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Shanghai E4E event: Linus Liang and Embrace

julia.meek@wokai.org (Julia Meek) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:53:05 CST

Team Wokai in Shanghai

How many Chinese sports brands can you name?

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:25:20 CST

Here in Jincheng, fashion for males is dominated by sports apparel. And when there is demand, some company or multiple companies will try to supply that demand. This is very true in Jincheng. Every major sports apparel company has a store here. This was extremely surprising to me because I can’t quite imagine the same thing happening in the US. Can you imagine Nike, Adidas, Puma, Reebok, Fila, etc. all having stores within walking distance of each other in a rural town?

In the past decade, Chinese sports apparel brands have been skyrocketing. One very clear way to see this is to look at Anta, one of the leading sports brands in China. Their stock price has doubled in the last 3 years. Maybe a more obvious way to see this is to look at how many athletes in the past couple years that are now being sponsored by Chinese sports brands. I’ll just list a few here.

Li Ning: Asafa Powell (Jamaican Sprinter), Evan Turner (NBA), Shaquille O’Neal (NBA), Baron Davis (NBA), Alex Bogdanovic (UK Tennis Player), and Spain’s National Basketball Team.
Anta: Kevin Garnett (NBA), Jelena Jankovic (Serbian Tennis Player)
Peak: Jason Kidd (NBA), Ron Artest, (NBA), JaVale McGee(NBA)
Xtep: Birmingham City (English Premier League)

Here's a picture of a Kevin Garnett ad at the Anta store in Jincheng.

At the most recent NBA Slam Dunk Contest, Peak was brought to the forefront when JaVale McGee wore 5 different pairs of Peak sneakers for the contest. And now during the NBA finals, Chinese television keeps putting on commercials with Jason Kidd. Here's a link to one of his commercials.

Many of the world’s most famous athletes are of course still sponsored by Nike. If you watched the French Open finals, Federer, Nadal and Li Na, the first ever Chinese Grand Slam winner, all wore Nike gear. So the question becomes, “can these companies compete against Nike and Adidas?”

Right now Nike and Adidas have major presence in Chinese cities though they have yet to open stores in the more rural areas. The Chinese sports brands have penetrated all the way down to the large rural towns, like Jincheng. Nike and Adidas have said in the press that they might consider competing in more rural large towns but that is still to be seen. Many analysts think that Adidas and Nike should go the way of European fashion design labels in the US and continue to price themselves at a luxury.

One shocking thing I noticed was the price point of the sports apparel here in Jincheng. The Li Ning sneakers, for example, are around 600 RMB which is almost $100 which is also roughly the price of Nike and Adidas sneakers in the US (Other brands are cheaper). How do the kids here afford that? Having gone to an inner city high school, I was reminded that the poor kids would just save money over a long period of time. Learning to save at a young age will probably do these kids some good in the future.

And lastly, I’ll leave you with a question. Don’t you think these logos are quite similar to Nike? Maybe a little bit too similar?

Wokai Development Update

ben@benbenson.com (Ben Benson) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:35:56 CST

Another three months has passed since my last update. This quarter much of my time has gone towards long term planning and working out details with outside vendors for projects that have yet to be unveiled (stay tuned!). Still, a number of significant improvements have been made.

Advocate Tracking Tools

A few months ago I released the Advocate Program, where Wokai Members can refer friends and earn impact points redeemable for prizes. In the last few months this program has been further supported with new and improved tracking tools.

Contact Importing -- We now have contact importing working for Google, Yahoo and MSN so referral emails can easily be sent to all your contacts. More ISPs will be supported as APIs are made available.
Referral Codes -- Members can now create their own referral codes so that handing out social cards or even telling people about Wokai in conversation can lead to tracked referrals. Visit the Referral Codes page to create a code for people to enter during registration. Anyone who enters your code during registration will be linked to you as the referrer and you will earn credit for their contributions over the lifetime of their account.
Redeem Codes -- Wokai Advocates can now sell their own products or services and exchange for a Wokai Gift Card Code. The seller simply generates as many Wokai redeem codes as they want and records which codes sold. Later the seller transfers money to Wokai to fund the redeem codes that were sold. This system gives Wokai Advocates complete freedom to fundraise in all kinds of creative ways while greatly simplifying the process of getting donors registered and transferring fundraising collections to Wokai. Advocates will be credited for any new referrals.

