A great post from Alan AtKisson over at WorldChanging. Here’s an excerpt:
That 300,000 “Phone Ladies” now make good livings keeping people connected, that 85,000 beggars are now part of a program that teaches them how to swap out retail sales for the usual handout model of their special enterprise, that 13,000 children of the the seven million illiterate borrowers are now taking out higher education loans and going on to engineering, medical school, even PhD’s … all that is stupendously wonderful enough. Imagining the relief — literal physical relief — brought about by helping poor women change the culture to make it possible for them to urinate and defecate privately by day, in a latrine, and instead of having to wait until darkness to find a spot in the reeds and preserve their modesty … it is amazing that no one thought to help them with that pain before.
But the real lesson here is what can happen when a gifted teacher decides to leave the academy and get his hands dirty by teaching those who claim to know nothing, and to teach in them ways that help them learn to improve their own lives. If we get our own heads around that simple lesson from this year’s Nobel Peace Prize Winner, he will have taught the world something that could just make it possible to do what Yunus claims must be possible: to turn poverty into a distant memory in our lifetime.
Now go read it…
