Sprinkler Water is Not for Drinking: Adventures In Life, Love, and Microfinance In India

By Larsen

Faced with an increasingly toxic work environment, Liz upends her trusted corporate world and follows a dream that will take her to other side of the globe.

In Sprinkler Water Is Not for Drinking you'll discover through Liz's eyes the colorful stories of women who earn just dollars a day in support of their families.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885042260

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Sprinkler Water Is Not for Drinking

Sprinkler Water Is Not for Drinking

Adventures in Life, Love, and Microfinance in India

Liz Larsen

New Degree Press logo

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Liz Larsen

All rights reserved.

Sprinkler Water Is Not for Drinking

Adventures in Life, Love, and Microfinance in India

ISBN

979-8-88504-119-5 Paperback

979-8-88504-747-0 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-226-0 Ebook

Contents

Introduction

An Easy Target

This Is My Job

Changing Lives

Everwhite Laundry

How to Love Bangalore

Chickens in My Ceiling

Chai and Meetings

Revert Back with an Updation

Hello Baby!

An Offer to Stay

Visiting the Slums

The Biker Bar

Powerful Connections

Hiking with Dharma

Changed Seattle

A Late-Night Question

Ramadan

Ghosted

Indian Onboarding

Reality Sets In

A Tearful Coffeepot

Reunion

Temporary Lifestyle

Ice Cream and Tears

Finally, Answers

A New Life

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

For my love, Josh Larsen

Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Give a woman microcredit, she, her husband, her children, and her extended family will eat for a lifetime.

—Bono

Introduction

In 2007, in need of both adventure and a sense of purpose, I left my corporate job to follow a dream in microfinance, the concept of giving small loans to women without collateral. These microloans would allow women to start and grow businesses and enable their families to succeed.

At thirty-five years old, I had spent much of my career working in high tech marketing in Seattle. I would take advantage of the time between roles to follow my passion for travel. As I traveled around the world, my favorite part was to learn about the people in the countries I visited. I spent hours talking to taxi drivers, hostel managers, coffee shop staff, and people on the street.

During my travels, I formed an idea around families and finances. Overwhelmingly, it was women who held the families together. The women fed the family, cared for the children, directed the education, and maintained the home. In contrast, it was still the men who had control of the families’ finances. I left my corporate job because I saw the potential microfinance could have in the lives of women and their families.

While working in microfinance in India, I wrote a blog about my experiences, sharing my joys and frustrations about living in a country so unlike my own. Once I realized the end of the story had taken an unexpected twist, I used the blogs and my journal to write a book in 2010, about two years after I came home. I fully intended to publish the book, but I got busy with life. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 I pulled the book back out and realized I still wanted to publish it.

While editing the book, I changed most of the names to protect both the innocent and the guilty. I also realized our language has changed since 2010, and we’ve become better at expressing inclusiveness and diversity. The way we talk about wealth and income disparity in the United States is different than it was in India at that time. Household staff, such as drivers and maids, were called servants. There was a clear delineation between castes, with the lower classes treated much differently than others. While that offended me, I still found some of the us vs. them mentality snuck into my writing. I’ve found I continued to learn about myself and my experience while editing this book.

I also must admit living in India was personally challenging for me. I was an avid traveler, and by the time I left for India, I had been to more than thirty countries and had traveled for years at a time. I didn’t expect it to be so hard. I had lived in places like London and enjoyed assimilating into the culture. Living in Honduras, I enjoyed a wide network of both local and expat friends. In Bangalore, I discovered it was tough to integrate, and I had a hard time finding local friends. My inability to build many local relationships meant it was easier for me to live in my expat bubble, and I missed much of the local connection I might have had. Those connections I did have became all the more valuable to me.

All this to say, I apologize in advance for writing that isn’t culturally sensitive. And for this time in my life, I fell down the expat hole in a land of so many opportunities. I hope you will forgive my excesses and enjoy the story.

Much love!

Liz Larsen

Chapter 1

An Easy Target

The sharp words of the email stared back at me as plain and as painful as a dagger to the heart. I read the message again. And then again.

