My name is Max Schoening, and I’ll be a Kiva Fellow in Malaba, western Kenya for the next six weeks. I’m part of a team of six students from Brown University that will be posting updates onto Kiva.org, as well as making a short movie about Kiva to show at the Clinton Global Initiative Summit this fall. Along with being Kiva Fellows, we are also the Brown chapter of a national organization called Students of the World. Students of the World (www.studentsoftheworld.org) is an organization with a mission to send college students to developing countries in order to document creative solutions to problems affecting the developing world. After extensive research this year, we chose Kiva because of its innovative approach to micro-finance that addresses a lack of capital that microfinance institutions have to work with. Three of the students will be volunteering with KMET, located in Kisumu, a small city off of Lake Victoria. The rest of us are working with Peoples Micro-credit & Investment Bureau (PEMCI), a small but rapidly growing micro-credit institution servicing previously ignored communities in the Teso District.