The Peasant and the Professor: On Trust, Microcredit, and World Poverty

A Eureka Moment 

Dr Muhammad Yunus was a Vanderbilt-educated professor of economics at Chittagong University, who had only recently completed studies in the United States as a Fulbright scholar. Sufia Begum was a shy, miserably poor mother of three. At 21, she looked twice her age. Her fingers were calloused from making bamboo stools. Even though she worked seven long days a week, she could barely survive and feed her family. For each elegant stool she crafted, she borrowed nine cents from a moneylender for raw materials. The arrangement required her to sell everything back to him at the price he dictated, which was far below market value. Her profit was two cents per stool.

Yunus said, “I thought to myself, my God, for [two cents] she has become a slave. … I couldn’t understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things.”3 He calculated that Begum was paying an interest rate of 10% a day, more than 3,000% a year.

Yunus knew, of course, that her situation was not unique. The extremely poor are trapped in similar situations all over the world. Although they work hard and create wealth, nearly all of it goes to moneylenders and employers who pocket the fruits of their labor. Having no collateral for loans, the abject poor are not considered “bankable” by commercial lending institutions. They borrow where they can, from moneylenders who charge usurious interest rates. As a consequence, they remain trapped in poverty, toil, and exploitation all their life, because they cannot find the financial traction required for a meaningful beginning.

Summing up their plight, Yunus says, “We’ve created a world that goes around with money. If you don’t have the first dollar, you can’t catch the next dollar.”4 Or as economist Jeffrey D. Sachs observes in his book The End of Poverty, “At the most basic level, the key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung.”5

The day following his encounter with Sufia Begum, Yunus and his students did a survey in Jobra and found that 42 other villagers had arrangements with moneylenders similar to Begum’s, and that they owed a total of about $27. By this point, Yunus recalls, “I couldn’t take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves.” Yunus’s on-the-spot loan amounted to about 62 cents per borrower. They could pay him back, he told them, whenever they could. His strategy was for them to buy their own materials and bypass the lenders.3

They all paid him back, a little at a time, over a year. Yunus’s experiment created excitement among the villagers. “If I could make so many people so happy with such a tiny amount of money, why not do more of it?” he asked himself. He began to consider whether or not his experiment could be replicated on a nationwide scale.

Yunus describes his chance meeting with Sufia Begum as his “eureka moment.”3 It may have been that, but it was also a perfect combination: a poverty-stricken woman met a man who possessed uncommon compassion and a magnificent imagination.

The result was Yunus’s founding of the Grameen Bank. (Grameen is derived from gram, the Bengali word for village.) Today, Grameen Bank has 2,259 branches that give collateral-free loans to nearly seven million people, 97% of whom are women. There are branches in nearly 73,000 villages in Bangladesh, which is almost 90% of the villages in the country. Thirty thousand scholarships and 13,000 student loans are given annually. Grameen Phone, a subsidiary mobile phone company, has 10 million subscribers in Bangladesh’s villages. A chain of Grameen eye hospitals provides care to tens of thousands of peasants who otherwise would be condemned to a life of blindness.6, 7

In thousands of articles, economists, academicians, and development specialists worldwide have tried to analyze why the Grameen concept works. In retrospect, the underlying idea seems so simple and obvious that one wonders why it was so long in coming.

The fact is that Yunus could see what bankers could not see, and this enabled him to turn conventional banking on its head. He envisioned a bank that would loan money based on a borrower’s level of desperation, in which, as he put it, “the less you have, the higher priority you have” for a loan. Commercial banks take the opposite approach. They look down on the extremely poor as bad credit risks. Not Yunus. “We’re not talking about people who don’t know what to do with their lives,” he says. “They’re as good, enterprising, as smart as anybody else.” Yunus envisioned a society in which very small loans could help poor people open “the gift they have inside of them.” His certainty that the extremely poor are industrious, creative, and trustworthy enabled him to make loans with no collateral and no paperwork, which continues to horrify many a conventional banker. As proof that he wasn’t wrong, the repayment rate of Grameen’s loans is around 99%.4 Yunus observes, “The central message of Grameen [is] that the poor always pay back, not because they are afraid, but simply because they are smart. They see how their interest is better served by repayment.”8

As if to emphasize the point, Yunus embarked in 2003 on what many consider the ultimate test of the integrity of extremely poor people—a program to finance beggars. “All we are doing,” Yunus explains, “is telling beggars that, well, since you go house to house begging, would you like to take some merchandise with you, some cookies, some candy, something?” The loans are interest free and the beggars can pay back whatever they wish, when they wish. A typical loan for a beggar is around $12, which buys the basket and merchandise, as well as life-sustaining essentials such as a blanket and a mosquito net. Of the 85,000 beggars currently in the program, about 5,000 have stopped begging completely. The beggars repay their loans at rates conventional banks can only envy.9, 10

The 1974 meeting of the peasant and the professor set in motion a lending revolution that swept the globe. New words emerged to describe the phenomenon—microcredit, microloan, microfinance.

Muhammad Yunus discovered not just a new way of doing, but also a new way of seeing. To him, penniless peasants and beggars were not irresponsible deadbeats who deserve their lot in life, but individuals with inherent dignity, integrity, and creative potential. In recognition of his discovery that tiny, seemingly insignificant loans can transform the lives of millions of desperately poor people, in 2006 Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Checking It Out 

Anyone can see the results of the microcredit revolution for himself or herself. That’s what Dave Harmon did. Harmon, 70, a retired sociology professor at Mesa State College and Colorado Mountain College, met Muhammad Yunus in 1993 at a conference in Washington, DC. Harmon traveled to Bangladesh in 2000 with a group of Colorado Mountain College students to see how Grameen Bank works and to talk to people who had benefited from it. “We spent a lot of time in these small villages and saw just tremendous results,” he says. “One woman told us how she got a $6 loan that allowed her to build these bamboo stools that she then sold in a nearby city. She said her profits increased from 12 cents a day to $1.25. In an economy like they have in Bangladesh, that allowed her family to move into a better home and send their kids to school. She paid back her loan in three weeks.” Harmon’s students were amazed by the fact that no collateral was required of her, that she didn’t have to sign any legal papers, and that repayment was solely up to her. His group asked some of the Bangladeshi women if they would have preferred that the money be a gift. “They said, no, when they have to work hard to repay a loan, it gives them dignity.” Harmon concluded, “Millions of people have pulled themselves out of poverty. It’s amazing what people can do with very little money. Muhammad turns everything into a positive. He knows the country and its people. I think they should have given him the Nobel Prize for economics, too.”11

Microcredit: A Brief History 

As a result of his Nobel Peace Prize and the publicity that came with it, many people assume that Muhammad Yunus invented microcredit for poor people, but that is not the case.