New Loan Products

I have changed the way Wokai's generates amortized schedules for loan repayment. The new system is much more flexible and allows field partners to choose exactly how loan principal and interest is broken down over a series of repayments. The system also prevents Wokai from having to write or maintain business logic for each field partner.

Language Preference

Wokai Members can now choose Mandarin or English as their preferred language. All automatically generated emails from Wokai now respect this setting and send a Mandarin or English version. Additionally, Member names are properly handled for last name first or first name first preference. Wokai's blog is also shown in both languages now, just click on the Chinese or United States flag at the top of the page. More work remains to make Wokai's website completely bilingual, but the pieces are coming together quickly.

RSS Feeds and Wokai API Framework

Wokai will soon be integrating with a number of outside websites and mobile phone applications. In preparation, I have put together a REST-style API framework resting upon the same scalable infrastructure and MVC web framework as Wokai's consumer website. More details will be made available once it has passed a piloting phase and I've had time to fully document, but for those of you who have development skills, stay tuned!

In the meantime, we've made a simple RSS feed showing all loans for which we are actively fundraising. Visit /loans-rss.xml to see the XML output.

Financial Posting Journal

I've improved Wokai's accounting system to include formal journal postings which tie together sets of financial transactions that together represent a single business transaction. This makes auditing much easier, allows for batched transactions and is generally more in line with standard accounting practices of much larger systems.

RMB Support

By far the biggest accomplishment I've made in the last month is support for handling RMB. Significant effort was put into reworking our financial model to handle both USD and RMB in cooperation with Wokai's partnership with CPWF (China People's Welfare Foundation), as well as allowing for for billable donors. You may have noticed the USD/RMB symbols at the top of Wokai's website. Now you can switch between either currency and all amounts on the website will be converted on-the-fly. Wokai now settles all incoming funds into RMB at the daily exchange rate (and all previous contributions/donations have also been converted). Choosing RMB as Wokai's standard makes sense for a number of reasons and will keep Wokai operations simpler and allow for future support of other secondary currencies (like USD).

Other Minor Developments:

borrower/loan profile information structure changes
website monitoring service changed
closing of 2010 financials
blog navigation turned session-less

Amazon Cloud Outage

Many of you may have noticed that Wokai's website was hit by Amazon's major datacenter outage last week and was down for a period of almost 20 hours before I gave up looking for signs of control and restored Wokai's service on completely new infrastructure in Singapore. Amazon's outage went on for another four days. This was an unprecedented outage not only for Amazon, but for the cloud computing industry overall. It is clear that they have a flaw in their design and some serious explaining to do. That being said, it only takes one mistake and those of us who have designed or otherwise been around fault tolerant architectures know that it is not a simple thing to build, much less to do it as a consumer service with aggressive feature buildout. Wokai leverages a great number of features from Amazon that we would not otherwise be able to afford, so I for one hope that they will be providing clear details on their architecture design, flaws and all, such that we can build in the safety we need.

At the minimum I was able to prove the resilience of our architecture by how quickly everything was recovered on new equipment, and users in Asia will be happy to find Wokai's website much faster with our new Singapore datacenter location.

Become a Wokai Fellow!

brendan.rigby@gmail.com (Brendan Rigby) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:09:06 CST

We will be looking for a highly motivated, self-directed and engaged individual to take up the challenge of being the Wokai Fellow!

What is the position?

Position: Wokai Fellow

Contract: Full time. Volunteer

Location: Jincheng, Yilong County, Sichuan, China

When: Early June 2010 for 5-6 months

Opportunity: Work as Wokai’s Fellow at the Association for Rural Development in Yilong County (ARDY) Work in a small Chinese NGO and get a hands-on experience of how microfinance and other development activities work in rural China. Get a chance to use your skills to lift thousands of people from poverty, test yourself, and gain invaluable experience.

