It’s easy to be cynical about how technology is turning all of us into socially-backwards hermits incapable of carrying on a normal, face-to-face conversation with our next-door neighbor. Because in some ways, it’s true — sometimes, technology makes us less human.

Kiva represents the other side of the coin.

You’ve heard about the idea of microfinance? That little bits of money — usually $100 or less — spread to lots of individual people in developing countries can drastically improve those people’s lives by helping them to become entrepreneurs or just make their lives a little better. These people are so willing to work, so excited at the prospect of having the ability to actively make their own lives better, that rate of loan default is very low. No one wants to screw up their chance. (If you’re interested, The New Yorker wrote a great story on it last fall.)

Normally, it’ll be a bank that doles out microfinance loans. But Kiva lets you be the lender. You, very literally, are putting money directly into the hands of an individual who will use it to make his or her life better. Kiva is peer to peer lending, along the lines of Zopa in the UK (coming soon to the US) and Circle Lending here in the States. But unlike those two, Kiva will send your money to an individual entrepreneur who wants to better their life.

You know who the person is, you see their picture, you know the details of what they’re going to use your money for. And it’s not charity — like any loan, they pay you back. This is the woman I lent some money to yesterday:

She lives in Kenya, a good ways east of Nairobi, and runs a green vegetable kiosk. She wants $200 to increase the variety of produce she sells at her stand. I gave her a portion of that amount, and she’ll pay me back over the course of the next 12 months, giving me updates about her business along the way.

It’s a sobering feeling, paging through the pictures and stories of all the people who have applied for loans. I didn’t lend all that much money, but no one was asking for much either. I had the power to change someone’s life, and here are those lives, laid out in front of me for me to choose from. Scary.

But it was exactly that scary, powerful feeling that makes using Kiva such a powerful experience. I’m not throwing my money into some big pot with a everyone else’s; I’m giving to a single person. I can see that person on the computer screen, someone I would never have met before. I know details about her life. And I feel good about myself because I can see the tangible results of my loan.

Kiva used technology to enable that experience — in a way, a profoundly more human experience than I ever have in the course of my normal, off-line life.