2104 In Review

Well... we survived. Barely. With less than 2k in the bank we managed to fund 156 loans, pay for all of their booth fees for 3 months, pay our employees through March and pay off our credit card. Good news is our friendship is still in tact. Ha!

A success and yet a failure all at once. I wont rehash that - you'll have to read the previous entries. We havent started attempting to collect on the loans we gave out. Going to start doing that in February since that is when the other loan recipients were told they had to start paying back. Emphasis on HAD b.c Open Hand requires a pay back simply enough for the fact that we cant continue our organization without it.

In thinking back over this year I think my emotions wouldn't have been so off the charts if money wasnt an issue. If I could get people to give to what we are trying to do then it wouldnt be so stressful. Man I wish I was a celebrity with a charity. Piece of cake. Two stay at home moms on the other hand... not so easy. Who am I kidding, it was pure hell. And now the question comes to what does the future hold for Open Hand? Is there a future? If so, what is our next project and where the hell do we think we are going to get money for it? I hope against hope that we are wrong and that the Haitian people will repay their loans. If they do, we can duplicate somewhere else in the country of Haiti. If they dont... then lights out for Open Hand. Haiti is an easy flight and same time zone but not where we ultimately want to be. We want to be back in Africa. But truth be told - that type of a time commitment, flights etc... just isnt feasible for me with a 5 year old. And now that Alisha lives in Brazil, not exactly easy for her either. Do we step back and lick our wounds and try to come out fighting sometime in the future? Do we simply let the curtains of Open Hand close? Certainly wasnt the global impact we had dreamed of when we started this thing. Then again, we are in our first year. On the flip side is that if our first project doesn't have a good return on the money, or any return on the money than our entire model is off and we can't talk about how the donations are cyclical. That was a huge plus in what we are attempting to do.

So I dont know what 2015 hold for Open Hand. I dont want to be a quitter but the fact is the money isnt there for anything else. We exhausted our resources and then some. Wouldnt it be great if the Haitian people were so grateful they paid back their loans? Wouldn't it be great if we could be proud of ourselves and what we have done instead of ashamed we didnt hit the goals we had so desperately hoped for? It would be nice to not go down for the count over just one project in our first year. It would be nice to not have this be our only year, but I don't have the answer.

We Did It!!!

And we should be damned proud of what we accomplished in the last year. Through our donors we were able to fund 156 small business loans which combined has a reach to 1,000 people. Wow!

Even though it wasnt nearly the amount we had hoped to fund I still hope that these 1,000 people will have a better life b.c of what we have done. I hope they pay back their loans. This has been a hell of a ride and I dont know if this is the end for Open Hand. There certainly isnt anymore money coming in unless they pay back their loans.

Nicolas, our Director, tells us the people are grateful. I hope so. Enough to pay it back. I'd post pictures but facebook messsenger wont allow me to turn them into a format that will work on this blog so you'll just have to trust me.

A Well Said Quote

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Downward Spiral

The hits keep coming and this is the biggest of all... this one is going to put us under as an organization. Our first and only project and we are an utter fail.

Even though all the key issues have changed throughout our entire project of raising the money for the loans in Haiti from the loans being $50 to the loans being $300 it would figure that nobody on the Haitian end of things is even acknowledging the fact that the loan amount increased 200% from when we first signed on to provide 300 loans. Over the course of time we communicated we wouldnt get close to our 300 goal and they were aloof about it and now the shit has hit the fan. Now that it is down to the wire and the marketplace is set to open they realize we can only provide 156 loans. Not 300. Well no duh, we've been telling you that all along but NOOOO that doesn't matter. All that matters is apparently there are 300 loans we should have given out and now they are scrambling b.c we didnt hold up to our end of the bargain. Sure they arent saying it exactly like that but it is very much implied. And what should have felt like a minor victory - I've been pissed all along that we couldnt get to the 300, now feels like a total loss b.c we didnt come close to what we said we'd try to do.

The story is that Haitians are banging down the doors of LAC b.c they were promised a loan and now LAC is trying to raise the money we couldn't and of course, they are struggling too. To add insult to injury for all we know, the people banging down their doors are actually people who snubbed their noses at our $150 loans and said no thanks and now they are backpeddling and realizing they should be grateful for something spoiled little shits.

All along we had a plan in place and from our end it was going to work but the rules kept changing. We were going to take the booth rental fee and divide it by 12 and attach that to all the loans so that Open Hand would 'own' the booth for a year as collaterial to pay back the loans. Well... that didnt happen and now we are scrambling to figure out how we are ever going to recoup the money b.c reality is if the people make money they are first going to pay their booth fee and that is all that the management company is going to care about. They arent going to care if we are getting repaid b.c it isnt money coming back to them.

