Education changes everything.
Just outside of my office at BancoFie is a poster that caught my eye on my first day of work as a Vittana Fellow. It says:“La Paz no es un obyecto encontrado por casualidad. Es el producto de la igualidad entre los hombres.” – -“Peace is not an object found [...]
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“What happens to Africa matters to the world.” – Patrick Awuah As a fellow in Ghana doing market research on the potential for an education loan I, along with [...]
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“Rainy season” in the Philippines is no joke. For about seven months a year, the Philippines is riddled with perpetual downpours and frequent typhoons. Since I have been in the Philippines there have been nearly twenty typhoons, most of them consisting of very heavy rains and mild flooding. My street [...]
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The other day, I came across a what seemed like a strange clause in the policy for ASKI and Vittana’s pilot Loan for Educational Development Program (LEAP): Only third and fourth year students would qualify for a loan. I found myself wondering, what kind of impact are we making when [...]
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We’re floored on a daily basis by students who have struggled against all odds to finish their education, lenders who time and again come back to change yet another person’s life, and Fellows who dedicate a portion of their own lives to bringing microloans to more students in developing countries. [...]
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Ernie, Tri, and Fitra were the first Vittana students I met in Indonesia. I remember walking into Ernie’s home, into her family’s modest, dimly lit living room and being greeted by her mother and aunt who carried trays of cookies and iced drinks to the table. We sat and exchanged [...]
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As I sit here on the day before Thanksgiving, what comes to mind is the over 250 students on Vittana right now who are poised to transform their lives by continuing their education. Whether it’s Omar Ahmad‘s desire to become a civil engineer in Jordan or Lidia Severina Aban‘s goal [...]
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As a Vittana Fellow I find myself often comparing my educational experience and my life in the United States to what I see on the ground here in the Philippines. Although the Philippines is a far cry from Washington State there are still many similarities between my life there and [...]
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I must admit I knew very little about the Philippines before I arrived. What I did know was that it’s an archipelago in South East Asia and the only Christian nation in Asia. I knew basically nothing about what the people, politics, economy or food was like. It was a [...]
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Ithaca is a small town, home to around 30,000 people and Cornell University- which is situated on a hill above Cayuga Lake in Central New York. I spent the past four years studying Economics, Philosophy, and Psychology in this frigid island of academia far away from my home in sunny [...]
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