What are the roles & responsibilities?

• Blog about everything you see/experience to allow online users to better understand rural China in the context of Microfinance and Development.

• Financial Reporting: Work with ARDY staff members to maintain, update and improve current financials.

• Translating various documents from Chinese to English and vice versa to better help ARDY communicate with various foreign organizations.

What are we looking for?

• Technical skills: Intermediate level of Microsoft Excel

• Experience working with balance sheets and income statements

• Fluency in English and Mandarin

• Have some familiarity with microfinance and social development

We are looking for someone who is pro-active, intellectually curious and can thrive in a relatively unstructured work environment. Also, being flexible and able to work through unexpected difficulties is a plus – this is rural China!

To apply, please email recruitment@wokai.org, Subject Line: “Wokai Fellow” as soon as possible. Include a copy of your resume and a cover letter explaining why you are interested and qualified. Due to the high numbers of applicants, we regret that we can only respond to candidates that we would like to interview.

Chinese National Treasure

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:41:46 CST

As the visa I got only lasts 90 days at a time, I took a trip to Taiwan before re-entering China. On my way back I stopped by Chengdu to see China’s National Treasure. What is China’s National Treasure? it’s the Giant Panda of course!

Giant Pandas are classified as an endangered species and in the past 20 years, China has worked very hard to conserve the remaining areas where wild Giant Pandas live as well as working towards breeding them in captivity.

The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base (where I went to see the pandas) has bred over 100 Giant pandas in captivity.

Happy Friday and enjoy the pictures of cute pandas!

Adolescent Pandas napping (They start napping at 11 AM after eating and sleep most of the day.)

Adult Pandas munch for much longer before taking their nap

Can you spot the 4 Panda cubs napping in the tree?

This one finds a new more comfortable position

Apparently Pandas also take multivitamins

Red Pandas are also at the Research Base. Despite its name, Red Pandas are most closely related to raccoons, weasels and skunks (they were originally thought to be in the Ursidae-bear - family)

Karaoke: a cause of death?

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:04:16 CST

As Evan (the previous Wokai fellow) described in an earlier post, karaoke in Asia (also known as KTV in China) takes place in private rooms that are rented out by groups of friends. As a Chinese-American, this is the only kind of karaoke that I’ve participated in. More of these karaoke joints are starting to pop up in the US and elsewhere. I personally never understood the American model of having karaoke nights in public bars, where the goal is to make a fool of yourself in front of strangers by struggling through a song. I guess Asians are just more private about “losing face”.

Karaoke (derived from the Japanese words for empty orchestra) started in Japan back in the 70s and has now become a source of entertainment almost everywhere in the world. Some interesting facts I learned from perusing the interweb:

1. Karaoke has led to bizarre murders in the Philippines. One incident involved a bar security guard who shot a man singing ‘My Way’ by Frank Sinatra because his rendition was off-key. Go here to read about the ‘My Way’ killings.
2. There is an international karaoke competition: KWC
3. The longest karaoke marathon actually happened in China. I think Wokai teams and Chapters should consider organizing karaoke marathons to fundraise. They could potentially be really successful, since we Asians love karaoke so much.

Here in Jincheng, there are not too many things to do. Karaoke is definitely a go to activity when young people want to get together and hang out. Recently, we headed to a new karaoke place that had just opened. As we arrived, the familiar flashing lights that indicate a karaoke place welcomed us. The hallway, and even the room, was quite psychedelic.

Evan had warned me that certain karaoke places here have a pretty limited English song selection (i.e. limited to Beatles and Boy Bands). I’ll admit that didn’t worry me too much because Backstreet Boys is my go to. To my pleasant surprise, this place had everything from Avril to Usher. Granted, the lyrics on the screen to ‘U Make Me Wanna’ had mistakes and different camera angles of the same blond-haired woman left much to be desired.