I knew, now.

Even if I would never understand.

Finally, all the confusion I felt leaving the last two years of my life behind made so much more sense. I could now see what I had missed all along. It had all been a lie.

Someone I loved and who I thought loved me had deceived me. We had lived and traveled together, shared a bed, and had dreams of the future. We had whispered sweet words of endearment, holding each other tightly, talking of marriage, children, and life together. But like love, truth only works if it’s reciprocated.

I had loved him. And he had lied to me—about everything.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you the whole story—the one about how I met India and a man.

Arriving in Bangalore, India, at 4:30 a.m. after twenty-four hours of nonstop travel, I felt equal parts excitement and exhaustion. I watched the luggage belt chug along below smudged beige walls. It was different from any luggage carousel I had ever seen, as it went straight along the back wall and crashed the luggage into the corners as it took two 90-degree turns. At the end of the belt, it unceremoniously dumped the luggage on the floor.

I watched as traveler after traveler and family after family piled mounds of bags and boxes on their carts, but I still couldn’t see my two bags.

In all my times visiting India, I have yet to get my bags on the first try, the man next to me commented. I should have realized at that moment India wasn’t going to treat me with gentle kindness.

Once all the luggage had reached the end of the belt, I turned to find my bags were across the room with a white chalk X on the side. Considering I had so much less luggage than anyone else, I didn’t think much about it.

As I walked through customs and a final X-ray machine, I was pulled aside, just like my luggage had been. I was an easy target being a blond and blue-eyed foreigner.

Do you have two laptops? the man at customs queried me.

Yes, I have one for work and one for personal.

You will have to pay 30 percent customs on the second laptop, he informed me. He pointed at a sign on the wall with customs fees and directed me over to the desk to pay. A man with a stern-looking mustache and tan uniform sat behind a bare wooden table with only a notebook and a pencil.

The agent behind the table asked me how much the laptop was. My personal laptop had been $600 three years ago. He wanted to charge me $300 customs. I felt offended. When I pointed out that it was more than 30 percent and the current value was only $300 total, he dropped the price to $200. I negotiated further, and the price decreased to $100.

I looked around the sparse table, unusually absent of any computer or electronics in 2007. You can only take cash, correct? I asked him. I knew from previous travels customs jobs were highly prized as cash-only fees, which might allow the man to pocket some of the money himself.

Yes, he said with a smile.

Then here is all my money. I opened my wallet and dropped $24 on the table. His eyes went wide with surprise.

You don’t have any rupees? he asked. Rupees were the local currency.

No, I responded. He shook his head that a foreigner would travel with so little.

I realized the best way to resolve this was just to get moving. I picked up my suitcases and headed toward the door. I was glad to get away with a $24 fine instead of $300, although I imagined much of that money went into his pocket.

And that, my friends, was my welcome to India!

Even though the early morning was still dark outside, I was excited to be there. I had been to Bangalore nine years before with my grandmother. At eighty-three years young, she was a fireball of energy, and we had traveled the length of India together. The vivid sights and sounds thrilled me, and I never anticipated someday I would live there.

Realizing if I wanted to work internationally, I should do it before I was married with kids, I had quit my well-paying job at a Fortune 50 company in Seattle. Microfinance fascinated me for years, so I picked up my life at age thirty-five and came to India to work for a well-known microfinance foundation.

The concept of microfinance was both simple and brilliant. Give women small loans, often only $100, to help them start or grow a business. In situations where the men didn’t always bring home their paycheck, empowering women to have control over their own money benefited the family with better food, education, and housing. As women paid back the loans with interest, the program was self-sustaining. The foundation gave the majority of loans to women, as they were more reliable in paying them back. I had followed microfinance for many years with a plan to get involved.

Now I had arrived.

That said, this move wasn’t entirely my choice. Like many major life changes, there was an instigating factor pushing me out the door, off the ledge, and into a leap before I knew whether my fledgling wings would fly. In this case, the instigator was my former boss, a woman I had admired. She had recruited me into the tech company and mentored me while I made my way through a high-profile career. I had gotten awards and top bonuses for great work, and I really enjoyed working with her.

