Awesome Anniversary Gift!

No, it's not quite time to celebrate my first anniversary with Dan. We still have just under 11 months until that rolls around.

I will celebrate an anniversary before October 4, 2009: my anniversary with my current employer!

Historically, the company has given employees their favorite bottle of wine, a balloon and a nice card on their employment anniversary. This has been well appreciated by our 30 or so employees—at least until our company president came up with an even better idea. Here are some excerpts from his e-mail announcing the new anniversary gift plan:

To remind everyone, we are changing how we recognize employees on their employment anniversary date. From now on, we are giving employees Kiva credit, which you will use to make microloans on the Kiva website. Oh, and balloons and the card with a touching comment from me, too. 

For this year, we will be giving everyone $50 for every year they've been here. After this year, we will add $50 in Kiva credit on each of your subsequent anniversaries. Pretty quickly, [our company] will be approaching $10,000 in Kiva loans.  

You can get to our team page by visiting kiva.org, clicking on community and typing [our company name] into the search function. 

I, too, have $600 in our team loans. I made my loans this morning. I elected to complete two loans that were not yet fully funded. One was to Beatrice Kimbugwe in Uganda who owns a small general store. The other was to Juliet Algekaen in Nigeria, who also owns a small general store. It felt great that my $600 worked out perfectly to complete both of these loans. 

 I look forward to choosing my loan recipient on July 1, 2009. How cool is that?