Even with the plethora of English songs, I gave in to my Chinese heritage and sang some Mandarin songs. Lucky for me, my parents used to sing karaoke all the time at different church members’ houses and so I had a few famous songs that I had learned way back when (吻别 – Jacky Cheung, 忘情水 – Andy Lau, 哭砂).

Two things about karaoke in China that are absolutely awesome are: 1) the real music videos; 2) the dance videos. In the US, the karaoke places do not have the rights to the real music videos. They play either some screensaver type background or some generic mountain or ocean. Here, for all of the Asian songs at least, they show the real music video, which actually makes a huge difference in atmosphere. Then of course there were the dancing videos. These are song selections that are meant for everyone in the room to dance instead of sing. There are no lyrics, just a video with people dancing. I had never seen this before but it was so much fun.

How to live on $2 a day: it's complex

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:58:52 CST

Something that I mentioned in an earlier post was that ARDY loan officers would meet with potential borrowers and go over their business plan to determine the amount of money that would be loaned to them. I was thinking about this process the other day and I wondered if there was a way to make sure that they money that they were loaned was actually used for the plan they described. For example, you could go buy a pig if you said you were going to start raising more pigs, but what if you spent some of the money on a different venture and would that even be a problem for ARDY.

The answer came rather quickly while sitting in a training session for the volunteers who are funded by 友成（called Youchange in English）.

友成 , is a Chinese NGO that is trying to foster volunteerism as well as develop non-profit workers. They currently supply the stipends for volunteers at different NGOs and if those volunteers become full-time staff after 2 years, then they will find more volunteers for the NGO. The NGO gets volunteers and potential staff and in return spend time doing a good amount of training. ARDY currently has 6 Youchange volunteers. I think this idea is pretty interesting. It’s definitely beneficial for all. Employees in their first year at any organization usually cost the organization more than benefits because of the time-spent training. This model eliminates the risk of paying for and training an employee that ends up leaving after a year. ARDY has certainly benefitted from it. One volunteer has since become a full-time worker and I think many of the current volunteers are planning to do the same.

In this training session (pictured above), it became apparent that the poor actually have very complicated financial situations. This stems from the inconsistent and variable cash flow streams. For those of us in the middle class or above, we most likely have a salary that provides us a very consistent flow of money. This makes planning pretty easy. The poor do not have that luxury. A farmer might get a good payout when he finally sells a pig he’s been raising or when the demand for vegetables happens to be high on a given day, but what happens on the other days.

An interesting book that came out two years ago called ‘Portfolios of the Poor’ looks specifically at how the poor deals with this issue. Research for the book included year-long studies of different poor families in India, Bangladesh and South Africa and tracks their inflows and outflows of cash and what financial instruments they use to smooth the inconsistent inflows. What they found is that the poor tend to have very complex financial situations. The families that were tracked used many different savings/insurance/loan instruments in order to make sure they had the cash when they needed it. You can learn more about the book by going here. This post on the Princeton Press blog has great links to discussions of the book.

I’m not sure what financial instruments farmers in Yilong County engage in besides loans from ARDY but what I do know is that they understand the wonderful financial concept of minimizing risk through diversification (the age-old saying of not putting all your eggs in one basket). The farmers here know that they can’t rely on any one venture. What if the winter is really bad and the crops grow poorly or some insect comes and harms the fruit trees? Because of this, they all have many small “projects” that they rely on for income. ARDY knows this and understands that the key to successfully making repayments on the loan depends on the overall success of all of the ventures.

ARDY loan officers go over the business plans of potential borrowers and periodically check in on their progress with respect to that business plan. However, ARDY loan officers also must take into account the many other “projects” and understand each family’s entire economic situation in determining the amount a family can loan. It is because of this deep understanding of each family’s entire financial situation that allows ARDY to give out reasonable loans that can both help families improve their livelihoods and ARDY to have such a low default rate.

The birth of Yao Ming: basketball is a Chinese sport

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:32:47 CST

Basketball has been popular for a while in the world’s most populous country and if there is one thing we know after the 2008 Olympics, it’s that China wants to dominate the world in athletics. China’s approach to basketball isn’t all that different from the way it has run its gymnastics or diving programs.

