Buy Day Success

The excitement hung in the air before and throughout our first activity with loan recipients yesterday. DHF had a great turnout of women and jewelry yesterday at our first official event of the year, Buy Day. This type of activity is held on various selected dates during the year when DHF purchases jewelry creations from our loan recipients and sends them to Austin, TX where our supporters can witness and purchase the products created by our women as a result of our classes. We had a mix of women - new loan recipient soaking in the creativity of old loan recipients showing off their jewelry creations. The new twist on Buy Day this year is that our loan recipients placed their jewelry on very slick and professional earring cards. You could feel the pride as women were asked to sign their earring card and place their earrings 'for export' on the branded DHF cards. And this Buy Day for me was especially great because Maggie picked out all the goods that we were 'exporting' (I usually stress when I have to select women's jewelry) while I got to take care of other business throughout the afternoon.

My favorite part of the whole afternoon was my conversation with Nancy, pictured in the middle of the picture below. Nancy was a very active loan recipient last year, trying to attend classes as much as she could while juggling her fried chicken restaurant every evening. She loves making jewelry and when I called her days before the event she reassured me she wouldn't miss this Buy Day. After all her jewelry was selected we calculated her payment together. She sold almost 100 soles, or $30, worth of jewelry to DHF. I paid her and her eyes got teary. " Thank you. Thank you." I reminded her that I wasn't gifting her any money. She said, "I know, but with this money I can pay for my children school inscription that I have to pay this Monday, so they can enter into their classes. All three of them. Without this sale I don't know how I would have paid for it. I worked so hard to make this jewelry, it hurt. Look at my hands (arthritis). But, I didn't want to let you down, I wanted to come to the first activity this year. And it was worth it, because now my children can go to school on Monday."

We are indeed touching and changing lives....