Historian Stephan A. Schwartz describes how Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of America’s Founding Fathers, wanted his life’s work to continue for two centuries following his death.12 As Franklin stated, “I wish to be useful even after my Death, if possible, in forming and advancing other young men that may be serviceable to their Country. …”13 To this end, he amended his will in 1789 as his health was failing, giving to Boston and Philadelphia each “One thousand Pounds Sterling. …”13 This money was to be dispensed not as grants or gifts but as small loans to “young married Artificers, under the Age of twenty-five Years, as have served an Apprenticeship in the said Town; and faithfully fulfilled that Duties of their Indentures so as to obtain a good moral Character from at least two respectable Citizens. …”13

As Schwartz astutely observes, “The protocol for his two-century experiment … anticipated the modern micro-lending programs of the famous Grameen Banks, which have had such an empowering effect on today’s Asian nations.”12

As directed by Franklin, the trusts ran 100 years, at which time, again following Franklin’s instructions, they were adjusted to include women (they did not serve apprenticeships when the trusts were formed), and set up for the next 100 years. When, as Franklin required, the trusts were adjusted a second time, there was $6.5 million in the funds. This was dispersed to two technical schools as endowments.

As Schwartz states, “There is no other comparable bequest from any of the other Founders, and over the decades this investment in micro-lending improved the lives of young families in Boston and Philadelphia. And it does so still, because the $6.5 million given to the schools continues to support the same people Franklin had originally designed them to serve.”12, 14

Making small loans to struggling poor people was quintessential Franklin, just the sort of thing one might have expected him to do. Franklin was born into humble circumstances, the 15th of 17 children, a school dropout because of poverty, and an eventual runaway. His life was dedicated to the proposition that poor, disadvantaged, common folk can accomplish great things if given half a chance—for that is what he did, becoming world famous as a scientist, inventor, diplomat, civic activist, author, printer, politician, and political theorist.

It is an interesting coincidence that Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, the tercentennial year of Franklin’s birth. It was as if these two visionaries were clasping hands in solidarity across three centuries. If Franklin had been in the Oslo audience when Yunus delivered his acceptance speech, he almost certainly would have smiled with approval when Yunus said, “Let us join hands to give every human being a fair chance to unleash their energy and creativity.” That, after all, is what Benjamin Franklin’s life was all about.2

Another early proponent of credit for the poor was Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), the American abolitionist, entrepreneur, and legal theorist.15 Spooner is best known for his American Letter Mail Company, which competed with the United States Postal Service before being forced out of business by the government. He also wrote about the benefits of small entrepreneurial loans to help the poor raise themselves up from poverty.16 Portions of the Marshall Plan to rebuild the devastated countries of Europe after World War II also contained the concept of microcredit.

The idea of microcredit in its current form was introduced in 1959 by Dr Akhter Hameed Khan, founder of the East Pakistan Academy for Rural Development.17 Al Whittaker, who resigned in 1971 as president of Bristol Myers to establish Opportunity International in Washington, DC, was also an early microfinancier. The first loan of this organization was to Carlos Moreno in Colombia to grow his one-man spice and tea business. The Economist magazine cites this as the first microloan.17

Others claim precedence. ACCION International, a huge pioneer in microfinance and founded in 1961, asserts that it gave the first microloan in 1973 to a recipient in Recife, Brazil.18 Around this time, in 1974, as mentioned, economics professor Muhammad Yunus came up with the idea of microcredit, apparently independent of all these earlier developments.17

FINCA International, another major microlending institution, was founded in the 1980s by John Hatch, an American economist who began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer. FINCA’s original purpose was to provide microcredit only in Bolivia, which Hatch accomplished with amazing rapidity. After assembling his team, within four weeks FINCA had created 280 village banks serving 14,000 families. The organization has spread to 21 countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.19

Pro Mujer is a recent but notable entry into the microfinance field. It was founded in 1990 by Carmen Velasco, a Bolivian psychologist, and Lynne Patterson, an American then living in Bolivia. Pro Mujer’s clients are predominantly very poor women; programs are available throughout Mexico and Central and South America.20

An effort I know personally and enthusiastically endorse is Friendship Bridge, a microcredit, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization based in Colorado (www.friendshipbridge.org/). The Friendship Bridge development model blends the short-term economic needs of women through microcredit, with the long-term goal of breaking the generational cycle of poverty by providing educational opportunities for their children. Since 1994, Friendship Bridge has distributed nearly $8 million in loans to women and more than 21,000 scholarships to their children, first in Vietnam from 1994 until 2000, and in rural Guatemala since then.

Friendship Bridge was the vision of a remarkable individual, Theodore C. Ning, Jr, MD, a urologic surgeon and clinical professor of urology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Dr Ning’s life exemplifies the highest ideals of medical excellence and committed compassion. While serving as a battalion surgeon in 1970 with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, his heart opened to the needs of the impoverished, war-ravaged Vietnamese people. In 1989, Dr Ning and Connie, his wife, a psychotherapist, founded Friendship Bridge. Working with volunteers and a shoestring budget, in 1990 the organization sent the largest single shipment of medicines, medical supplies, and equipment from the United States to Vietnam since 1975. As the Nings continued to make innumerable visits to Vietnam and ship a total of 140 tons of medical supplies to the country, they evolved a microcredit and educational model as a structure for their efforts. Because of the increasingly complex restrictions on foreign relief workers in the country, in 2000 Friendship Bridge turned over its entire loan portfolio to its local Vietnamese partners and directed its efforts to another needy area, rural Guatemala. To date, Friendship Bridge has helped nearly 10,000 women and their families in both countries, with loans ranging from $50 to $200.