In the 1970s, Yao Zhiyuan (Height: 6’7”) and Fang Fengdi (Height: 6’3”), two basketball players for the Chinese national team, were “encouraged” to be together and soon Yao Ming was born. Here’s where someone would insert, “and little did we know what kind of impact he would have.” However, I’m pretty sure the basketball authorities in China already knew. Today, we can all see the impact he has had on the NBA and China and it is blatantly obvious to me now that I’m China.

The NBA has reached every corner of China. CCTV5, the sports channel in China, plays NBA games regularly. And by regularly, I mean I can watch an NBA game everyday. When I tell people that I’m from Boston, they immediately ask me if I like the Celtics. Roughly half of the NBA's international revenue is from China and according to this Reuters article, 300 million people in China play basketball, which is about the size of the entire US population, so you can see why the NBA has high hopes for China.

A couple weeks ago, an ARDY volunteer and I went to the high school to play badminton and basketball. The high school has a huge gym-esque area outside where there are 5 full basketball courts, 3 volleyball courts and about 6 ping-pong tables. There were half-court basketball games going on at every basket.

We played badminton for almost two hours (using the volleyball nets, which btw is not really a good substitute as the net is 2 feet taller than a regulation badminton net), before a court finally opened. We joined a couple of high school kids and played 2 v 3 with me and my co-worker on one team because we were older and therefore should be better (according to the high school kids). I don’t think my age factored in as much as the fact that I was much taller than any of them. Let’s just say that even though I probably shot under 20%, I made up for it by grabbing more than half of my own missed shots. Offensive rebounds are key. My height also made it pretty difficult for them to shoot over me, but given that it was 3 v 2, I thought it was still pretty fair.

Throughout the game we were chatting and they asked me where I had gone to college which then catapulted the discussion into talking about the Boston Celtics. Part of the conversation went like this:

Kid: Have you ever seen a Celtics game in person?
Me: Yes.
K: You’ve seen Kevin Garnett in person?!?!?! Did you meet him?
Me: No.
K: What other teams have you seen in person???
Me: Nets, Hawks, Cavs, Knicks…
K: Have you ever met an NBA player??
Me: I’ve met Jeremy Lin before (who is the first Chinese-American ever to play in the NBA after playing with the Golden State Warriors this season).
K: Oh yeah, 林书豪. Wow....
Me: So what do you guys want to do when you grow up?
K: I want to be Tracy McGrady and enter the NBA

Needless to say, the kids here idolize NBA players.

Nelson Mandela has a famous quote that says this, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to unite in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination."

I think that the NBA and basketball is a great way to break down barriers between kids in China and the rest of the world. It has definitely allowed me to feel more at home here because the NBA is something that I can discuss with people here and watch together. Basketball also allowed me to talk with those kids so I’ve seen firsthand at how basketball/sports can open doors.

Beyond something that connects people, the popularity of basketball and the NBA in China has also allowed for social development. NBA's Basketball Without Borders holds camps all over the world, including China and besides basketball training the camps focus on education and health, for example, HIV/Aids prevention. Amway Nutrilite also recently sponsored a Junior NBA China event and Dwight Howard led some training exercises.

I know that some NBA players have made trips to China, but I really doubt they go to the rural areas. Hopefully in the future NBA players can travel to these rural places during the off-season. The kids would be so happy.

Sichuanese Hot Pot

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:40:24 CST

So when everybody thinks of Sichuanese cooking, they think of extremely spicy foods. It is true that they do tend to include hot peppers or Sichuan peppercorns (“Ma-La” or numbing spice) with almost everything they cook; however, I would say that more than half of the dishes aren’t all that spicy.

Hot pot however is a different story. If you’ve seen pictures or seen it in a movie, then you know that the typical Sichuanese hot pot looks like this:

The soup in the outer ring is made using a lot of hot peppers and Sichuan peppercorns. There were some guests with us who were not that comfortable with spiciness and so one of the ARDY staff decided to scoop out a portion of the peppers. Yeah....so he took a ladle and started scooping. I wasn’t prepared for the amount of peppers that were going to come out.

