Nothing is ever lost;
The rain that fell today
Becomes tomorrow’s frost,
And huddled in the grey
Shroud of a cloudy sky
Every droplet refuses to die.
Beneath an uncertain sky I stand,
Facing the direction from which
New seasons weave together strands
Of memories formed from the twitch
Of muscles: hearts that yearned and failed,
Listless lips that fell in love and ran aground.
I am presently seated in an office. Behind me sunlight is banging its fist against a window whose shades are drawn, begging me to notice that Spring is arriving soon. Perhaps I should be doing work, but instead my mind has turned toward the broader sweep of history, time, philosophy and the role of the individual in the world (it should not be of great surprise that I am embracing such thoughts given that I am reading a biography of one of America’s greatest leaders: John Adams). I am contemplating the fact that people always seem to “act their age,” that they give in to the demands of “the real world” rather than adhere to the longings of their hearts, and I find myself longing to unfurl my personal manifesto like a flag and plant it deep into the soil of my being.
Poets fight fiercely against the constraints of physics and biology (let’s remember that Dylan Thomas wrote about how we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light) and, on rare occasions, they succeed. The words of Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca and Robert Frost emanate from their throats and make the earth upon which we stand tremble with their passion; that they are buried deep within that earth only serves to amplify the effect. And so it is for this reason that I, too, think, and feel, and write, for to take the violent passion that makes my flesh shudder with love and transform it into the sweet music of poetry, of entrepreneurship and of justice, is the greatest of endeavors.
Andy and Jill with a Grameen Bank Center Manager and Borrowers
If you talk to anyone at Grameen Bank they will tell you that the real bank can only be found by going to the villages where Grameen operates. Grameen, after all, means rural, and in fact by law Grameen can only operate its lending programs in the villages. It is for this reason that on our third day in Bangladesh we–Jill, me, an Australian named Mark, our translator Matin and Mark’s translator Yunus–are all crammed into a mini-van barreling down the roads that lead to Rashahi, the zone that we will be visiting. Traffic here is an eclectic mix of motorcycles, bicycle rickshaws, cars, trucks hauling absurdly large loads and comically unstable buses all chaotically weaving and swerving, honking and narrowly avoiding catastrophe.
After 6 hours of bouncing along these roads we are happy, if not relieved, to have arrived at the Branch that will be our home for the next 10 days. It is a two-story building–the first occupied by Grameen–with two small rooms for guests. In order to understand where branches fit into the Grameen hierarchy, I need to take a moment to explain how the bank is organized. For in truth, Grameen is nothing short of an organizational miracle. In fact, I would go so far as to say that while Dr. Muhammad Yunus is praised for recognizing that the poor can be credit worthy, his real, lasting achievement is in the details of how he goes about delivering that credit to them in a cost-effective manner.
This morning I was thinking about the fact that throughout America people today are resting, attending church and making preparations for watching the Super Bowl, while at the same time in Haiti, in Iraq, in Myanmar, and in so many unknown villages, slums and cities around the world there are people deprived of food, justice and dignity. And it occurred to me that the great responsibility of living in a free society is to strike a balance between fully enjoying that freedom–and the comfort and security it affords–without turning a blind eye to the lack of freedom elsewhere. How do we confront the horrors of Haiti without reducing our own hearts to rubble? Yet if we can look at these things with clarity and not turn away, then we can find sustainable, practical solutions.
Yes, that is our task. What follows is the story of how I came to that realization.
This photo shows one of the Grameen center meetings
First Impressions of Bangladesh and Grameen Bank
When Jill and I landed in Dhaka on Sunday the city was shrouded in an intense fog that, we later learned, is quite common this time of year. The scene when we walked outside the airport was pretty much what one would expect of a third world capital city: people everywhere; rickshaws competing for space with taxis and buses and all manner of other vehicles, human, animal and fossil-fuel powered; bustling markets; polluted air, etc.
