When senior Devin Dvorak came to Pepperdine as a freshman he wanted to be an investment banker. Now his plans have changed: with the backing of a Fulbright grant he’ll be working in some of the poorest most dangerous neighborhoods in Argentina helping women start small businesses that will hopefully bring them out of poverty.
They call these neighborhoods “villas miserias” in Spanish— misery villages or “villas” for short. The villas are slums often built on squatted land out of whatever material the inhabitants can find— tin wood or brick. They are havens for criminals and drug lords but also for the countless destitute who cannot afford to live anywhere else. The future for a villa dweller is bleak and many rely on government assistance programs for a meager survival.
The nonprofit organization Fundacion Rio Suena will host Dvorak during his work in these villas. The organization started as an informal group of Argentine law students who thought the principles of microcredit could help those in poverty.
The idea of microcredit is simple: give a very small loan to someone who can start a modest business with the money. In this case it’s giving women what they need to sell a cleaning product cleaning service or clothing.
Microcredit gained acclaim when Muhammad Yunus a Bangladeshi economist and banker received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his outstanding success in helping thousands of impoverished Bangladeshi women.
Despite the success of microcredit in Asia Dvorak saw a much different reality for the foundation in Argentina. When he went to Cordoba in the summer of 2009 to meet the people of Fundacion Rio Suena he witnessed the troubles of the organization.
“[The foundation] was having really bad repayment percentages— astronomically high. They were looking for resources to sustain themselves out of pocket Dvorak said. Why did this methodology have great success in a lot of Asian cultures but just seen repeated failures in Latin America?”
Part of Dvorak’s duties as a Fulbright scholar— in addition to being a good academic and cultural ambassador— will be to research and collect data on the microfinance programs already in place so that microfinancers will be able to determine how to launch successful programs in the future.
Dvorak plans to conduct extensive research. He hopes to complete a comprehensive census of a villa that houses about 350 families and to assess how they’ve been affected by microcredit institutions. But first he needs to gain their trust.
For about a month Dvorak will enter the villa five days a week for four hours a day to teach English classes. His work will primarily take place with women between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. because he said after that the men start to wake up and with them the danger.
These villas have a reputation for being dangerous places for outsiders. The day before Dvorak’s arrival in the summer of 2009 a gunfight broke out in the street where he was about to work. The police are useless he said because they are often criminals themselves. It isn’t uncommon for them to assault people with rubber bullets.
“The police are very corrupt Dvorak said. There’s no magic ‘911′ you can call if you get into trouble. Common sense goes a long way.”
Aside from safety Dvorak points out two reasons why women are usually the recipients of microcredits.
“Women are more likely to pay back the loans and make good use of the money he explained. And secondly, he said, it promotes a lasting social change that starts in the household.
If you give the money to the women and they’re running the business out of the house it’s a cultural change because the women enlist the help of their children Dvorak said, pointing out that children would help organize the storefront, run errands or measure fabric. They see ‘we work for our money’.”
Dvorak once saw two villa kids arguing in the street and one shouted at the other one to look at the last four numbers on his identification card. “Look! That means I will get my government check before you do!”
Dvorak saw this as a sign that at a young age children come into a culture that shuns the capitalist work mentality.
The last part of Dvorak’s proposal will be to conduct a comparative analysis between the data he has collected and that of other microfinance scholars like Yunus.
So what moved Dvorak to abandon his dreams of becoming an investment banker?In his sophomore year Dvorak landed what looked like the ideal internship opportunity at an investment firm on Wall Street. He was disappointed.
“The job I worked so hard to obtain required me to call a minimum of 700 numbers per day attempt to get past the well-trained secretary and if successful transfer the prospect immediately to a stockbroker Dvorak wrote in his personal statement for the Fulbright application.
One day he was informed that the firm needed to unload a hefty block of Visa stock, which at that time was going downhill fast. About halfway through the day, they brought him a new stack of numbers to dial.
I started to see a common theme: ‘So- and-so is out sick.’ ‘So-and-so is spending time with their family.’ ‘So-and-so recently died’ he said. Here I am trying to sell this terrible stock to someone who has a terminal illness.”
Dvorak finished that day of work but it was his last.
“He had the ideal opportunity— in my opinion— to break into Wall Street to make the right contacts to become very wealthy professor Phillip Thomason, one of Dvorak’s advisors during the Fulbright application process, said. But he couldn’t tolerate it.”
Dvorak said he struggled because he loved the subject of stocks and finance so much but couldn’t deal with some of the moral implications he found in it. It looked like Dvorak had found his calling though when he was introduced to the concept of microfinance in Ecuador during Project Serve 2009.
“I saw the power it had to take money from someone who wasn’t necessarily using it and lend that money to someone who could produce a product he said.
Dvorak worked hard during the summer of 2009 and the fall of 2010 to perfect his research proposal for the extremely competitive Fulbright Grant.
I thought about it every day Dvorak said. It was the background on my desktop in case I forgot it. This is what I wanted and everybody that knew me knew it.”
Thomason helped Dvorak during the revision process and is excited for Dvorak to pursue his research abroad.
“[The Fulbright] allows an interaction between scholars of different countries?Thomason said. When you go to a different country you develop a new perspective and gain an understanding of that country that you can’t get anywhere else. And it’s not just an investigation plan. It’s a plan that from the beginning is going to help people. It considers the plight of those living in poverty and how they can be helped.”