Then one day, it all changed.

While I was doing the same work I had done for the past two years, I became the person who could do nothing right. I couldn’t understand what was going on and questioned my ability to do my job. By twisting real events to look bad, such as a draft spreadsheet not formatted to her liking, my boss had convinced everyone around me I was doing a poor job.

Just when I was ready to rip my hair out from incomprehensible frustration, I talked to an old coworker who had left in similar, mysterious circumstances. She helped me to understand this wasn’t my boss’s first rodeo. My boss would pick one person to be the target of her abuse until she told them to leave and would then pick a new employee to be her victim. When the last employee had left, it was my turn.

I knew my boss was unhappy with herself. After years devoted to the company, she had let go of much of her social life and sacrificed her self-care. I could only imagine how she treated her employees was a result of her own unhappiness.

By the time my boss got to me, she had become craftier and had convinced the HR manager I wasn’t doing my job. The HR manager, whom I considered to be a friend, sat me down one day. I explained the pattern my boss had created and had a list of my previous coworkers who had left in similar circumstances. Even though the HR manager was leaving the company with nothing left to lose, she looked at me and said, Don’t you think you should focus on doing a better job at work? I was devastated. I really loved what I was doing, and it felt distressing that others thought I wasn’t good at my role.

I had a choice to find a new job within the company or move on to something new. Recently, I had taken an in-house training for women and minorities designed to keep us in the company. Our exercise was to put together a plan for the next fifteen years. What would my next few roles look like? What would my personal life be?

Ironically, the outline of my life with a husband and kids was also a plan to leave the company. I was wary of my boss’s experience where the golden handcuffs of stock options and future bonuses kept people in the company long beyond when they had lost most of their personal lives. I had made a promise to myself not to work there longer than two years. Instead, I had visions of working in microfinance. A great dream, but I had no experience.

One day my boss told me I had until April 24 to find a new position within the company. The date hit me like a bolt of lightning. I had started on April 25 two years previously. She was asking me to leave two years to the day since I had started. I took it as a sign it was time to head to the next career on my fifteen-year plan and signed my resignation.

Now, instead of fighting to stay where my boss didn’t want me, my challenge was to get a job in a completely new field. I felt more empowered and in control already.

I started with a volunteer position in Honduras to learn the ins and outs of microfinance while enjoying the Caribbean. I visited women in their homes made of scavenged poles covered in black plastic and started to grasp the challenges of running a microfinance organization.

My role in Honduras was to find a new software system to track their microfinance loans. The software we chose was from a foundation in Seattle creating solutions specifically for microfinance. I had interviewed at this company before leaving, but after being bullied by my former boss, I had lacked confidence in my qualifications and I didn’t get the job. While working together, the foundation offered me a contract in India following my volunteer position. After the paradise of Honduras, I wasn’t sure I wanted to head to the rough and crowded India.

My second hesitation was my new boss, Wayne, who had gotten the job I interviewed for. He had come to Honduras to work on the project where I was volunteering. His title was Relationship Manager, but he dismissed me and my knowledge of microloans within minutes of arriving. I should have known better than to take another job with someone who didn’t respect me. Maybe it was my own insecurities about my abilities after my last boss that allowed me to be treated that way. My only consolation was I would be working on the other side of the world from him and would only have to talk to him once a week. That, I figured, I could handle.

All the other little pieces fell together so easily, it felt like the right position at the right time, and I accepted the role in India.

I was contracted to do three things:

1. Find a microfinance institution (MFI) that would commit to being a beta client for the foundation’s brand-new software.

2. Host a workshop to introduce the software to the Indian microfinance community.

3. Contact the MFIs around India to understand how they managed their loan processes and document how it would fit with our microfinance software.

Without an office in India, I was on my own. The only person I would know there was the foundation’s technology consultant, Emily, who was doing a short stint at the same time I was.

Emily was about my same age and height, slender, with dark, curly hair and a ready smile. She loved to joke and laugh and was fun to be around. We had met in the Seattle office during my transition from Honduras, and I convinced her to be my roommate. She told me what she was looking for in an apartment. I promised to do my best to find it. I was looking forward to having a friendly smile in my new home.