We were taken to the Grand Prince Hotel and then immediately met up with our interpreter, Matin, who accompanied us to Grameen Bank’s head office. Our first adventure took place when Muhaimeen hailed a bicycle rickshaw that, in just three chaotic minutes, brought us to the office. Amazingly, Grameen, a Bank that exists for and is owned by the poor, has a 21 story head office, one of the tallest buildings in the area. One can’t help but feel that Grameen is a kind of conglomerate for good: leveraging all the ingenuity, efficiency, scale and power of corporations while being driven entirely by the motive to eradicate the world of poverty, of pollution, of injustice. The numbers are staggering: Grameen has 8 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women and all of whom are poor. They have 20,000 employees, a staggeringly high repayment rate, 4 million bank accounts for non Grameen borrowers (all borrowers must open an account so that they can deposit their required weekly savings there), and have turned a profit all but three years of operation. Lastly, they are 95% owned by the borrowers themselves–each borrower gets a share in the company–and 5% owned by the Bangladesh government. In short, Grameen’s Nobel Peace Prize was well deserved.
This photo is from our first flight from Boston to London on 1-01-10
Jill and I are currently in the airport in Bahrain waiting for the third, and final, leg of our 28 hour trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. We left Boston on the first of January at 7:20 PM and arrived in London at 6:50 AM on the second. As you can see from the photo above, we really lucked out in terms of our seating on the first flight: we got the seats that are usually reserved for flight attendants when they take naps on long flight; as a result, we had seats that could recline all the way down (even though we were in coach) and we had as much leg room as we could possibly want! The flight went smoothly and, as I have been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich–an absolutely fascinating history of Hitler’s Germany–the time passed rather quickly. Our second flight took us from London to Bahrain, where we are currently in the midst of a seven hour layover before one final flight to Dhaka.
Renewal
It was raining sunlight when I rose,
Cascades of warmth densely falling
Like poetry written in prose,
And my heart, through stops and starts,
Galloped ever closer to repose.
December 2, 2009 12:00 PM
Myth
“The only thing truer than Truth is the story.”—Jewish Proverb
Scrawled upon the tattered pages
And etched into the voices
Of shamans, poets, warriors—the masses,
A thousand stories telling the human story
Turn men into gods and gods into men.
Long before I heard the tale, I saw
The actors brandishing swords, hurling
Their tears to mingle with the seasons,
And knew that though a hand belongs to a man,
Its gestures belong to history.
And so I beckoned the storytellers,
Reached out to the depths of awareness
Where metaphors and hopes were born,
In search of the hopes and the metaphors
That would give meaning to the days.
At night the actors were dressed
In the wild extremes of emotion, and I danced
Cheek to cheek with bliss, despair, unyielding love,
Until sleep bled into wakefulness
And nothing seemed real.
In the crucible of the human psyche
Two plots are forged: one reveals
The desire to construct cities, institutions,
The other explains why mortals toil
To make a lasting impression on the earth.
Lifting a pen, the poet’s ink mingles with the blood
Of the living, the dead and the divine,
Yet naked and alone, he must admit that
Though all people are poets, all poets gods,
No image compares to the beauty of sunlight and stars.
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Poetry of the Morning
The morning repeats itself, its poetry
Heard where feet first touch the floor
Upon which the soldiers of old
March in lockstep, fighting in vain
Against a newer yet ageless force.
The morning reveals itself, its long
Limbs stretching namelessly
Across the face of solitude,
While through a thousand windows
Sunlight makes mist of dreams and dreamers.
The morning teases itself,
Its abdomen pressing against
The smooth back of darkness,
An embrace replete with the hope and fear
Of another day.
Yet the morning surprises itself, too,
Its stark clarity sometimes
Sculpting a lover of longing,
An action of lofty words,
A poem of an idea.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
I am the Founder & CEO of Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit social venture seeking to tackle poverty through financial services. I am also a writer, poet, cyclist, and avid reader. Enjoy my blog!