This is the kind of update you never want to get as a microlender. Verbatim from my Kiva journal for one of my entrepreneurs, a hairdresser named Jerioth Wanjiru:

James Maina, Director of Ebony Foundation (EbF), has provided the update below for you. Due to the exceptional circumstances (including lack of reliable internet) where James is working in Kenya right now, Kiva is posting this update on his behalf.

Thank you,
Kiva Team
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Dear Kiva Lenders,

I wish to thank you for your continued concern and support during this very difficult moment in Kenya‚s history. We have been a peaceful Country in a generally troubled region and people sort of took the peace for granted.

The country is now battered almost to a pulp and blood spilt with vengeance, senseless killings and wanton destruction. Markets, food stores and shops have been looted. Hospitals are dysfunctional and health centers incapacitated by riots and barricades. The violence, death and destruction witnessed in the Country for the last couple weeks has jolted the Nation into conscience and every body is now craving normalcy.

While peace is slowly returning to all affected parts of the Country, the impact of the riots has been devastating. Hundreds of people have been killed turning thousands of innocent children into helpless orphans and over one million people have been displaced, becoming internal refugees over night.

The impact of the riots is most felt in the micro and small business sector. Over 1 million small businesses were looted and or burnt down destroying the only source of income to millions of Kenyans. Most of the fighting and destruction occurred in slum areas in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru and Kericho in Rift Valley. These regions are home to over 70% of Ebony Foundation‚s clients and as you can imagine almost all of our clients in these regions have been affected by the riots. Only one region- (Mount Kenya) which is home to about 20% of EbF‚s clients was spared the violence. The economy in this safe region is now getting stretched as the residents have to now house the displaced population.

We have recently completed auditing the riot‚s impact on our clients and as of yesterday about 4,900 of our clients had been badly affected by the riots:

– About 1,532 of our clients were displaced and both their homes and business premises burnt down. This population is currently housed in church compounds and police stations.

– Another 2,479 clients had their business premises burnt down or looted leaving them with no source of income at all.

– 833 clients had their homes looted or burnt down and about 56 clients are missing and feared dead or critically injured.

We arrived at these figures through a survey being administered at holding grounds, police stations, and through reliable reports from groups and community leaders. Our staff and local group officials have also been committed to conducting field assessments. I am sending a photo today which you may share with the lenders. The biggest tasks at the moment are to feed and house the displaced people, and to finance the reconstruction of the small businesses that were affected in order to enable the people to reclaim their source of income. In addition, Ebony Foundation is now helping other MFI‚s audit their clients.

Eb-F has formed the following committees to address the above issues:

– A humanitarian committee that is working with the International Red Cross to provide food, shelter and medical care to the victims.

– A business reconstruction committee that is working with the affected clients to re finance and rebuild the small businesses that were looted and/or burnt down.

– A compliance committee that is studying the legal and contractual aspects of the affected loans to arrive at the best policy action.

Thus, we ask for your continued patience as many loan repayments will be late, and it even may be impossible for some loans to be repaid in full at all. Thank you for your patience as we work hard to address all of these difficult issues, to serve our borrowers and help them recover, and to repay loans as quickly and as much as is possible in the coming months.

Sincerely,

James Maina
Executive Director
Ebony Foundation

Kenya

There are many threads unfolding about this, include some good discussion of whether to waive repayments and how to support the ongoing operations of in-market kiva partners like the Ebony Foundation. I am glad to see this, but most of all am profoundly saddened by this state of affairs.

There’s nothing like travel to take your head out of everyday life and get you thinking about things. Amy and I headed east last weekend for some much-needed R&R in Vermont, and through some coincidence of the normal seasons and global warming, we were treated to a perfect combination of fall leaves and late-summer weather.

More ridiculously idyllic pix will eventually get posted to Flickr, but a few highlights include:

• walking and driving the back roads around Brattleboro and towns around it like Newfane, Grafton, and Jamaica, watching leaves drift off the trees and flutter
• visiting a graveyard with a stone turnstyle
• stopping at an apple farm that grows ~70 varieties of heirloom apples on the premises — some of the best damned apples you’ve ever tasted
• local cheddar cheese and beer — ditto, and ditto

Best of all, we spent much of the time hanging out with friends Tom and Cathy and their two children, who live on 18 acres with a beaver pond, can’t hear traffic from their yard, and have a box of African percussion instruments and a tree-house with a pirate flag instead of a TV.