When I left Honduras, the foundation gave me only two weeks between projects. I went home, packed my stuff for India, put all the rest of my belongings in storage in the attic, and found two roommates to fill my home while I was gone. I visited my ailing grandmother in Boulder, said goodbye to friends and family, and got on a plane to India. By the time I arrived, I was worn out but excited. I was looking forward to a new challenge in a new country.

After that first test with customs at the airport, the whirlwind continued.

As I stepped out of my hotel that first day, my overwhelming impression of Bangalore was that it was loud. There was an auditory assault on my senses from car horns in all directions and no way to turn down the volume. It was customary in India to honk when you were coming up behind someone, overtaking them, stuck behind them, or any time you got near them to let them know you were there. They considered it to be a safe practice, but it sounded like they were honking most of the time. As long as I lived there, I couldn’t see the value, but, like forms in triplicate, it was something they felt like they couldn’t live without.

Liz in India

Liz in India

I had one week before my team arrived: my boss, Wayne, his boss, Aliana, and my roommate Emily. In that time, I needed to find an apartment, secure a SIM card for my cell phone, and get business cards. Once they arrived, we were making a whirlwind trip around India to get introduced to several partners. I needed to be ready.

Asking around for the best mobile phone company, the answer was definitively Airtel. I couldn’t get an Airtel SIM card without having an apartment address, and I couldn’t get an apartment without a phone. After trying different tactics at several Airtel offices, I still had no luck. I had become friends with the front desk clerk at the hotel, so I asked her advice on how to get an Airtel SIM. She said she had an extra SIM card she could sell to me. I was relieved to finally have the first item on my list taken care of and paid her cash for the tiny card that would be my lifeline around India. Only weeks later, I got debt collectors calling for her, asking how I could find her to get their money!

Similar to the phone, I asked the front desk if they could recommend an apartment agent to help me find a rental. They made an appointment for me, and an agent showed up who didn’t speak English. They said this wasn’t a problem. They would tell him what I wanted, he would take me to see it, and then they would translate again when I returned.

I wanted a fully furnished, three-bedroom apartment in the southern part of Bangalore, near where Emily would be working. I knew little about rentals in India, so I was just asking for what was normal in the United States. The agent took me to a decent apartment, but it was dark and completely empty. We returned to the hotel to sort out the problem. It turned out they had told him semi-furnished, which meant it had a stove and a refrigerator but no furniture. We tried another place, but it wasn’t what I was looking for either. I decided to try another agent I found on Craigslist.

The next morning a new agent, Raj, called to confirm and said his driver was downstairs to meet me. They whisked me away in a van to a beautiful condo complex with security, pool, gym, and women whisking the sidewalks with reed brooms. The apartment was very nice, with huge balconies overlooking Bangalore. The furniture wasn’t ideal, but it was functional. It had internet and was in the right part of town. The only thing more we could wish for was an extra bedroom for an office.

As we drove back to the hotel, Raj said, Do you want to go shopping tonight? While I am your agent, I am at your service. Please let me know how I can be of assistance, ma’am. Now that’s an agent, I thought to myself! Should I let him know I need a fifteen-page report on microfinance organizations?

Two days later, the first agent who spoke no English showed up at my hotel again to show me another apartment. I still hadn’t found something I liked, so I followed him outside, and we caught an auto-rickshaw, a three-wheel motorcycle with a covered bench on back, usually called an auto.

An auto-rickshaw taking kids to school

An auto-rickshaw taking kids to school

A few blocks away, he instructed us to stop, and his three friends also got in the tiny auto, only designed for three, with the guys sitting on each other’s laps. They smelled like they hadn’t showered recently. As they didn’t speak English, I couldn’t ask them where we were going. We spent a long hour riding, stopping every few minutes to ask for directions, and finally arrived at an office building.

I found out where they were taking me—another apartment agent! They talked briefly to the new agent. She turned to me and asked, So you are looking for a two-bedroom apartment in Koramangala? I