A unique grassroots feature of this organization is the Friendship Bridge Circles, local groups in cities throughout the United States that meet on a monthly basis to share a common vision of positive change in the world. Each circle sets its own agenda and raises funds to support the microcredit and education mission in Guatemala. Donors to Friendship Bridge can contribute anything from used cars or motorcycles to money (www.friendshipbridge.org/giving.php), with the assurance that this admirable organization, run by impeccable individuals, will use one’s donations to the fullest extent possible.

This is only a snapshot of a few famous and not-so-famous microcredit organizations. This picture is woefully inadequate, because it is not possible to acknowledge herein even the main participants in the microfinance world. For every microcredit organization you hear about, there are thousands working quietly in the background, off the media radar. The World Bank estimates that there are more than 16,000 microfinance institutions worldwide, and that in 2005 alone, these organizations helped 92 million families.3

Trust 

Many well-known entrepreneurs have embraced the promise of microcredit and the possibility of bypassing the glacial pace of governmental bureaucracies in meeting the needs of poor people. A notable example is Pierre Omidyar, the software engineer who founded eBay. Over the Labor Day weekend of 1995, he wrote the computer code that made it possible for people to buy and sell items over the Internet. Soon after the company went public in 1998, Omidyar’s share of the stock offering—around 10 billion dollars—made him the richest 32-year-old in the world.21

Omidyar is a man with a social conscience who is used to doing things on a grand scale. In 2004, he met Muhammad Yunus and had a “little epiphany” that was not unlike Yunus’s own eureka moment. Omidyar modified Yunus’s microcredit model and entered the philanthropic and microfinance field in spectacular fashion.21

There are subtle but deep connections between eBay, Omidyar’s brainchild, and microfinance, in which loans are made without collateral. Both processes operate on trust. When Omidyar first talked with Wall Street investors in 1997 about his eBay idea, they could not get past the trust factor. They thought Omidyar was practically insane. “That’ll never work!” they objected. “It’s impossible! You can’t trust anybody—you’re going to get ripped off!” They were colossally wrong, of course. The larger lesson of eBay, Omidyar says, is that “people have learned that, in general, people are basically good.” He observes that eBay has taught “more than two hundred million people that they can trust a complete stranger.”21

Omidyar realized that if complete strangers can trust each other in eBay transactions, trust could take the place of collateral in making a microloan. Suddenly the microcredit scenario made sense to him: his little epiphany.

For various reasons, Omidyar has not jumped totally onto Yunus’s “microbus.”21 Unlike Yunus, he does not believe poverty can be eradicated completely. The very idea raises his hackles. “Museum of poverty!” he says, railing against Yunus’s colorful image of a world in which poverty has been banished. “It’s ridiculous! To claim that microfinance is going to solve poverty is a myth. From ancient Greece to today, poverty has been with us and it will occupy us forever.”21 Omidyar is famously iconoclastic, so one wonders whether his skepticism is a bit theatrical, in view of the fact that he has contributed tens of millions of dollars to philanthropy and microcredit.

Computer magnate Michael Dell has also joined the microcredit revolution, via the $1.2-billion Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. So has investment guru Warren Buffett, who channeled around $31 billion of his money into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose portfolio includes a prominent place for microlending.

Why Women? 

The vast majority of microloans worldwide are made to women. This is initially off putting to many Westerners, but there are solid reasons behind this practice, many of which are described by physician-researchers Helen Epstein and Julia Kim:

Foreign policy experts increasingly favor … [microfinance] programs [for women] because they recognize that gender inequality is not only an injustice in its own right, it also hinders economic and social development. Women’s labor—including tasks such as cultivating crops and working for family businesses—produces most of the wealth in developing countries, but much of it is unpaid. Microfinance programs bring women into the cash economy, encourage the poor to develop entrepreneurial habits and skills, and sometimes help stimulate economic growth. In places like South Africa, these programs may also reawaken a spirit of ambition and purpose in communities long demoralized by lack of opportunities, apartheid-era forced relocations, discriminatory laws, and a culture of inequality that has numbed many poor people into dependency upon government welfare. While hardly a panacea for the myriad hardships faced by poor people in developing countries, microfinance programs have improved many women’s lives. Studies have suggested that microloan recipients tend to have fewer children, and that the children they do have are healthier. … [Microfinance] officials tend to favor women because they are more likely to repay loans than men are, and are also more likely to spend their earnings on household welfare.22

Epstein and Kim describe how some microfinance programs have been structured to give women more power and reduce the risk of domestic violence and the spread of HIV in their community. In many societies such as South Africa, physical and sexual abuse is deeply entrenched in the local culture. Victims rarely call the police, neighbors seldom intervene, and even when reported the authorities don’t take women’s complaints seriously.23

In one program initiated in South Africa in 2001, women were required to participate not only in group meetings every two weeks to discuss business and repayment plans, but also in open-ended discussions dealing with sexuality, personal relationships, masculine and feminine roles in daily life, and how women were treated. At first the women, especially the older ones, didn’t like the meetings. “We don’t feel comfortable talking about such issues. It is not our culture,” one woman said. But they began to open up. Painful, tearful discussions developed about being beaten by a husband or boyfriend, and how they looked away in silence when their daughters were also beaten and abused. Could it be that the old ways are not always the best, they asked; could culture change? Apparently it could. After two years, the women who participated in the program were only half as likely to experience domestic violence as were a control group that did not participate. Divorce rates did not increase among the participants, and they reported greater respect for their contributions to family life, a greater degree of self-confidence, and more open communication with their partners about sex and HIV.22

Becoming a Microlender 

Nelson Mandela, the former president of the Republic of South Africa, says, “Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our time—times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry, and wealth accumulation—that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.”24 Many people agree with Mandela, and they want to do something personal to alleviate poverty and inequality. But how?

This morning I found a way. From my laptop in Santa Fe, I became a microfinancier. I made a $25 loan to help Ms Charity Tsomena operate her tiny textile shop in Accra, the capital of Ghana. It was not much, and I plan to make more loans, but I was just getting my feet wet and learning the ropes. I loaned the money effortlessly via PayPal through www.kiva.org, a Web site that enables anyone to support budding but poor entrepreneurs in countries around the world.