This is the bowl he filled with them and there was definitely still a lot more in there.

Besides the spiciness, there isn’t too much that is different from hot pot from other regions of China and the rest of Asia.

There was one thing that I personally found odd; it was the fact that they let beef overcook in the hot pot. All the other times I’ve gone to eat hot pot, either in the US or Taiwan, beef is plunged into the boiling soup and the instant the red is gone you eat so that it’s still tender. The meat may be in the soup for 10 seconds to a minute depending on how thick the meat is. Here they just dumped the beef in and then just let it sit in there and I asked if it was ready and they told me that it was definitely not. After asking a second time I just pulled a piece of beef out and it was way overcooked and super tough. I wonder if it’s because they just want to make sure that it’s fully cooked.

In any case, everyone should try Sichuanese hot pot at least once if they get the chance.

妇女节-Women's Day

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:35:53 CST

March 8th is China's 妇女节 or Women's Day. ARDY had planned an event with Heifer International (小母牛) on this day and we zipped off bright and early to the village where the event was to be held.

On the bus over there was a huge commotion as everyone rummaged through their wallets to look at their 100 Yuan bills. Apparently one of supermarkets in Jincheng had a promotion going on that day. If you spent 100 Yuan using a bill whose serial number ended in 38, then you would receive 100 Yuan for free. So since it was Women's Day, the women were making the men promise to trade them a 100 Yuan bill if they found one whose serial number ended in 38. Unfortunately, the promotion was only for the morning and no one had found one until later that afternoon. No worries though, that bill is being kept safely by one of the female staff so that it can be used next year.

After arriving at the site, we strung up colorful flags and set up chairs and benches before the farmers and villagers started arriving. The event was focused on Heifer International’s impact in the surrounding villages and was what they call a “Passing of the Gift” ceremony. I will devote the next post completely to Heifer International’s work in Yilong and ARDY's partnership with them.

After the official Heifer International opening ceremony came a time of performances. First up was a 60-something year old woman who sang two traditional folk songs. Then a man played a traditional wedding song with a Chinese trumpet. There were some other acts including a comedy act by a young man who was from one of the villages but left to work in a factory elsewhere in order to make money. This was a reminder to all of us the need for the rural areas to develop economically so that families do not need to be separated.

The ARDY volunteers, including myself also performed. Four volunteers put on this Chinese skit, in which they take turns saying one line to the audience with each round ending with a witty phrase with respect to what was said by the others (as well a a clang of the cymbals).

I also sang “You Raise Me Up” (a song sung by many different people including Westlife, Josh Groban, etc.) I chose the song because I felt like it was particularly meaningful. The song is basically about how, with the help of someone, he/she is able to rise from his troubles and pursue greater things. In the same way, with Heifer International and ARDY's support (as well as the countless people who have donated money to them) these farmers and villagers are able to enjoy life and struggle less.

Here are the lyrics (in both English and Chinese). The Chinese was translated the night before with the help of Google and another volunteer.

You Raise Me Up

When I am down and, oh my soul, so weary
When troubles come and my heart burdened be
Then, I am still and wait here in the silence
Until you come and sit awhile with me.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas,
I am strong when I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be

灵魂失落的心变得厌倦
心灵承受着烦恼带来的困惑
我却一直守侯在寂静的夜空
直到你降临于我身旁

你鼓舞了我，让我站在高山之颠
你鼓舞了我，让我遨游于大海
靠着你，让我变得坚强
你鼓舞了我，让我得以重生

Wokai + Food Trucks: Spreading the Word in Los Angeles

brendan.rigby@gmail.com (Brendan Rigby) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:33:16 CST

By Jason Yeh (LA Chapter President)

One of Wokai Los Angeles Chapter's primary goals in 2011 is to engage our local community, and to drive awareness to the issues around poverty in China and how Wokai can be used as a tool to effect positive change. In late January, we held our first ever Wokai Food Truck Festival, and we strategically picked the neighborhood of Rowland Heights in San Gabriel Valley to host the event. For those not familiar with Los Angeles, it is a city made up of many distinct neighborhoods and surrounded by numerous towns. While the LA Chapter has previously organized events in areas like Hollywood, Westwood (UCLA) and downtown LA (USC), we had never previously held events outside of LA. San Gabriel Valley is one of the areas around LA with the highest concentration of Chinese people in all of Southern California, and served as a great target destination for our first food truck event.

