Up With People

Many years ago, I watched a segment on 60 Minutes (at least, I think it was 60 Minutes). 60 Minutes is perhaps the oldest of the news shows on the air. I remember it in the 1970s and it's now 30 years later.

Once upon a time, I used to think of news as being objective and while the press (Fox News, not withstanding) still maintains this air of objectivity, I began to realize shows like 60 Minutes does not. These are manipulative shows meant to give one side of a story, so that the audience sympathizes, while not giving the other side of the story a fair shake. It's one reason the show is so popular.

Eventually, the two other major networks developed their own news programs. 20/20 in the 80s, and Dateline probably in the 90s.

The segment I watched was about a man from Bangladesh (which is near India) who had studied business in the west, and realized most of what he had been taught did not apply to his poor country. Other countries had tried to invest, but many of the projects laid incomplete, and didn't help anyone.

He came up with a rather novel idea. He would open a bank to the poor. As it turned out, the very poor often had a raw deal. They might have basic skills, such as making baskets or chairs. However, to acquire the material, they had to make a deal with someone who would provide them material, and then take the made item and sell it, leaving her with only a little more than she had paid for to feed herself. They could never rise above their abject poverty. Of course, they were so poor, they couldn't get loans either.

The man once asked a woman if he were to loan her money, could she sell it for more money than she was making now, and she said definitely. So, he loaned her the money, and soon enough, she was making enough to repay that loan.

He realized that he needed to do more than simply loan the money, that the poor had been poor so long that they lack self-esteem and even the know-how of what to do with the money. He wanted to empower these women, so he came with a credo which the borrowers would recite, and some even joined the bank and could relate their stories to others.

The man, Muhammad Yunus, discovered women were better at repaying the loans than men, so many of the people he helped out were women. He would hold what amounted to a jamboree where those who had borrowed would come together as a group and meet one another.

This idea has apparently spread beyond Bangladesh, and has even made it to the United States.

This was a fascinating story of how people come up with ideas to help the indigent.

This morning, I had plans to go get my car looked at. It's fine, but the maintenance light turned on, and I knew this meant that it needed its periodic checkout. However, I had just been there very recently, so I wondered why the light was on (it's stupid, and doesn't know that maintenance was recently performed). So I came back to College Park, headed to the UM gym, and read Scientific American.

The article I read talked about prostitutes in Calcutta (these days, cities in India have changed their names, presumably from British rule, thus Calcutta is now Kolkata, and Bombay is now Mumbai, much like many of the cities in China changed names) who used to have a high incidence of HIV.

This was causing problems because men would visit these prostitutes, get infected, and then infect their wives. A doctor (I think) wanted to figure out a way to solve this problem. One solution was to convince these prostitutes to convince their clientele to use condoms.

However, this was not so easy to do. There was no incentive for them to do so. He had attended some conference where he had heard the term "sex worker". He realized that maybe, if he could convince these women, that they were workers much like he was a worker, that this would elevate their own image of themselves.

Many of these women were prostitutes not by choice but by force, and had lived this way since before they were teens. However, since customers didn't want to wear condoms, they might leave one worker for another. So, he had the women organize themselves, much like a union.

He also had to convince the police to stop raiding the brothels because the women needed steady income and a raid meant no income, and more likelihood to accede to customer requests not to use condoms. He was trying to convince people that prostitution would not go away, and that these women could also become educators, warning of the problems of HIV.

Not only has he reduced the percentage of sex workers with HIV, he has helped their self-image, their working conditions. He's seen as something of a saint for what he's done.

This is one of those intriguing stories that has as much to do with how society perceives its own ills. As much as people despised prostitution, there were enough men who sought out the services and enough women trapped in what they perceived as demeaning jobs, treated like slaves, that it took someone who had health concerns on his mind to look past the moral issues that comes with this.

This reminds me a bit of Firefly, the short-lived series by Joss Whedon. In Whedon's view of the universe, the prostitutes of the world, called companions have an elevated stature. They are trained, much like dancers or musicians, to be charming, well versed in many topics, and of course, able to please.

Of course, to me, that kind of view seems very much a male idea. This doctor in India has come as close to a real manifestation of this fantasy as anyone has, although for, in my mind, much nobler purposes.

This is one of those questions that vexes humanity. How do we improve the lot of people, when there are people inclined to the status quo and folks that simply aren't that well-behaved.