Its so much to write it's just upsetting. It is looking more and more like this is going to be the most expensive learning lesson of our lives b.c we will be lucky if we ever see a dime of this money and we sure as hell aren't going to go out and collect any more money since it was so hard to get what we do have.

What should have been a proud moment for Open Hand is now our lowest. And the 156 loans represents almost 1,000 people who are dependents of those loan recipients. That's a lot of people to help but it still feels cheap. Unsuccessful and inadequate. Losers. And do I really want to do this again? Hell.No.

And the whole time I'm thinking to myself, 'why would God allow us to look like complete and utter idiots?' "Why did you say thank you if you knew that we were going to be failures?' 'Why did you send us here and give us clear signs this was you only to have us come up way short of our goal and everyone is disappointed in us?" "Why have I spent the last year of my life working my ass off for something that will never happen?" "Who in their right mind would ever do this again? But more to the point, there will never be money to do this again because our key element is that the loans are cyclical. If there is no payback then we have nothing to stand on."

After all of this I think to myself - what a joke. What a joke to think that I could do something to make a difference. What a joke to think that people would be passionate to give to our cause. What a joke to think that the Haitians would be grateful for what we were able to give. What a joke to have started something and fall short of the goal line. What a joke because what we did raise isn't good enough - not even close. So I will back up into the shadows with my tail between my legs, crawl under a rock, put my head in the sand - you get the idea. I just want the whole thing to go away. Can I have the last year of my life back, please? Or my dignity? That would be nice too.

I AM GOING TO SCREAM

Could this whole process BE any more difficult? Send a check down to Nick DHL so that he can deposit it into our goudes account and they are saying he can't deposit it b.c the check is in my name but we are both on the account. WTF. I'm so over this. How the hell are we supposed to get the money into our loan recipients hands. THis is what we spent 4 hours doing when we were in Haiti. Making sure we could transfer money between accounts and now we are told we cant.

The Finish line is in sight

I wish I could just download my mind instead of writing out all that happened on our most recent trip to Haiti. Luckily, we were able to kill two birds with one stone and while the Bloom Women's Conference was going on we were also able to graduate our 145 loan recipients. Yeah. Not 300 but what can I say? When you sign on to sponsor 300 loans at $25 bucks only to have the amount go up and up and up and end at $350 a piece you can only do so much.

So here's the plan. 145 loans. $150 each for product and $75 each for their first 3 months of booth rental. Yeah, they have to pay 3 months of booth rental up front. We didn't know that so as we are sitting in the office of the Marketplace Director he asks if we are ready to pay for the booths. Of course, Alisha and I look at each other with looks of pure panic. He needs a check for almost $10,000 that we weren't anticipating we would have to pay. Seriously. But I have to back up for a second because the marketplace isn't done yet and its been raining in Haiti so there is mud. Alisha was primping herself in our room before our meeting and I was just going as I was. I asked, "Why are you primping yourself?" She said, "because the director is very business savvy." I think you guys can maybe see where this is going. So we get dropped off at the front of the marketplace and have to trudge to the back to get to our meeting. Alisha is wearing fancy flip flops and she steps into mud. And proceeds to sink and then fall on all fours. I kid you not. The.funniest.thing.ever.
ROFL it makes me laugh just remembering it. It would have been a million times better if there hadn't been a huge container of water that she got to wash off in. Ha!
On this trip we had to also open a Haitian goudes account. We already have our US dollar account at Soge bank and so silly us, we thought it would be a snap to open another account. Alisha and I only had our passports for identification and the ladies were demanding a second form of ID. Which we didnt have. Never mind that these are the same ladies we dealt with the first time we opened the account and I know they recognized us. After an hour of getting passed back and forth we were finally able to get our answer - No goudes account for us. Well... in the mean time I had asked for our balance and they had written it on a tiny scrap of paper. Being the bad ass that I am I turned to Nick and told him to translate exactly what I say. I slid the tiny piece of paper in front of the nose of the manager and pointed to it and said, "I want to withdraw all of this." Ok. So I was bluffing. Badly. Because I knew if I walked out of that bank with that much cash we'd get robbed. It's a well known fact that the tellers in banks are the ones who will give someone the heads up when there is a lot of cash being taken out of the bank.  So back to me and my badassery - of course they immediately start back peddling and telling me to hold on and they would see what they could do. After 4 hours we walked out with a Haitian goudes account and the ability to manage our money online and transfer from one account to another.