LOAN 2: EMERGENCY FOOD CRISIS
Aminata brought Kadija’s request to the group. For the savings group, giving emergency loans to members in need filled many with pride. They could provide financial support to their friends and neighbors when what each could give individually would not have been enough.
Kadija’s loan request received no opposition. Instead, a few women who knew Kadija’s family offered to bring a few bowlfuls of millet to her home before the market, to ensure that the family had enough to eat.Kadija thanked everyone for her fortune to receive such generosity. Silently, she worried about repaying the kindness because, unlike Bintou and others in the group, Kadija rarely made or grew enough of anything to sell. Often she barely managed to make the weekly savings contribution, a few times struggling to pay fines for late payments on top of the regular deposits. She had skipped a meal that day and was tired from working in her family’s farm plot without her husband’s help over the past few days. She sat down heavily, grateful, tired, and already running the math in her head. With millet to make it to market day, she could buy enough grain with the loan to feed her family for another few weeks. She prayed that would be enough time for her husband to get better. Her family often ran out of food toward the end of the soudure dry season, just before harvest, but this was early, and it did not bode well for the leanest period.8 She wondered whether she would need to sell one of her husband’s goats herself and whether he would let her.