moo’s and baa’s

A few days ago, I left my “typical day in baku” routine, fled the traffic madness, and took a mashrutka out to Saatli, a small city in south-central Azerbaijan to interview Kiva loan clients.  I had already done many client interviews to date, but this was a first as far as visiting a client base engaged in farming and agricultural businesses in a rural region.  It was exciting to learn about the economics of cattle and sheep business!  I also visited the usual trading/services small businesses aka mom and pop stores but the small town context provided interesting color to the experience.

This was my very first interview with a man who took a loan for his cattle small business.  My initial impression was that he was dressed like a Deloitte partner going to a client presentation.  Instead we were walking through animal dung and mud (it had been raining all morning).  Anyways, he told me (through a translator) he had used the 500USD loan (plus his own money) to purchase the 2 calves in the picture.  I’m sure the answer to my next question was apparent to everyone around me.  “ok…so erm, what do you do with the 2 calves?”  Many questions later, I got the basics:  he bought these 2 calves at around 300USD (bigger one was more expensive) and will raise them for about 1 year before selling in the meat market for at least 600USD.   He also has a couple of milk cows which are expensive to purchase (1,200-1,500USD) but produce a steady stream of income.  Lastly, there are also cows whose sole purpose in life is to pop out baby cows: a good cow can reproduce 1 calf per year for up to 20 years!

Aside from his cow-raising and milk production business, this entrepreneur also has an orchard he uses to grow wheat and fruits to supplement his income while the calves are growing and fattening up.  Still, that doesn’t explain his dressing.

 

 

This was a client who used a loan to purchase 7 pregnant sheep to grow his flock to a considerable size so that he can begin selling them one by one to supplement his security guard job income.  How does he know that the sheep were pregnant when he bought them? By the way they walk! Go figure.

At this interview with a tea house and doner kebab store owner, the conversation below is pretty typical with trading/services business clients:
Me: “How did you use the loan?”
Him: “I bought stuff for my business.”
Me: “Can you give me examples of what you bought?  Doner meat?  Vegetables?  Kitchen equipment?  Furniture?”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “Which ones?”
Him: (Shrugs) “Little bit of this and little bit of that.”
The funny story in the picture is that there were a few policemen in the background drinking tea and watching TV who freaked out when I took the picture because they were supposed to be out patrolling instead of hanging out at the chai house.  Now the world knows.

In Azerbaijan, there’s a lot of store signs written in English in spite of the fact that people hardly speak the language.  A client’s men hair salon business had an interesting Azeri-fied English word on the sign.  “Gentlemen” was spelled with a “C”, which is pronounced like a “j” sound in Azeri, and an “e” was dropped so that one wouldn’t mistakenly read it as “gent-LE-men”.  Makes complete sense no?

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