Tom (a journalist) and I were also trading book recommendations, and I walked away with his copy of Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben — which I devoured on the plane ride home and can’t recommend highly enough. It’s about the notion that our dependence on energy subsidizes a more hidden dependency on cheap shipping and mass production, and what that does to our food chain and our communities. Because it’s cheaper to produce lettuce AND ship it a thousand miles than it is to produce it on a local farm (at least until the price of oil doubles), the price at the cash register tips the balance in favor of WalMart and WalMart-like superindustries in our food chain. And much is lost in the process — including, in many places, any semblance of an ability to be self-sustaining.

Seriously, if you care about community, local economies, or what you eat, read this book. I’m not saying I agree with everything in it (and particularly I don’t think he’s found the right proscriptive angles yet), but it certainly makes a provocative book-end next to, say, Thomas Friedman.

As I was processing all this, replaying the tape of seeing Dr. Yunus’s talk last week, and after I came home to read about having passed “peak water” in the west, I came to a decision that some things must change for me. Among other things, I’m going to be thinking a lot more about how to get serious about harnessing the web (and Yahoo!) for social purposes.

Yesterday, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and founder of Grameen Bank, spoke at Yahoo!. I was lucky enough to stake out a good seat, and was very glad I did.

There’s nothing quite like hearing from a guy who has taken hundreds of thousands of beggars out of poverty and millions of humans out of abusive, village-scale loan-sharking situations to remind you what “scalable social solutions” could really accomplish if we put some effort into it. Starting with a $27 loan to 42 women in one village, his bank has to date issued over $6.3B in loans to over 7.4 million borrowers — a veritable tidal wave of tiny payments that has changed government policies and built new infrastructure (e.g., the largest mobile phone company in the country).

In web2.0, we talk about agile development, iteration, delighting users, getting things done, and what functionality to take away to make an API more elegant. In Bangladesh, a family is considered to be moved out of poverty only if it meets 10 criteria along the lines of “all family members sleep on a bed”, and “family uses sanitary latrine”.

Anyone else wanna get stuff done and delight some users? Via Kiva.org, I just lent $25 to Margaret Namyalo, a restaurant owner in Uganda who takes care of 3 orphaned children on top of her own 3. (As of this posting, she still needs some more funds.) I also just added a payroll deduction to the Yahoo! Employee Foundation, which will be matched by our founders and distributed via employee-initiated grants to worthy organizations.

But that’s just doing my bit as an individual contributor in other people’s systems. What I’m really thinking about is how to build more systems that change The System. And how we might be able to leverage and/or hack Yahoo!’s global platform to do that.
I also feel very good about my choice to skip the latest overpriced confab. There are more important things to do. Like rethinking what innovation, incubation, and platforms – three words I rarely fail to use in a day — can really mean.

Thanks to Volkswagen of America, the VW sitting in front of my house — my fourth — is sure to be my last. Not only that, I’m blogging and posting on Satisfaction about my negative experience. (You can read the full details there if you want, but the nutshell is my transmission blew up just barely out of warranty, VWoA accepted my request for help with the matter, and promptly declined it without explanation.)

The point isn’t that my transmission blew up; transmissions blow up. The point is not even that they have a proprietary part that seems to be known by mechanics to be extremely sensitive, want more than half the trade-in value of the car to replace it, and abjectly refuse to stand behind their product.

A little history: the first car I can remember my family owning when I was a child was a rust orange ‘71 squareback that my dad used to commute 80 miles in daily. I’ve owned two Jettas, and currently own two vw’s — the dead Jetta in question and a ‘71 karmann ghia convertible that I love driving (when it’s not raining or too hot or too cold) and proudly tune and troubleshoot myself. I have aftermarket vw parts and replicas catalogs coming to my house, occasionally go to vw-centric swap meets and online classifieds, have been invited to join VW clubs and rallies, and once even entered an air-cooled vw car show (2nd row, middle).

As I’ve said before, the Bug was a true platform. And trust me, I’m far from a true enthusiast compared to many of these folks - these things have just sort of happened as a by-product of owning a vintage car.

So what happens when I call VWoA with this problem? After I make a point of sharing my history and noting that a transmission failure inside of 75,000 miles is unacceptable to the point that I wouldn’t buy another VW if they didn’t help me, they decline to help me.

What amazes me most, though, is that they do so without offering me anything - not even a favorable trade-in or modest incentive on an upsell to a new car (which I would have been very likely to go for under the circumstances).