With the support and participation from our friends at Cupcakes a GoGo and Komodo, we held our first event at the brand new Seasons Place shopping center in Rowland Heights on Saturday, January 29. The event was a great success, as more than 150 stopped by during the event to chow down on the finest cupcakes & gourmet tacos & burritos & TRUFFLE FRIES in LA. 10% of all sales generated during the event were donated to Wokai. The primary objective of the event was to chat with the local community about microfinance in China and introduce them to Wokai. We had 5 chapter reps on hand to speak with attendees, and were fortunate enough to get ample coverage by local Chinese newspapers, magazines and even TV stations. It was a great afternoon of meeting new people and sharing the story behind Wokai with a new and highly relevant audience. All in all, it was a great success, and we hope that it will serve as a model for future food truck & local community targeted events to be held throughout Southern California.

Exercising in Rural China

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:03:17 CST

For the vast majority of people here in this town, it doesn’t seem like people exercise very much. People think it’s a really big deal that I occasionally wake up early to go running. Running for exercise (and not because you are in the midst of a sport) is kind of foreign to them and they must think that all Americans go running because the Wokai fellows before me also ran in the mornings.

So when I do go exercise I go running up the mountainside and almost at the top of it is somewhat of an outdoor gym. I at first thought it was a playground, and for sure, some of what is there would fit right in at a playground.

The closest apparatus is actually a leg press; in the back left are some pull-up bars and in the center is something that you can do sit-ups on.

Usually there are some older folk up there when I exercise and they are stretching and doing sit-ups or “hitting” themselves which is more like taking the outside of your hand and sort of hacking away at your muscles. I think it increases circulation and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen my grandmother doing it before.

Some people here also dance for exercise. Evan wrote about the type of dancing they do in a prior blog post. I learned recently that two ARDY staff members actually regularly participate in these dancing sessions and today they decided to dance right outside the ARDY office in the alley. Here’s a picture which is not so great. It was hard to get a good shot because of the darkness (it was already 8:30PM).

Though, honestly, even though I’m in pretty good shape from regularly running long-distance, it’s quite a workout just living here. The town is on the side of a mountain so walking to lunch or to the grocery store always involves walking uphill. Plus the whole squatting to use the bathroom. It’s a workout in of itself.

Constant Improvement - New Management Information System

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:50:16 CST

ARDY installed a new management system at the end of last year that has allowed all of their branches to input their daily financial information (loans given out, payments received, etc.) directly from the branch locations. The system is connected to the server at the headquarters giving the HQ better ability to manage everything.

Go here to read about the installation process (blog entry by former Wokai Fellow, Evan Kornbluh)

The new system allows for a much more efficient way of keeping track of all of the loans. However, it doesn’t come without some difficulties.

First, all of the staff have had to spend time to get used to using the new system. This may not sound that difficult but you need to remember that some of the staff are older and probably never used a computer until they started working at ARDY (which for some of them, that means they first starting using a computer a couple of years ago). Everyone has parents that they’ve tried to teach to use some new technology and if they’ve been in the US for sometime, they definitely have had experience with computers and what not already. So some of the ARDY staff have put a lot of effort into learning to use the new system.

Second, the internet and electricity, especially in the branch offices, is not that stable. Even in the short time that I’ve been here, the Headquarters has lost electricity 3 times (once because of a kid shooting firecrackers and the other two times because of unknown causes.). One of the times the entire town lost electricity for over 6 hours. Obviously this causes problems like making sure all the information from the branches is always accurate, not to mention the inability to work when the electricity is out.

