I keep in contact with a few of the other parents I know who adopted children in Vietnam.  At some point or another we’ve all discussed the extreme poverty we all encountered in one way or another while we were there picking up our kids.  Believe me, you couldn’t escape it.  The parents who were able to meet their child’s birth parents tend to wonder whether they should send money back to them each year; the parents with abandoned kids just seem to wonder how to help ameliorate the problem of poverty.  The problem of poverty is so overwhelming that at times it’s just easier to ignore it than to attempt to do something to help.

I know I’ve written about Kiva before, but I thought I’d mention them again.  It’s a microfinance site that allows people like you and me to participate in loaning money to folks across the globe.  Oscar and I are each lenders; I’ve been doing it long enough that all of my original loans have been repaid and I’ve been able to re-loan the same funds to other well-deserving individuals.  Kiva has done the research that I am not able to do; they find business owners in need of funds, and people like us send them the money they need. 

What I love about Kiva is that they allow the individual lenders to choose which people/groups whose loans the lender will fund.  I also love that Kiva works with three field partners in Vietnam, so there always seem to be a number of Vietnamese women and men to whom we can lend funds (and BTW, the delinquency and default rates of the VN businesses on Kiva is 0% – zero!).  If you’re looking for a way to help someone in need, you might want to look at Kiva.  Are we individually going to change the world by making a $25 loan? No, but if we all did it . . .