A long time ago, I read Thomas Friedman's "Lexus and the Olive Tree".

He describes the Electronic Herd as millions of people "sitting behind computer screens all over the globe, moving their money around with the click of a mouse." He talks about how the herd can literally transform economies overnight -- from distant computer screens in cubicles and basements around the globe.

Next week, it is likely that Kiva will be featured in both the Wall Street Journal and on a segment on BBC radio. Listen, Kiva cannot scale fast enough to handle the oncoming herd. We WILL scale to meet the demand, but not at the pace that modern technology has demanded.

So I will sit behind this screen and face the herd. Wish me luck.

I've been out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania now for almost a week. I find myself spending every other Christmas and every other Thanksgiving in Pittsburgh since I got married. One of the best things I get to do when I come out is to visit Sandra (Mom) Jackley's first grade classroom.

This year I was here for the last school day of the year so we got to have an assembly. We all sat down and obediently sang to the tune of the music teacher's animated powerpoint presentation. It's amazing how well elementary kids can sit up straight on hard gym floors for long periods of time. I remember doing that. It's also amazing how well they all sing together. I detected no inhibition and no attitude from the near 200 suburban Pittsburgh 1-3 graders on the floor.

We sang a few secular Christmas carols, then a Hanukah song and then....a Kwanzaa song. I had never sung a Kwanzaa song, but these kids had. In fact, they all seemed very well acquainted with Kwanzaa. Segueing from Christmas to Hanukah to Kwanzaa was effortless in that gym of 200 (mostly Caucasian) kids.

As a suburban 1-3 grader of the 1980's, Kwanzaa songs never reached my elementary school. In fact, Kwanzaa never hit any of my schools up until college at Stanford in the late nineties. I have reached this point in my life knowing little about Kwanzaa. Lately, in an effort to relate better to Africans, I’ve tried to learn more about anything African that I find.

I showed my ignorance on a phone call two nights ago with Moses who lives in Uganda. I thought maybe that Kwanzaa was widely celebrated in Africa. Apparently, as I have learned, this is not really the case. Kwanzaa is mostly celebrated by African Americans and other Africans who do not live in Africa. We were in the middle of talking about Christmas and how his family celebrates it. He was telling me that his family goes out to an adjacent rural village and has a feast with many relatives all together.

Then I asked him, "And do you celebrate Kwanzaa?"

"Kwanza?", he replied.

"Yes, Kwanzaa, the holiday?" I said.

"Yes, Matt. Kwanza is, you know, the first time. When you celebrate a kwanza, you are celebrating the first of something."

It became very clear after talking more that Moses' Kwanza was very different than the Kwanzaa I was talking about. He was talking about the Swahili word “Kwanza” which means “First”.

Then I told Moses, as I was reading about Kwanzaa on the internet. "In America, Kwanzaa is a holiday celebrated by African Americans to celebrate African Unity and cooperation. It is also to remember the oppression suffered by millions of Africans over many centuries."

"Ok, Matt, this is a very good holiday then. Let us celebrate Kwanzaa this year then together." He responded.

I instantly agreed and I am, as we speak, celebrating a modified Kwanzaa. Let me tell you though, that it is difficult to properly celebrate Kwanzaa unless you know where to look. This website has good instructions on how to prepare for Kwanzaa. If you start late, as I did, it is not easy. I am not trying to do everything perfect. In fact, I am just trying to do the candle ceremony. Even this, I have found out, is not easy to prepare.

The site says that the Kwanzaa candle ceremony calls for "seven candles, one black, three red, and three green". The problem here is the black candle. Ever try to find a black candle in the suburbs? Name a chain store and I bet they don't have a black candle. I even tried Michaels and JoAnn Fabrics. Each store had TONS of candles -- none of them black. The closest they had was the dark blue “Moonlight Musk”.

The staff at Michael's showed me how I could make my own black candle by buying a brick of wax, a mold, a wick and some dye. I decided just to cover one of my other candles with black clay they sold me. The absence of black candles in any major store makes me wonder though: How do most people celebrate Kwanzaa in this country? Do people have to just go to Afro-centric stores? Do the chain stores in other (more diverse) neighborhoods carry different colors of candles? Do people, like me, make their own black candles? Do they order online?

Whatever holiday you are celebrating, have a good one.

I burned through about 10 of these cards in the month before I went to Africa. When I got back, I stumbled onto something more affordable: UnionTelecard.com . UnionTelecard.com effectively ended my hobby of card collecting. With its simple web-based shopping cart and rock bottom prices, it just didn't make sense to go looking for zebra cards -- no matter how pretty they were. UnionTelecard.com changed the way I communicated with Africa.

When I returned from the trip I had a new hobby -- I spent every night writing PHP code in my bedroom. I was trying to create a little website that would enable me and my friends to lend to some of the business people Jessica and I got to visit in both Kenya and Tanzania. We had visited a random subset of the businesses started by VEF and it seemed like *every* one of them was an incredible success. I sat in these interviews, often in mud huts. Jess had several metrics she used to judge a business' success. Did the business still exist? Did the entrepreneur keep a savings account? Did the entrepreneur take sugar with her tea? I couldn't seem to find a catch. Helping people start businesses was just working.