Kiva provides information on hundreds of applicants, including their photos, credit histories, and loan proposals. Lenders browse and choose someone they’d like to fund. All the money goes directly to the applicant, via a local, on-site Kiva partner who smooths the transaction. In this case, the partner was Kraban Support Foundation, a local nongovernmental organization that works to eradicate rural poverty in Ghana. Ms. Tsomena was required to furnish no collateral—her word is her bond—which, as we’ve seen, is the custom in the microcredit world. Although lenders earn 0% interest when the loan is repaid, borrowers pay 16% interest to cover the cost of administration. (This rate may seem excessive to Westerners, but not to poor, third-world borrowers who are used to paying stratospheric interest rates to moneylenders. Remember the 3,000% annual rate being paid by Sufia Begum when Muhammad Yunus met her.) The chances that Ms Tsomena will repay me are excellent; so far, Kiva has experienced a loan repayment rate of equal to or greater than 99%.

This means that the Kiva concept is not foreign aid, of which many Americans are suspicious, and it is not a handout. When I am repaid, I can withdraw my money or direct the loan to another entrepreneur.

Kiva was created by a young American couple, Matthew and Jessica Flannery, after doing aid work in Africa. The Flannerys realized that a major block to economic development was the absence of credit to the poor at any reasonable cost. “I believe the real solutions to poverty alleviation hinge on bringing capitalism and business to areas where there wasn’t business or where it wasn’t sufficient,” Matthew Flannery says. “This doesn’t have to be charity. You can partner with someone who’s halfway around the world.”25

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person lending center for the poor. Headquartered in San Francisco, it was named one of the top ideas of 2006 by The New York Times Magazine. In a little more than a year, Kiva has grown to become the most trafficked Web site in the microfinance world, with over 35,000 Internet lenders making more than $3 million in loans to thousands of entrepreneurs in around 25 developing countries. Major Internet businesses that are partnering with Kiva read like a who’s who—Google, MySpace, Microsoft, PayPal, and YouTube.26

During my lending process, I learned that 10 other Americans have made loans to Ms Tsomena, including Arthur in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Julie in Amherst, New Hampshire; Marie in Woodland, California; Donald in Franklin, Massachusetts; Clairan in Chicago, Illinois; Sharon in Lakeville, Minnesota; and Hans in Blacksburg, Virginia. They are my fellow microfinanciers. We will never have a board meeting, but it’s nice to know they’re out there.

I discovered Kiva through an article by columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, “You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor,” in The New York Times, March 27, 2007.25 Kristof had used Kiva to loan $25 each to a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic, and a baker in Afghanistan. When his work took him to Kabul, he dropped by the bakery of Abdul Satar, 64, his new “business partner,” to see how he was doing. He found him in his tiny shop on a muddy street, selling loaves for 12 cents each. Mr Satar was astonished to see him and admitted that he didn’t know what the Internet was and had never been online. But he lost no time offering Kristof a sample of his bread. “It was delicious,” said Kristof. Mr Satar said that Americans had directed a total of $425 in loans to him. This had enabled him to open another bakery, with a total of four employees. He now enjoys economies of scale when he purchases flour and firewood for his ovens. “If you come back in 10 years, maybe I will have six more bakeries,” he proudly told Kristof.

The local group in Kabul that mediated the loans between the Kiva lenders and Mr Satar is Ariana Financial Services. Ariana is run by Storai Sadat, a brilliant young woman who originally wanted to be a doctor. But when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan and put a stop to the education of women, she wound up working for Mercy Corps, the international humanitarian aid and development charitable organization.

In 2003, with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mercy Corps founded Ariana Financial Services, with Storai Sadat in charge. Since then, Ariana has made microloans to clients running enterprises in all areas of Afghan life, such as weaving, carpentry, tailoring, hairdressing, food processing, florist work, kite production, knitting, leather working, and animal husbandry.

Over 80% of the loans are to women. Ms Sadat explains, “[One] reason for Ariana’s focus on female clients is cultural. In Afghanistan, women take on a large part of the responsibility of caring for the family. It is a question of honor for them to repay any debt they might have. Afghan women simply are far more unlikely to default on a debt than men are.”27

Kristof reports that it’s been difficult to connect some female borrowers with donors on Kiva, because many Afghanis would be horrified at the thought of taking a woman’s photograph, let alone posting it on the Kiva Web site. Another excellent Web site that connects donors directly to recipients is www.globalgiving.com. The main difference is that GlobalGiving emphasizes donations, whereas Kiva is for loans.

Making It Personal 

By creating personal sketches that feature actual photographs of needy individuals, Kiva and other organizations that employ this strategy are utilizing methods that are known to prompt compassion and concern.

For years, psychologists have recognized that people respond more readily to individual tragedies than to large-scale disasters such as genocides, earthquakes, or tsunamis. When misfortunes are so vast they can’t be connected with individual suffering, at some point the mind blurs. Many despots have used this fact to their advantage. As Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said, “One man’s death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”28

Until organizations such as Kiva came along, when most people made a charitable donation they were usually reaching out to people they did not know, in an unfamiliar culture. This meant that aid organizations were asking people to do something they may be hardwired not to do—extend help to someone ethnically different from themselves. Why is this so difficult? Why is the very idea of foreign aid—aid to foreigners—so objectionable to so many?

Many anthropologists suggest that our ancestors needed skills for knowing whom to trust. One way was to sort out individuals according to the ethnic group to which they belonged. Skin color and styles of dress and speech provided ways of identifying those who were likely to share your interests and values. Ethnic distinctions became exaggerated and morphed into animosity when societies were strained, as during famine or war. “To me this makes perfect sense,” says Daniel Chirot, professor of international studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. “Especially in times of crisis we tend to fall back on those with whom we are most familiar, who are most like us.”29

What’s the evidence that these prejudicial instincts may be hardwired?

Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske and colleagues showed photos of individuals from a range of social groups to students, while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging. The brain area of interest was their medial prefrontal cortex, which is known to “light up” in response to socially evocative stimuli. The researchers were shocked when the students’ brains showed no response at all to photos of extreme out-groups such as homeless persons, beggars, and drug addicts. It was as if the students simply did not register these individuals as human. “It is just what you see with homeless people or beggars in the street,” Fiske says. “People treat them like piles of garbage,” unworthy of notice. In follow-up experiments, she replicated her original findings, then tried to turn around the students’ nonresponses by asking them questions that might make the homeless person or beggar seem more human, such as “What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar would like?” When asked to consider these simple questions, activity was restored to the students’ medial prefrontal cortex. Fiske says, “The question has the effect of making the person back into a person.”30

Fiske’s research doesn’t tell us whether our brain’s response to the extremely poor is a result of neurological patterns laid down in the course of evolution, whether our prejudices were acquired through childhood learning, or whether both factors are involved. In any case, even if we are biologically primed for prejudice, it is not inevitable. Biology is not destiny. As Fiske’s research and Kiva’s record shows, it doesn’t take a lot to overcome this tendency. All we appear to need is a gentle nudge in the right direction.