When I tell my mechanic about my experience with VWoA, he just laughs. Then he shows me the cease-and-desist letter VWoA sent him, because he had the letters “VW” in the name of his business (as in, “____’s VW Repair”). He tells me how he had to buy all new letterhead, new signage, etc., under threat of lawsuit, and that they even tried to collect a settlement from him for the business he had done in alleged violation of their trademark. He tells me everybody knows how poorly they treat their community of fans and customers, and how all the independent mechanics he knows consider them the enemy.

Thinking back on my experiences and visits to the swap meets, I notice I can’t recall any official VW presence there. A quick search shows plenty of examples of C&D’s chilling the community. Unbelievably, they sent one to a rec.autos.makers.vw.aircooled moderator. There’s even an official statement about it, noting that they’ve successfully pursued actions purusant to, among other things, domain names with the letters “vw” in them, such as “anyvwpart.com”.

I do understand trademark protection (setting aside the dubiousness of some of these claims). I also appreciate that random extensions of warranties cost real operating dollars. But what VW just doesn’t seem to get is the opportunity they’re missing to embrace, rather than alienate, their enthusiast community. There’s so much more they could be doing to put their fans to work for them.

Where are the community moderators? Where are the mechanic’s reps? Insiders blogs and message boards, official leaks to influencers, loyalty discounts? How long will it take for vw to discover and claim their brand on Satisfaction? By contrast, another german car manufacturer seems to know how to nurture its life-long fans - and actually use the internet.

In the meantime, I’ll be shopping for a car from another manufacturer. If anyone can recommend a modern car that behaves just a bit more like a supported platform and ecosystem, I’m all ears.

It’s probably just a coincidence, but I finished reading Oryx & Crake a few nights ago, and every news item I’ve since seems eerily in line. It’s a provocative book, worth reading — and just for laughs I’ve posted my review over on GoodReads.com.

I just came from an internal all-hands meeting at which Jerry Yang presided as newly minted CEO, and Terry Semel announced his stepping aside to the employees of Yahoo! I can’t discuss the content of the meeting, but I can say that this is a very exciting transition to experience, and I am reminded that it’s not the first such passage I’ve participated in in my career.

When I first joined St. Martin’s Press in 1994, it was as the editorial assistant to a guy named Tom McCormack (whose Wikipedia entry really deserves attention). A quirky, opinionated character, muscular creative judgment, an actor’s command, and a sharp’s ability to cover the angles don’t often arrive in a single package, but when they do, look out. Most everyone I knew either revered Tom or reviled him (and occasionally both), but nobody failed to appreciate him — or the $100+ million publishing house that still ran like a family affair and somehow managed to wring profit out of the unlikeliest books.

Tom was a mentor in the truest sense of the word, alternately encouraging and scolding to the verge of tears younglings of various vintages before me, but ultimately jabbing his cuban cigar at the door and sending them off to beat a sure path to success. I was last off the line (and I’ll keep you posted about the other bit); knowing early on that I would witness an interesting transition if I stuck around long enough, I was not disappointed when Macmillan, the parent company, was sold to the Holtzbrinck conglomerate a few years later.

Ideas clash and things change; hypercompetent individuals rebel at the idea of process; cults of literary personality give way to MBA’s. . . but the main thing is the culture and those charged with its clarity. Either a leader can embrace the tonic change, and the management has the stomach to handle the hangover and convene the new day at the old table, or politicians and bureaucrats prevail. At St. Martin’s, I had a front-row seat, was given a chance, and took my medicine (running a line of travel books, mostly figuring it out as I went). The house’s success after Tom left speaks for itself, a testament to the talent he groomed and the successor he seated firmly at the table’s head — the most abiding of the lessons I was left to ponder on his retirement.

As for Yahoo!, I’m similarly thrilled to be a witness to this changing of the guard. Reorgs have their un-fun parts, but change like this at companies as interesting and important as Yahoo! is right now don’t happen very often. Once again, I’m sitting in a pretty interesting spot.

History — and the shareholders and employees of a $40 billion company — will judge the new CEO with a much harsher lens than Jerry Yang ever put himself under as a Founder or as “Chief Yahoo!”. Yahoo! is in a good position to continue its success, but realizing its true potential depends on whether the new guy “gets it” when it comes to recognizing the issues and the opportunities, has the DNA and the creative vision to know what to do, and has the balls and the stamina and the sheer will to make it happen.

For that job description, I can’t think of a more inspired choice.

I’m not one for paranoid conspiracy theories, and I hate to cast cynicism upon injury, especially with respect to an event as sad as the recent fire in Griffith Park — a park much-enjoyed by me for nearly five years.

But I couldn’t help being struck by the similarity between the footprints of the fire damage and the highly controversial master plan for developing the park. I’ve been musing on it for a couple of days, and a friend convinced me to at least put the thought out there for public rumination.

