Linking travelers and Gypsy entrepreneurs

Another side of Bulgaria

SLIVEN, Bulgaria — Meet Diana, a traveling sock saleswoman, and Silvia and Todor, a couple who make a living selling firewood.

These budding entrepreneurs are members of one of the biggest concentrations of Roma in Eastern Europe.

More commonly known as Gypsies, they are the people almost anyone here will tell travelers to avoid.

About a month or so ago, my husband and I did something most Bulgarians would also advise against — We made Diana, Siliva and Todor small business loans.

Working through Kiva.org, a San Francisco non-profit that pairs people like us with those in developing countries in need of a banker, we loaned $25 to Diana and another $25 to Silvia and Todor. Along with money provided by 31 other Kiva lenders, including an author of children's' books in Oregon and a bus driver in Seattle, Diana raised $1,000. Silvia and Todor, with 21 investors, from Oslo, Norway to Miami Beach, raised $750.

When I found out Sliven was just a two-hour bus ride away from where we planned to be in Veliko Tarnovo, I asked Kiva about the possibility of visiting our new business partners.

They put me in touch with Greg Kelly, a 30-year-old U.S. Peace Corps volunteer who organized the loan program here with a non-profit business incubator organization called REDC, funded by Hungarian-American businessman George Saros.

Yesterday, we veered off the tourist path to meet our borrowers and see how business was going.

Dressed in capri pants and a pink t-shirt with "New York" stenciled across the front, Diana, 26, is a mother of two with dark eyes and shoulder-length black hair.

She and her husband, a meatpacker, have a modest brick-and-concrete house in the better of two Roma neighborhoods. The other, known as the ghetto, is literally across the railroad tracks, cut off from the markets, cafes and shops of mainstream Sliven by a wall on three sides.

Diana worked in a canning factory for a while, tried babysitting, then started her sock business five years ago.

Her business plan is simple: She buys socks for about 35 cents a pair, and travels in a chartered mini-van to markets four days a week where she sells the socks for 70 cents, undercutting the regular stores by half.

She nets around $150 a month, a decent amount here, but without collateral and co-signers, it's unlikely any bank would make her a loan.

With her Kiva money, she'll be able to expand her inventory of sock styles, buy a sign for her stall and an awning to protect her inventory when it rains.

Todor, 30, and Silvia, 25, ball caps shading them from the sun, proudly displayed the large ax they recently bought so they can split their firewood and attract customers with small stoves.

Many people cook and heat with wood here, and Todor and Silvia hope to use their money to buy a new truck double the size of their present one, and generate regular clients by providing home delivery services.

Diana, Silvia and Todor will repay their loans over the next year and a half. Neither Kiva nor the lenders like us collect any interest.

Unemployment among Buglarians in general is as high as it is everywhere in Eastern Europe. Private companies took over some formerly state-owned factories after Communism fell in 1989, but they employ far fewer people, and many lack the job skills to compete in the new market economy.

Unemployment among the Roma is even higher, and the prejudice against them is often openly expressed.

"Eat, drink, babies, go," is how one Bulgarian I met described his impression of the Gypsy lifestyle.

Lacking jobs and political clout, many get by on welfare. Some show up at train stations to beg with babies in their arms or teach their kids to steal.

Those are the ones tourists tend to encounter.

Many more — Diana, Silvia, Todor and others we met during a walk though the ghetto with Greg Kelly — are settled in towns like Sliven. They want to work, send their children to school and build a future.

I feel lucky to have had the chance to see this other side.

Kelly, who with REDC, has set up 35 Kiva loans in Sliven, mostly for Roma borrowers, says: "These are the seeds of entrepreneurship. It's just a beginning."