Beyond Thankfulness: Creating Hope Out of Despair

Here in Paris, thousands of miles away from "home" we will celebrate Thanksgiving with American expats and French friends. I know that it is my favorite holiday, and that it is important for my French-American daughter to understand this holiday for many reasons. Thankfulness for all that we do have, for the fact that we have more than enough, is one way to give a precious gift to one's children.

Thanksgiving dinner is also the one meal we can share with our European friends which demonstrates that Americans know how to use seasonal foods, prepared deliciously, even if acquiring sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce is not the easiest thing to accomplish (unless you are lucky enough to have a friend at the embassy with access to the PX). Each time I have made Thanksgiving dinner abroad, European friends are won over by the stuffing, pumpkin pie and jalepeno cornbread. Tonight a fellow expat will be doing the cooking, as I will do my best to arrive on time with the metro strike. The wine tonight, however, will remain French.

But today, halfway around the world, in Bangladesh, other mothers will not be able to feed their children. People will die from water-borne disease and have no shelter due to the force of last week's typhoon which slammed into a country which is home to some of the poorest people on this planet.

Yet even amidst the poverty and suffering, there is hope. There are now millions of people who are able to no longer be amongst the "poorest of the poor". After disasters such as these, micro-lending programs, like those run by the Grameen Bank founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Prof. Muhammad Yunus, will once again give loans. Ironically, when we asked what we could do to raise money to help people in Bangladesh, Yunus responded that the best thing was to support what we were already doing..continuing to draw awareness to this powerful Social Business and replicate the microl-oan process around the world, and add to it an Emergency Services program such as the one Grameen uses after horrific events such as this typhoon.

Affected borrowers' loans are not written off, they are in fact give new loans. And they end up paying back both! In a country where typhoons, floods and disasters of all kinds are a yearly occurrence, some might find this tough love approach a bit much. But it works. How can you argue with that?

There is still a place for emergency aid, but what we must remember, even in our own countries, in times of disaster and economic upheaval (such as the one we are experiencing now) people are able to best get back on their feet and remain that way when the approach is a sustainable one, and not a quick fix.

So as you sit down to your Thanksgiving meal today, take a minute, and send some thankful thoughts to people who need them. And during half-time, don't watch the commercials, get up and check out www.grameen.com...and then you will feel thankful whoever wins the game, during the washing up after the meal, and calculating how much money you may have lost in the stock market last week.

Comments

[liveandlearn]

even the poorest among us live better (materially) than over a billion of the world's poorest. give back (pay it forward).