Here’s the master plan map - click thru to a larger size and look for the dotted lines. (Complete plan here.)

Here’s the LA Times info-graphic of fire damage.

Now, it’s undoubtedly true that undeveloped areas are more likely to catch fire, given that developed areas are generally irrigated or paved. It’s equally likely that developed areas would be more strenuously defended by firefighters. And I do believe that coincidences happen.

But politics are already happening around this, including at least one group claiming quicker development would have prevented this fire. Maybe they are right.

In situations like this, I can’t help pondering questions like:

• Are there, say, hundreds of millions of dollars of private-sector money at stake?
• Does this event advance the agenda of those with the money at stake?
• Does it hurt the agenda of those opposing?

The first two are clearly yes. As for the last, I’ll let you decide for yourself. Here is how the agenda of the Parks Committe of the Los Feliz Improvement Association (with whom I’ve sided in petitions, etc.) is described on their website:

The PARKS COMMITTEE, chaired by Chuck Soter and Chris Laib, is fighting to preserve Griffith Park and protect it from those who view it as a vast vacant land that somehow needs to be “improved.” Griffith Park, a de facto preserve within the limits of Los Angeles, is one of the few places where people can readily experience nature. It is the habitat to a variety of mammals, reptiles, and birds rarely seen in other parts of the city.

Huh.

Again, I’m not taking the cynical position. And it’s not like there’s a history of corruption, conspiracy, or collusion in this city or anything.

UPDATE: Loads of good ripostes in the comments to a link-post over at blogging.la, including a link to this map of the proposed park features.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is to recognize a great opportunity when it comes along – and to that end, I’m pleased to share some good news.

Starting this week, I’m in a new Yahoo! role, as part of the business team supporting platform and incubation teams like MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Developer Network, Pipes, Brickhouse, and Advanced Products. These are some of the most innovative thought leadership teams at Yahoo!, and I’m excited to be joining them.

I’ll be doing a combination of market strategy, business plan development, and partnership development - a pretty cool gig I’ve had the chance to shape collaboratively with my new team and peers over the past weeks, and one that I’m very happy to finally share.

Over the last year and a half, as part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network, I’ve had the good fortune to work with (and in some cases, welcome to the fold) many of the folks on these teams, as we’ve sought to develop Yahoo! capabilities for publishers and innovate through acquisition. So I’m jumping from one innovative team to another - a very natural next step for me, as I’ll now participate more directly in the success of numerous Yahoo! platforms, in addition to getting involved in a formal incubation environment.

As I write this, I’m in San Francisco – you’ll be seeing a lot of posts from the road! And to my YPN friends, I’m moved to quote the father of American popular existentialism, Charles Schulz:

I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.

So farewell (but not goodbye) to my old friends, and hello to my new ones - though I don’t think any of you have yet been able to score well on this quiz from my uncle!

Because I can. And because my friend Ben finally started blogging.

Also because it’s baseball season.

And for a few other reasons I’ll write about soon.

I’ve read so many frustrating newsbytes this week that I can’t help seeing a pattern emerge. And it’s only Wednesday. In no particular order:

• A politically appointed World Bank President is outed for dictating his girlfriend’s outsized raises, after bitterly disputing a multi-national ethics board’s recommendations
• A U.S. state governor is found to be going 91 MPH just before the crash that nearly kills him, in contradiction to U.S. law and specific guidelines for exceptions
• White House officials are discovered to be improperly using and failing to archive political email, while official email from investigation subjects goes missing, in contradiction to U.S. law and clearly posted guidelines on how to follow it
• Yet another Wall Street darling is under investigation for massive fraud and violation of SEC rules at shareholder expense
• A troubled young student with both a legal record and a campus history recognizing him as a danger to himself and others is able to purchase a gun before going on a shooting spree

It’s enough to make even a bitter old man shake his head. But the sad thread these items share is that they are all took place despite - and not only despite, but is flagrant disregard of - serious infrastructure designed to prevent them.

Publicly debated and democratically constructed laws, transparent disclosure systems, officially monitored and enforced regulations, “fail-safe” IT systems and, oh yeah, common decency and shame are, apparently, not enough to overcome political cronyism and the human ego.

Setting aside the moral repugnance of this misbehavior, the truly disturbing thing about it is that these are key systems designed to protect us. . . from exactly the kinds of corruption noted above. Suppose someone you love were killed by a U.S. state governor on his way to meet a discredited radio personality, in a speeding car driven by a state trooper?

There is a problem here.