When we see the needy and the helpless as human, our heart and brain get tickled in the right places and we are capable of great things. This is particularly true when single individuals are involved.

In 1987, when an 18-month-old toddler, Jessica McClure, fell 22 feet down an eight-inch-wide abandoned water well in a backyard in Midland, Texas, the nation was riveted. As her dramatic rescue unfolded, people all over the world opened their hearts to “Baby Jessica.” A million dollars in contributions poured in. A TV movie, Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure, was made starring Patty Duke and Beau Bridges. A poll conducted by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press measuring coverage of Princess Diana’s death found that during the prior decade only Jessica’s rescue rivaled the Paris car accident in worldwide attention.31

Yet, when hundreds of thousands of children are murdered, starved, or orphaned as a result of genocide, as in Rwanda and Darfur, we, like the Princeton students, often turn away in nonresponse or consider their plight the responsibility of governments and international organizations. Our choices are enormously influenced by whether or not we can identify with the victims on an individual level. As Midland Fire Chief James Roberts succinctly put it, speaking of the response to Jessica’s plight, “This was just a one-child disaster.”

So, too, was the plight of Charles, Jr, the infant son of Anne and Charles Lindbergh. Kidnapped in 1932, his body was found two months later along a road near the Lindberghs’ New Jersey home. The tragedy evoked sympathy from around the world and was called “the biggest story since the Resurrection” by journalist H.L. Mencken.32

Where animals are concerned, our response is much the same. It is the one-animal disasters that are most likely to capture our attention, not wholesale calamities. When wildfires burned nearly a million hectares in Australia in 2006, hundreds of thousands of native animals such as kangaroos and koalas were incinerated. In the state of Victoria, close to 100% of the animals in the path of the blazes burned to death. The situation was hellish. “Because of the heat and the fireballs … the animals are just bursting into flames and just being killed before the fire gets to them because it is so hot,” one authority said.33 Yet, there was no international wave of support to help save them.

In contrast, when a single dog was found stranded and racing back and forth on the deck of a burnt-out, abandoned, Indonesia-registered tanker adrift in the Pacific in April 2002, the response was different. Hok Get, the little female mixed-breed terrier, had been left behind when all but one of the crew of the crippled vessel were rescued by a cruise ship. (Hok Get means happiness, good fortune, or blessing in Taiwanese.) The dog had been marooned on the ship for nearly a month. Sympathy largely bypassed the unfortunate crewmember who was burned to death in a fire in the engine room and focused on the cute, frisky canine. By the time she was rescued Hok Get was a celebrity, having been featured on CNN, in People magazine, and countless newspapers around the world. Tens of thousands of dollars poured in to help finance her rescue, which eventually cost around a quarter of a million dollars. Following her eventual liberation in Honolulu, the Grammy-nominated Hawaiian singer Henry Kapono produced a CD with a song about her. A tanker was renamed Hok Get in her honor. She’d become so familiar that people stopped her on the street when her new caretaker took her out for walks.

When a 32-foot juvenile right whale became entangled in 500 feet of fishing gear off the South Carolina coast in 2005, rescuers sprang into action. The first thing they did was to personalize the operation by naming the whale Yellow Fin in honor of the Coast Guard cutter that took part in the mission. The strategy worked like a charm. CNN covered the successful rescue sequence, and the scientists were able to draw attention to the fact that only 300 right whales remain in the world’s oceans.34

In the early 1990s, a lone red-tailed hawk was spotted in New York City’s Central Park. He eventually attracted a mate and nested on an upper ledge of an upscale, Fifth Avenue apartment building. Marie Winn, the author and birdwatcher, named him Pale Male because of his light color. Soon the hawk was a cause célèbre among the Big Apple’s naturalists, photographers, and journalists. When the management of the building removed the nest, an international outcry arose in newspapers not only in New York and other American cities, but also in Tokyo, London, and other capitals around the world. As a result of the global protest, the scaffolding for the nest was replaced and the avian couple rebuilt their nest. Pale Male’s family life has long been scrutinized through thousands of binoculars. His love affairs have never been a secret. His original mate was given the name First Love, his second Lola. As of 2006, Pale Male was in good health—14 years old and the sire of 26 known chicks with four different mates. He has his own Web site and DVD, and has starred in a PBS special.35 Other red-tailed hawk couples have joined the neighborhood—Pale Male Junior and Charlotte, and Tristan and Isolde. The birds’ behaviors continue to be monitored with microscopic precision by Manhattan’s passionate birders, who practically consider them members of the family.36 The hawks are an iconic example of the power of personalization in drawing assistance to creatures in need.

As with people, animals, whales, and birds, so with plants. When we hear that nearly half of the plant species on earth could be facing extinction,37 many of us react with a yawn. But when a single plant is in trouble we can be fired to action, particularly if the plant has a history we can wrap our emotions around.

One of the most famous trees in America is the Treaty Oak, a once-majestic Southern live oak in Austin, Texas.38 The American Forestry Association proclaimed the Treaty Oak as the most perfect specimen of a North American tree—until 46-year-old Paul Cullen, in 1989, poisoned it with Velpar (a powerful hardwood herbicide), for which he was eventually sentenced to nine years in prison. The tree had been part of a larger grove called the Council Oaks, which, legend has it, were a site for meetings between Native Americans and some of Texas’s founders such as Stephen F. Austin. Sam Houston, the first president of the Texas Republic, is said to have rested under its branches. When the Treaty Oak began to die, tests showed that it had been poisoned with enough herbicide to kill 100 trees. Media coverage began immediately. DuPont, the manufacturer of Velpar, established a $10,000 reward for the capture of the vandal. Ross Perot, the former Reform Party candidate for the US presidency, wrote a blank check for expenses to save the tree. Get-well cards, prayer sessions, and bowls of chicken soup collected at the base of the Treaty Oak. A limited, numbered edition of 1,300 pens were crafted from the salvaged wood of the dead part of the tree and sold for $100 each as a fundraiser. In 1997, when the tree produced its first crop of acorns since being poisoned, city workers gathered the acorns, germinated them, and distributed the seedlings throughout Texas and other states. Today the Treaty Oak still lives, more famous than ever, although it is a lopsided version of its former self. Without the collective outcry against this arboreal assassination attempt, it would be dead—the power of a single, troubled plant to evoke compassion from masses of concerned citizens.