So I got home and talked about the idea with David. David was quite a hacker himself. Each night David would stay up late helping me make a PHP/MySQL system like we use on Kiva.org. It's not rocket science, but it was my first web app. I had been programming for TV up until that point in my life. I made the app pretty fast, but it would be a year before we actually used it. It seemed like there were so many hoops to jump through to do something that was so simple at first. I just wanted to loan to some of the people we had met and document it online.

The biggest worry? Legal concerns. When Jessica came back we started setting up meetings with lawyers. This was a smart thing to do, but man was it deflating! Here are some examples of what we heard "You can't just let people loan on the internet!" and "Why don't you just go talk to the Google guys and get money from them?" and "Why don't you go work for someone like the Red Cross?" and the more usual "This just sounds really complicated."

If I had to do it all over again, I would have just started. This blog is definitely not about advice, but here is some anyway. If you have an idea you are passionate about, just try to start now. You will learn so much more from trial and error than by getting permission from everyone you know. Try and readjust. If you are doing something truly new, you will never be able to figure it all out before you start. I've learned more in the last three months than I had in a year and a half before that time.

Jess and I got married in August 2003. Before that, we took a 13 week pre-engagement class at our church. Yes, that's right. 13 weeks. This wasn't even for marriage, this was just for engagement. Did we learn much? Yes. Did we follow all of the instructions? No.

One of the things they make you do is talk about things. The obvious things, the big things like kids, money, family, and well, you know. We scored pretty well on our "tests" -- pretty well.

There were, however, a few concerns. We had this workbook. It was pastel green and pink and had pictures of happy couples on the front and childish cartoons throughout. I think it had a chapter named "Life Goals". Hitting this chapter about midway through the course was like hitting a fence. We had to answer all of these questions and write the answers in the workbook. This week, we had the question: "What are your Career Goals?

Matt 's Answer: I want to live in the Bay Area and work for high tech startups.
Jessica's Answer: I want to go to Africa and do micro-finance.

Ouch. That seems like a pretty big disconnect. You can imagine the concerned look of our classmates after our presentation. Hadn't you guys worked this out yet? Despite this eyesore, we passed the class and had a great engagement.

Fast-forward to Feb 2004 -- 6 months after the wedding.

I am living in Noe Valley. My flat-mate is this cool guy David who I met on craigslist. He smokes in the backyard each night and we talk about Burning Man. I'm subletting our guestroom to him for three months. Where is Jess? In Africa doing microfinance. Where am I? In the Bay Area working for a high-tech startup. D'Oh!

Another thing that pastel book tells you is to "Spend as much time together as you can during the first year of marriage." On this point, we weren't doing the best job at the moment. Certainly, Jessica's 3 month trip to East Africa wasn't the kind of thing suggested by the book. I was going to join her for about a month -- the middle month. So I had these one-month bookends to hang out in San Francisco and talk about neon-light installation art with David. It was like nothing had changed.

What did I do? I walked around a lot. I thought about Jessica, I missed her. I found myself trolling liquor stores in the Mission. It's not what you think. I was looking for PHONE CARDS. I became a phone card expert. These are the cards they sell behind the counter next to the bad magazines. You can find them in the Mission because that is where the immigrants are.

Each phone card is different. Some have connections fees, some have disconnection fees. Some charge by the minute, some charge by the 5 minute chunk. They all try to rip you off in some way and offer rates which turn out to be HALF of the real cost. Some work especially well for Africa, but most don't. You have to read the fine print. One thing they all have in common -- cool pictures. The Africa one's are especially cool. They got zebra cards, rhino cards and pretty much any big game animal card you can think of. I collected them like baseball cards.

And then, after I picked up the best card, I would call Jessica on the walk home through the Mission. This was a great feeling. Like a prize for finding the best card at the best liquor store, I got to talk to Jessica for a sizeable amount of time. As I walked down Valencia Street, I would hear sounds of sirens (in my neighborhood) juxtaposed with the sounds of roosters (in her neighborhood). I wonder what was louder -- nighttime in the Mission or morning in rural Kenya? Both can be loud.

1) New Businesses/New Regions

Village Enterprise Fund has posted new businesses in Dodoma, Tanzania and Kakamega, Kenya. They went up last Thursday night late. I intended to send out a general announcement to the new Kiva users, but stopped myself after seeing they we mostly all funded in less than a day. I guess I will save that announcement. Rowland Amulyoto is overseeing the VEF loan operation in Kenya and Richard Mazengo is doing so in Tanzania. Rowland is the former marketing manager for Kenya Breweries and Richard is an esteemed Pastor in Dodoma.

2) WSJ Interview

I had my biggest interview to date, the Wall Street Journal. Maybe I will see myself drawn in pencil?. Nope, I don't think so. They said I was one of 13 people interviewed for this article and have a good chance of not getting in it at all. Oh well, I'm not sure what Kiva would be able to do if we got in the WSJ soon anyway.

3) Kiva Gift Cards

Why wasn't I blogging last week? I was making the gift card feature. More complicated than I first thought...

4) Beta Round of Loans is Over

Jessica and I first started Kiva with seven businesses in Tororo. Yesterday, they all paid off their loans. I want to congratulate : Justine Onyango, Geoffrey Obanja Jasu, Apollo Olweny , Eunice Oyuk, Christine Awora , Elizabeth Omalla and Rose Athieno . It will be interesting to see what the Kiva beta round lenders decide to do with the repaid money.

There has been a power outage in Uganda which has delayed a Kiva announcement for a few days. Right now, they could really use this.