I spent a few more days in UB, poking around and buying some cashmere presents for Elena. I was missing her warm touch and although the weather in UB started to warm up in the afternoons, I was ready to fly back home to some clean air. Stefan threw me a small party at their concrete house before I left. I regretted not having spent much time with Mark beyond that first week, much less than I anticipated. He was a contemplative soul to be sure, but I wondered if his own personal journey was much more difficult than I imagined. He seemed to be in love with Sarah, and while at the eco-tourist hotel I couldn’t help noticing them taking a slow stroll that next morning around the lake, holding hands and moving at an easy pace. In her and Stefan he had found a pair who seemed to be guiding him in a healthy direction.

  The cynical part of me imagined that they saw in me just a pseudo-philanthropic mark who could fund their ventures. They were all too idealistic and genuine for that sort of thing, though, and the many deep conversations I had with them over the three weeks I spent in Mongolia gave me glimpses into the purity of their souls. Even so, it wouldn’t have mattered to me since most friendships carry some measure of utility no matter the connection; and the world that they were opening me up to already proved much more promising and meaningful than the one I had just left.

  Part III | THE PHILIPPINES

  CHAPTER 1 | HOME

  For the first three days after my return my apartment transformed into a catacomb of delivered meals and sleep depravity. The Benadryl didn’t work this time and I suffered trying to switch back over to San Francisco time while force feeding fresh organic vegetables into my system. Few people mention this part of long-range travel and jet lag–getting one’s bowels back in order. Normally, I could set my watch by my morning movements. Getting that rhythm on track was a long time coming, and for the first week I felt like the lower half of my body had transformed into a sewer system. No doubt the salt and chemical-ridden airline food contributed much to that. Elena stopped over on the second day to bring some beauty back into my life. She had a way of saying a lot without saying a word, and I snuggled into her bosom for a mid-afternoon slumber. After years of an iceberg marriage punctuated by short romances based on utility disguised as lust, I reveled in her warmth and gentle touch. She also taught me a few short meditations, which helped me relax and keep my mind from racing at times when I couldn’t sleep.

  The next few weeks I committed to researching as much as I could on microfinance and to get a handle on this alternative method of financing. I read the book Banker to the Poor, written by Muhammad Yunus, a Vanderbilt trained economist from Bangladesh who saw that the trickledown economic theories he was teaching in the university were having little effect on the poverty in his country–a country dominated by the poor. So, he went out to a village and loaned twenty-seven dollars out to a group of forty-two people. That was enough money to either start their own businesses, or at the very least use the money to purchase raw materials they previously had to borrow for at exorbitant rates. Later, this would grow into millions of dollars as he created a microfinance bank and named it Grameen (meaning “village” in Bengali). Reading his story and how he spent four decades transforming the lives of millions of people felt like a profound wave crashing over me and I knew I wanted to be part of it. What most intrigued me were his statistics on the high repayment rate of borrowers–hovering around ninety-eight percent. I had heard hints of this in Mongolia, and as it was explained to me, for many people this might be their first and last chance to take a loan. As such, they didn’t
want to screw it up. Even the loan sharks wouldn’t take a chance on most of them. The lending was often done in groups. So, people relied on social support, and even peer pressure to help pay back a loan. One thing I remember Zorigoo in Mongolia saying to me was that everyone was born an entrepreneur, and it was up to MFIs to tap into it. As I read Yunus’ book, I came across the inspiration for Zorigoo’s statement:

  If all of us started to view every single human being, even the barefooted one begging in the street, as a potential entrepreneur, then we could build an economic system that would allow each man or woman to explore his or her economic potential.

  Those words resonated with me, as I’d spent decades supporting entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. Of course, none of this material was covered in any of my MBA courses over at Wharton. The basics were easy to grasp, essentially loaning and collecting small amounts of money to poor people, often via weekly group meetings. I had to adjust my opinions around creditworthiness. I’d grown up believing that poor people were lazy and prodigal, forgetting the dire straits my own family faced throughout my childhood. What I’d seen on the ground in Mongolia, buttressed by strong repayment rates captured in financial statements, dissolved that belief.

  While I spent the next few weeks reading up on this new world, I also got my body back into shape and spent as much time as I could with Elena. She said she noticed a gleam in my eye that she’d caught mere glimpses of when we first met–a gleam that was now burning brighter the more I waded into this world of banking for the poor. I didn’t notice it myself. All I knew is that I was finally excited about something beyond my own little world and what advantages I could wrangle out of it. Of course, I did see myself in the role of rescuing people from a miserable existence. Is that so bad?