Whether we are dealing with humans, animals, or plants, the pattern is the same. As journalist Nicholas D. Kristoff puts it, “Evidence is overwhelming that humans respond to the suffering of individuals rather than groups.”39

Numbers numb. “Statistics can dissipate any emotion we might feel towards a victim,” says Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research in Eugene, Oregon, and professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. In one study, he and his colleagues found that donations to aid a starving seven-year-old child in Africa declined drastically when her image was accompanied by a statistical summary of the millions of needy children like her in four African countries. “The numbers appeared to dampen people’s feelings of compassion towards the young victim,” Slovic said. In another study, he and his associates found that people felt less compassion and donated less aid towards a pair of victims than to either individual alone. This research, Slovic concludes, suggests that the emotion called compassion fatigue “may begin for groups as small as two. No wonder compassion is absent when deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.”40

Governments and international agencies can undergo the same sort of paralysis that individuals experience when faced with holocaust, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or natural disasters—not surprising, since they are made up, of course, of individuals. If we cannot rely on our moral instincts to guide us in these instances, what should we do? In Slovic’s view, “We need to design legal and institutional mechanisms that will force nations to act against genocide and other crimes against humanity. Leaving things as they are makes it too easy to do nothing.”40

Governments and institutions might also take a lesson from Kiva. To rally popular support for a mass disaster, make it personal. Tell people’s stories. Provide names and faces, not just numbers. Americans are a big-hearted, generous people. They want to help. They just need to be reminded of the person behind the statistic.40

Giving Away the Farm: Heifer International 

Dan West was an American farmer who served as a relief worker in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He became so frustrated with the limited amount of available food aid that on returning to the United States he founded Heifers for Relief. (A heifer is a cow before she has had her first calf.) West’s idea was to combat hunger by giving impoverished families livestock that would propagate beyond the original donation and that would be a source of milk, offspring, and fertilizer. His organization also trained the recipients beforehand on how to care for the animal they’d receive. West’s philosophy was based on the folk saying, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

The first 17 heifers were shipped from York, Pennsylvania, to Puerto Rico in 1944. Each family was required to donate female offspring to other needy families, insuring that the benefits would spread.

From Dan West’s vision evolved Heifer International, one of the most respected and honored charitable organizations in the United States. Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, its mission is “to work with communities to end hunger and poverty, and to care for the earth.”41

Heifer International has become a world leader in sustainable ecology and agriculture around the world. In 2003, it was named one of Forbes magazine’s top 10 charities. In 2005, the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance found that Heifer International met all of its standards for charity accountability. This means that the organization is truthful in representing how its money is spent, does not allocate an excessive part of its budget for fundraising or administrative expenses, and makes its financial statements available for public inspection. In recognition of its service to millions of families in 128 countries, in 2004 Heifer International was awarded the $1 million Hilton Humanitarian Prize for its efforts to eliminate world hunger and help communities become self-sustaining.42

The organization is about a lot more than heifers. One can also make a gift of sheep, rabbits, honeybees, pigs, llamas, water buffalo, camels, chicks, goats, geese, and trees. A lot of planning precedes the donation of an animal to a needy family. First, a community group requests help from Heifer in setting up an animal or agriculture project. Staff from within the country then meet with applicants to make sure the group’s goals are compatible with Heifer’s mission, and that they have the know-how to carry out the project successfully. A joint decision is made between the applicants and Heifer about which animals or crops would be the most beneficial. If the project is approved at Heifer headquarters, project participants then undergo rigorous training to learn about all of Heifer’s cornerstones—guidelines that include gender equality, sustainability, and passing on the gift. For many, the training and education that precede the gift are as important as the gift itself. Families learn how to construct shelters and other facilities that will keep the animals healthy, how to prevent destructive grazing, and how to grow grasses for a food source for the animals. As soon as the families receive their animals, the eggs, milk, and meat begin improving their nutrition. Food not consumed by the family can be sold for income, whereas manure can be used to fertilize crops. The gift is shared, as the family donates one or more female offspring to other needy families, as well as the training they have learned. A chain is thus created that can extend to thousands.

Another Heifer Cornerstone is spirituality, expressed as “common values and beliefs about the value and meaning of all of life, a sense of connectedness to the earth and a shared vision of the future.”43 Protection and improvement of the environment is another key element in all Heifer programs—increasing soil fertility with animal manure, encouraging biodiversity, promoting forestation, monitoring watershed conditions, and minimizing erosion.

Heifer practices what it preaches. “If we’re going to have a lasting impact on ending world hunger, then everything we do must renew the earth and not deplete it,” says Jo Luck, Heifer’s president and CEO. So, for the site of its new international headquarters in Little Rock, Heifer chose a brownfield, a used, environmentally dirty site that had once been a railroad switching yard. Over 75,000 tons of earth were removed as the site was transformed into a wetland that controls, stores, and reuses surface groundwater. Even the parking lot is built to allow rain to percolate through it, eliminating storm-water runoff. The slanted roof collects and stores so much rainwater in a collecting tower that the entire building is water independent. Masonry from old abandoned buildings on the site was crushed into gravel and reused for a walkway around the building. Recycled steel was also used. Some of the building’s flooring is made from bamboo, one of the most renewable wood resources on earth, and the rest is covered with recycled carpeting. The building captures so much natural light that it uses 52% less energy than a conventional building of comparable use and size. The structure was designed to comply with the requirements of the U.S. Green Building Council. It has been featured in Architectural Record magazine and has attracted the attention of green architects around the world.44

Why mention Heifer International among microcredit institutions, when it does not loan money? As with microcredit, recipients are obligated to pay back in kind, to keep the chain going. The major difference is that the “currency” Heifer gives to the needy is not cash, but living things that moo, quack, buzz, or bellow.

