mama rachel

a beautiful day

another week. another suubi meeting. another 5 million paid.

yesterday i completed our first "direct deposit." within the past month, we have doubled the suubi ladies' salaries. this is a very, very good thing that can lead to very, very bad choices. you know what i'm talking about if you've ever had your salary doubled. suddenly, things that you struggled for are accessible. anyway... i want to promote banking among the suubi ladies. i found my suubi lady banking obsession when i first began to visit the suubi ladies and noticed that when they wanted to buy me a soda they reached under their couch cushion and grabbed some coins. money management is not high on the priority list when you don't have that much money. but now we're giving our ladies some money and its my priority to make sure they don't lose it under the chair.

now, more than one year later, more than 45 of our 93 ladies have bank accounts. during the last two weeks of April, we paid each of the 93 women 50,000 each. we told them that they could choose the amount of "direct deposit" in 10,000 increments. so the ladies brought us their bank account numbers and i made a neat excel table. during the suubi buying meetings we asked each lady how much she wanted to deposit. some ladies chose 10,000 or 20,000. some chose more. some even put all 50,000 in the bank.

on friday afternoon i went to the PRIDE bank. i stood on line for a long time. i brought a bag of 20,000 notes and printed out my neat list. i gave it to the teller and he nearly fainted. for the next three hours he alternated between doing a suubi lady deposit and taking a customer from the line. it wasn't fun, but it was worth it. i deposited a total of 1.8 million shillings into 45 bank accounts.