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The PBS NewsHour series “Brief but Spectacular” portrays Jacqueline Novogratz with her micro-lending development work. The interview begins this way.

JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ, Founder and CEO, Acumen:  When I was six years old, my first grade nun, Sister Mary Theophane, beat it into my head to whom much is given much is expected.  And so, I always wanted to change the world.

I moved to Rwanda to help start the first micro finance bank and soon thereafter realized that most people don’t want saving.  Most people want choice and opportunity, which is another way of saying dignity.

The “people don’t want saving” line naturally caught my attention. She’s right of course. Ever since we were toddlers we’d look up at those giant, godlike things we call parents and say “I do it myself!”

We like to be in control. We like options. We want our pride intact.

Visa Para Un Sueño

When I was a missionary in the Dominican Republic World Renew (then CRWRC, I always liked the palindrome) used to run a micro-business loan program for Haitian women. These are good programs. Women who might hear a dollar or two a day can strengthen their income, be able to feed their family better. They might be able, with some hard work and ambition work their way into a cement block home with a tin roof. They’d likely still have an outhouse and the kids might have to run to the river for water, washing and bathing.

These programs do good work and we certainly want to support them, but let’s not kid ourselves. Any of these women would drop their 50 dollar loan for a visa to the USA. When I first arrived in the DR in the early 90s the #1 hit song was “Visa Para Un Sueño” which talks about the dream of nearly every Dominican to get a shot a going to “Nueva York”.

In a recent article on a blog about global inequality the author suggest that if we really wanted to wipe out poverty world wide the best thing we could do would be to simply wipe out national borders. According to a Gallup piece  such a move would likely empty some of the poorest countries in the world of 90% of their populations.

It doesn’t take much to have us imagine what such a move would look like in the US. Camps would pop up around every major city in the US, and many rural areas too. Cities in the US would quickly look like cities in the third world. Schools would be overwhelmed and sanitation would be an immediate crisis.

This, however, would not really break down all that much inequality. To do so we’d likely have to take further steps of outlawing locked doors and legal defense of personal property.

What would happen in such a world? Well gun sales would go through the roof and we’d see something like we find in dystopian movies. Americans wouldn’t stand for it but the masses of the would would likely celebrated their shot at una visa para un sueño.

Who went out to see John the Baptist? Why was he so upset?

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