I admit a strong personal admiration of Heifer International. Heifer was the first such organization that Barbara, my wife, and I supported. For years, instead of giving graduation gifts, wedding presents, or funeral flowers, we have donated to Heifer in the name of the friends involved. Most of them are touched by this gesture, and many become donors themselves. I grew up on a farm, and I know the difference an animal can make. So when Barbara and I donate an animal to an impoverished family in a distant country, the family and their new animal do not seem distant at all, but real and immediate.

Real People, Real Results 

The power of microcredit is best seen in the lives of those who receive it. An example is Janèt Dèval, who ranked among “the poorest of the poor” in Haiti.45 When she acquired her microloan, she could neither read nor write. She was burdened with an additional deficit, that of partial deafness resulting from an injury. Dèval’s story illustrates why microcredit is more effective when directed to women. “My husband didn’t want me to send my five children to school because his parents didn’t send him to school,” she relates. “From the beginning, he said he would not pay and he has never given even one gourde [less than three cents], but I always knew it was important. For a long time I have gone to Port-au-Prince to buy goods to sell in Hinche, and I put all my money into paying for school for my children.”

She was also intent on self-improvement. “When I found out that Fonkoze [her microlender] gave literacy classes for market women, I was so happy. I never went to school even one day. I didn’t know anything about school. I started right away with basic literacy and I have tried to never miss a class.” Dèval’s struggle is difficult to imagine:

I couldn’t write my name and I didn’t understand anything, but I kept going even when my husband got angry. My kids pushed me and encouraged me and they helped me practice my letters. The monitor, Christa, told me to keep writing every day even when I didn’t understand.

I can write my name now, and I write it everywhere. Imagine, I used to go to Port-au-Prince to buy and I couldn’t read the bags and I felt lost. I couldn’t keep track of what I bought. The drivers sometimes would take my boxes off the truck and give them to someone else, but I didn’t know until I got all the way home. Now, I can’t lose anything. Now I write my name on every box and I know what I buy.

I … went to the Health Program, too. I still don’t know many things, so I want to keep going. I take my notebook to my school and I write in it because one day I hope to read and understand everything. I bought two books in the market and my kids help me read them.

I work hard in the market so I can repay my loans, keep going to school and so that my kids have that chance, too. If my parents would have sent me to school, I would have thrown a party for them to say thank you.

Susan Wengui, a microcredit borrower from Kenya, is another example of hardship and hope. Ms Wengui grew up in a rural, dirt-poor area of Kenya. Although her parents struggled to send her to school—the only one of her siblings to do so—she was forced to drop out following fourth grade because they could no longer afford the fees. When she became pregnant at 17, her parents kicked her out of the house. Struggling to find work, she and her infant son moved to Nairobi, where she married and gave birth to a daughter. When she and her husband discovered she was HIV positive, he abandoned her. In order to feed her children and with no means of support, she entered prostitution.

Ms Wengui learned about Jamil Bora, a microcredit agency, from her slum neighbors. She took business lessons at Jamil Bora, which gave her the confidence to start a tiny business mending and selling clothes. The small loan enabled her to leave prostitution and her shack in the disease and crime-ridden slum for a safer house that had a floor, running water, waterproof roof, and a door with a lock.

Like nearly all desperately poor women who are extended microcredit, Ms Wengui proved an excellent credit risk. With each repaid loan she became eligible for others, which enabled her to buy raw materials in bulk for her shop. With economies of scale, her shop became more profitable. Today, she is convinced she would be dead without Jamil Bora’s medical insurance and access to HIV medications, and has no idea what the fate of her children would be, as there is no one else to take care of them. For the first time in her life, she has savings with which to ensure her children’s education, so they can break the chains of poverty that for so long enslaved her.46

Controversy 

Not everyone is enamored with microcredit. Gina Neff, a sociologist, economist, and assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, is harshly critical of what she calls the microresults of microcredit. “This [Grameen] model,” she says, “has sparked a movement to dismantle development initiatives and decentralize antipoverty programs with the ultimate privatization of welfare—shoeless women lifting themselves up by their bootstraps. … [The] western development literature is guilty of painting women as the sole moral and financial guardians of the family.”

Neff is profoundly skeptical of attempts to import the “Grameen religion” to the United States, saying, The can-do enthusiasm of targeting the poor meshes nicely with the shredding of the social safety net, so the applicability in the U. S. of the peer-lending model for small, informal businesses is never questioned. Microcredit fits in nicely with prevailing U. S. prejudices, since it relies on local, rather than national, programs and individual, rather than collective, approaches. But the notion that microlending could seriously reduce poverty in the U. S. is ludicrous. … Behind the chic rhetoric of flexibility and decentralization, there is an exploitative feel to many of these programs. Yunus’s vision of moving mass production out from under one factory roof into home-based self-employment sounds frighteningly like a return to 19th-century-style piecework. … Rather than working to increase wages, the microliberals are clamoring to cut job training for the poor. … Turning peasant women into mini-capitalists is just furthering the reach of finance capital and shifting the burden of risk to a class who already bear the brunt of poverty without safety nets. And playing cheerleader to dead-end consumerism and self-exploitation strengthens the arguments of the slash-and-burn policy crowd as they cut public programs and replace them with the rhetoric of credit-fueled self-empowerment. … Since some individuals have been helped by microloans, their individual cases form a powerful body of rhetoric that plays into the myth of America itself—work hard and make it. Now the microlenders promise the destitute they can ‘borrow our money and be your own boss.’ Sounds like a late-night TV pitch for instant wealth through no-money-down real estate—and just about as believable.”47

Neff believes the microcredit boom is being used by governments as an excuse to reduce improvements in areas such as healthcare, education, roads, sanitation systems, and clean water. “[M]icrocredit is a convenient vehicle for governments eager to cut spending on domestic and foreign poor,” she says, “and politicians have already been exploiting the opportunity.”48

Critics have also pointed out that certain vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities, have great difficulty entering the microfinance market.49 Each year the Microcredit Summit Campaign, a consortium of microfinance organizations around the world, issues a report to highlight their work and to debunk what they consider myths that are barriers to microfinance. In 2006, the report challenged several complaints they consider particularly damaging, including the oft-heard charge that microcredit adds debt to those who can least bear it. Not so, says the Microcredit Summit Campaign report, which cites objective evidence that moderate poverty declined not only in Bangladeshi villages participating in microcredit but also in surrounding nonprogram areas, that the effect was even greater in reducing extreme poverty, and that the longer the villages participated, the greater the decline in overall poverty.50

The Campaign’s rebuttals of other objections to microcredit can be found at http://www.globalurban.org/GUDMag06Vol2Iss1/Daley-Harris.htm.