It was not long ago that ARDY used paper to keep track of everything, which obviously is a much more strenuous process as well as more prone to error. With everything in the new system, it is easier to see patterns in the data as well as check the data for errors.

This is just one example of how ARDY is continuing to find areas to improve no matter how much effort it takes.

Here's a picture of the ARDY server. A far cry from the humongous IBM servers a lot of us have at our companies.

Future Blog: This might not be for a couple of blog posts but I might be singing at a farmer’s gathering tomorrow……so stay tuned haha.

Update: Facial Hair Fundraising

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:18:28 CST

It’s been almost a month now and I’d like to just give a quick update on my facial hair situation haha. Some things that I’ve learned about my facial hair:

1. There are certain places on my face that just won’t grow hair. 2. I’m going to have to trim my moustache or else risk eating it during meals.

So before I start trimming I thought I’d let everyone see to what extent my moustache/beard has grown to. And to respond to Brendan’s comment in response to my original post, apparently I can grow out my beard...sort of haha.

This little ploy of mine has raised over $1,700 from my friends and family for rural borrowers in China. If you are a supporter of Wokai, then please take the time to promote Wokai and bring awareness to the plight of the rural poor in China. Tell your friends, tell your parents, and tell your co-workers and maybe even offer to do something like I did. All it does is prove to your friends that your serious about this and it's not on some whim that you are asking them to donate.

I know that there are people out there that are wary about microfinance, or unsure about trusting an organization that they are not too familiar with yet. If you know people like that, be sure to send them links to the blog next week. I plan to focus the next handful of blogs on ARDY. As a young professional from the US, where there are a million NGOs to donate to, I am very careful about where I choose to donate, so I completely understand people’s hesitation. Hopefully I can help resolve some concerns that people have.

Medical Care

joshli@gmail.com (Joshua Li) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:48:10 CST

So a couple of nights ago I woke up multiple times in the middle of the night with a weird stomach ache. However, by morning the pain had subsided and I had already scheduled a run for that morning, so I got into my Nike Hyperwarm cold-fighting clothing and ran up the mountain while it was still dark. After I got back I felt ok and proceeded to do some work, but by lunchtime I was feeling quite under the weather and after a lunch that I forced down, I went to take a nap.

The stomach pain came back and I woke up in the afternoon with one thought and one thought only. “Get to the bathroom!” (and don’t forget to bring toilet paper of course because here everyone just brings their own toilet paper with them). Without getting into too much detail, I had to make 7 or 8 trips in the span of 5-6 hours. I was hoping to escape the dreaded TD (or traveler’s diarrhea) while I was here but that hope has changed to just experiencing once.

I was planning to just wait it out because I got norovirus from my roommate in the US and was throwing up like crazy and felt much worse then and I just sipped Gatorade and got over it after 3 days, but an ARDY staff member said I had to go to see a doctor and after more prodding from him I finally gave in and said that I would go.

So another co-worker of mine came by to take me. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would there be a waiting room? Would some guy in a white coat and glasses take my blood pressure and temperature? Short answer was no. We walk up to what looks like a very small pharmacy and we walk in. I tell this older woman behind the counter (who, I would bet a good amount of money, does not have a medical degree or at least not the equivalent of a US medical degree) my symptoms and then she proceeds to take pills from different places and then wraps them in doses as well as gives me some powder that I figure out later is to help me rehydrate. Here’s a picture of one dose:

She told me to take a dose that night and the other two the next day. I asked her what the pills were and she said antibiotics. Now, I’m kind of wary of eating random antibiotics but I kind of just gave in to the situation. I paid a whopping 12.5 RMB (a little less than $2 dollars) and headed home to take the medicine.

Well, the medicine worked (not that I doubted antibiotics) but I wonder at what rate bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics here given that it is basically handed out for really cheap. I still don’t know the exact antibiotic I took...oh well...it's rural China, there's lots that I can't control.