"Bangladesh was in terrible, terrible shape. A lot of deaths. A lot of killings. During the war I was teaching at a university in Tennessee. But I decided I had to come back; I thought I should be useful in rebuilding Bangladesh. I came back and started doing the one thing I knew. I started teaching the same thing I had taught in the United States: economics.
"Instead of getting better, things were getting worse. Then a in 1974 a terrible famine hit. People were dying in the streets. That's a rude shock. I lived in a beautiful bungalow on a hillside near the university and would walk by people who were dying. Then I'd come back to the classroom and give my big lecture, and I said: 'What is this?' I felt completely empty.
"I came to the conclusion that these theories were useless for these dying people. I realized I could help people as a human being, not as an economist. So I decided to become a basic human being. I think that was a good decision for me because I no longer carried any preconceived notions."
--Muhammad Yunus, in a conversation with Frances Moore
"Yunus's experience of dissonance reminds me of my own at the very same age. Everything I wrote in Diet for a Small Planet was sitting there for any nutritionist or economist to put together well before I did. But because I was untrained, I didn't wear the blinders created by being taught to perceive only within a set framework. Without those blinders, I could see that there is plenty of food for all; that we ourselves create the scarcity we fear.
"For Yunus, as for me, an admission of 'not knowing' was the beginning of real learning. But what Yunus did was much trickier. He had to unlearn what he knew, so that he could look at poverty anew.
"Dropping his preconceptions and leaving his theories in the classroom, Yunus traveled into the villages near Chittagong University. He decided that to understand poverty and hunger, he had to listen to poor people themselves, in order to learn a new economics.
"What Yunus observed in these villages seems, in one sense, utterly obvious. These most hungry were those with no land. At the time, they made up at least half of the rural population. But instead of accepting whta he saw, Yunus asked: Why is it this way? Why can't it be different?
"He found that many of the landless struggle for income by making things to sell. But they must buy the raw materials, and to do that, they must borrow from a moneylender. By the time they repay the loan, plus interest (when Yunus began, interest could be as much as 10 percent, per day), what's left is never enough to live on.
"Yunus's first "aha" moment was meeting Sufiya Begum, a twenty-one-year-old mother who fed her family by making bamboo stools. She bought the cane, her raw material, with loans from moneylenders who made her sell back to them at the end of the day. Her profit? Two cents a day.
"Soon Yunus and his students had collected a list of forty-two people in straits similar to Sufiya's, and he provided each with a loan out of his own pocket. 'My loan of only twenty-seven dollars spread among forty-two people was enough,' he tells us. It was enough to liberate them all from bondage to the moneylender."
--Frances Moore, Hope's Edge
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities,
but in the expert's there are few.
-- Shunryo Suzuki-Roshi