The Orlando Incident 

The ease with which we Americans can now extend aid directly to specific individuals in far-off countries can divert our attention from our own impoverished citizens. For many of us, making a small loan to a struggling mother in Bangladesh or Kenya is more appealing than doing the same for a poor woman in Appalachia or South Los Angeles. Yet, we have poverty problems that also need attention. How many of us realize that 12 million American children go to bed hungry each night?51

Supporting needy individuals beyond our shores can keep poverty psychologically out of sight and “over there.” By donating to a recipient I’ll never see, except on my computer screen, I can say I’ve done my part and ignore the 37 million Americans who currently live below the poverty line.52 This selective blindness makes it more likely I won’t notice governmental shenanigans that minimize the plight of America’s poor, such as a 2006 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report that substituted the term “very low food security” for the word hunger, experienced by millions of Americans, because the USDA said that hunger is not a scientifically quantifiable term.53, 54 Or perhaps I won’t notice that many of our leaders are in denial of the prevalence of hunger in our country—such as President Bush, who, when running for president in 1999 while the governor of Texas, said he thought the annual USDA hunger report, which consistently finds his home state of Texas one of the hungriest in the nation, was fabricated.54

Our ambivalence toward our own poor is often unmasked when they intrude into our lives. In April 2007, Eric Montanez, 21, was arrested in Lake Eola Park in downtown Orlando, Florida.55 His alleged crime was that he and other volunteers served 35 homeless individuals a meal of rice, stew, salad, and bread pudding. After Orlando police videoed Montanez serving 30 people from a large pot, “using a ladle” as specified in the police report, the authorities swooped in, collected a vial of stew as evidence, and arrested him. They also alleged that he acted surly by tossing his ID, which was disputed by other volunteers. For these grievous offenses, Montanez was hauled off to the Orange County jail with bail set at $250.

Montanez was the first person arrested for violating a controversial ordinance passed in 2006 prohibiting the use of downtown parks as outdoor soup kitchens. Residents and business owners in Orlando’s gentrified downtown had found this practice offensive. The new law requires aid groups feeding more than 25 people to have a special permit, and groups are restricted to no more than two such permits a year.

Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator,56 America’s largest evaluator of charity organizations, was troubled by the incident. “What was his alleged crime?” he asked. “Mr. Montanez went to jail for feeding the homeless. … I’m not sure if ‘utilizing a ladle’ makes it a more serious offense or not. … I’m pretty sure you can still feed the ducks in Orlando”57—probably more than 25 at a time and more than twice a year.

A particularly distasteful expression of our confused attitudes toward our impoverished citizens takes the form of coarse humor. There has recently been an explosion of jokes about the poor, such as the “yo mama so poor” and “you know you’re a redneck (or trailer trash) if” varieties. A Google search reveals over two million Internet sites featuring these jokes. In addition, there are another million sites for “homeless jokes.” A major function of humor is to relieve psychological stress and tension—in this case, the inner anxieties we have toward those among us who are in greatest need. It doesn’t stop there. Slurs against the poor are often surrogates for bigotry and racism, because these jokes are often slanted not just to the poor, but especially to minorities and people of color who happen to be poor.

Helping people rise from extreme poverty in foreign lands is a magnificent gesture that deserves our enthusiastic support. But unless we resolve our conflicted attitudes toward our own poor, a hole in our heart will remain, which even our most generous actions abroad will not fill.

The Future 

Very few believe that microcredit will completely abolish world poverty. As Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the committee that awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus said, “We are saying microcredit is an important contribution that cannot fix everything, but it is a big help.”3 And as Epstein and Kim state, “[G]lobal agencies must … recognize that although microfinance programs can provide an economic foothold for some poor people, in an increasingly globalized economy it is naïve to assume that such programs on their own could ever significantly close the vast gulf between rich and poor that continues to strain millions of poor families. …”58

Yet, the experience of millions of microborrowers, who for the first time are able to feed their families and educate their children, cannot be ignored. If these families had waited for the miserly efforts of most governments, many of them would still be starving and enslaved by moneylenders, as Sufia Begum was when she met Muhammad Yunus in the 1970s.

Microcredit can’t build massively expensive infrastructure in needy countries; it is not intended to. Not even private foundations, no matter how richly endowed and nobly intended, can meet the challenge of the roughly three billion people on earth whose income is less than two dollars a day, and the 1.2 billion whose incomes are below one dollar a day.59 International effort is required for the truly Herculean tasks that confront us. And while enthusiasm for microfinance is soaring, vigilance is required of citizens everywhere, to make sure that governments do not use this fervor as an excuse to weasel out of their responsibility to the miserably poor.

Giving Back 

Before action against poverty comes caring. But from whence comes caring, for those who are not naturally endowed with it? One source is simply to wake up to the dazzling position we occupy on this planet. By sheer accident of birth, most of us enjoy luxuries and advantages that would have made a pharaoh envious. As John Lanchester, the British journalist and novelist, says, “If you want to be happy, don’t ever ask yourself if you are. A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is, in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. … [Our ancestors] would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn’t be worth asking.”60

Now we have a new way to express gratitude for our fortunate circumstances and pay back. With the click of a mouse we can connect directly with the poorest of the poor around the world via impeccable organizations such as Kiva, Friendship Bridge, Heifer International, and many others, as mentioned. Never before has it been possible to intervene so specifically in the life of a needy individual in a third-world country. It remains to be seen what difference this ability will make in denting world poverty, but experts predict that it may be huge.

We may not be a Bill or Melinda Gates, a Warren Buffet, a Michael or Susan Dell, or a Pierre Omidyar, but when our efforts are pooled we can marshal considerable clout. So, to Bill, Melinda, Warren, Michael, Susan, and Pierre: where schools, hospitals, vaccines, sanitation systems, and clean water are concerned, you do the heavy lifting. We’ll help with the rest.