Nothing to Lose and Everything to Gain

Today, 35,000 children will die of hunger. Eighty percent of the children in orphanages in Indonesia have live parents but their parents can't afford to take care of them. Research shows that women in poor countries, when given the chance to earn money, spend the money on food, education and healthcare for their children, and therefore can change their lives and break the chain of poverty for their children.

All these things have been heavy on my heart these past two weeks or so as I have been researching much about poverty while reading this week's FoodShed Planet Summer Reading Pick of the Week, Banker to the Poor, by Muhammed Yunus. Yunus is the Bengali professor who founded Grameen Bank (and recipient, along with Grameen Bank, of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize), which gives small loans to the poorest of the poor, mostly women, which they use to launch businesses and lift their families out of poverty. We're talking 25 bucks to buy some supplies to make and sell more goods to earn a tiny profit to buy shoes or food or pay for school or put a new roof on the house, and so on.

In the past thirty years, microcredit has spread to every continent and benefited over 100 million families.

I love this concept. I love everything about it. I love how people change when they realize they can make a difference, when they realize they have a skill or a talent, when they realize they can be successful. I love how communities and countries change as a result. And I love that, by hearing stories such as those of people with nothing to lose and everything to gain who achieve the seemingly impossible, we can be inspired to look with fresh eyes on the place and purpose of each individual in the larger society of humanity.

Yunus stresses a particular point over and over again in Banker to the Poor. He says that poor people do not need training. They are resourcesful, creative, talented people who apply these skills on a daily basis just to survive. What they need is capital. He is quite critical in this book of aid organizations that insist on training, training, training the poor in order to help them get jobs and earn money. I think where this idea breaks down is that in many rural villages, skills are being passed down from generation to generation. In today's American society, however, these skills are not being passed down, so marketable craftsman skills that can sustain the poorest of villages in the most rural of settings elsewhere in the world are rapidly disappearing in our country.

And so, this gets me thinking. What are the basic sellable skills that we can pass down to our children, skills that can help ensure they can earn money during hard times in their life? Can our children swing a hammer or grow a crop? Can they cook or bake or build or paint? Do they know how to make any traditional artisan crafts? Are we outsourcing so much of our lives that we have also given away our children's tools for survival? Do we even possess these skills in order to pass them down? What about our senior citizens? Is there a way that we can honor them in our society more fully by valuing their skills and perhaps matching them with children to transfer this knowledge before it is gone for good?

As for Yunus, he writes in Banker to the Poor what the indicators are for defining a life as "poverty-free." They are:

1. Having a house with a tin roof

2. Having beds or cots for all members of the family

3. Having access to safe drinking water

4. Having access to a sanitary latrine

5. Having all school-age children attending school

6. Having sufficient warm clothing for the winter

7. Having mosquite nets

8. Having a home vegetable garden

9. Having no food shortages, even during the most difficult time of a very difficult year

10. Having sufficient income-earning opportunities for all adult members of the family

Food for thought.