What I've Been Reading...in the Last Year

Wow, I can't believe it's been a year since I wrote a comprehensive summary (is it grammatically incorrect to put those two words next to each other? ) of the books I've read. I've mainly been avoiding this because I wanted to do a grandiose post on what I thought of each book, with quotes, summaries, deep thoughts, etc. I'm realizing that might never happen, so something is better than nothing.

Of the three books I was reading when I last wrote something on this topic, I've finished two of the three. I still haven't finished reading the White Man's Burden...I don't think I've even touched it since my last post about it. Oh well, I guess that one will stay on the shelf another year or so.

So, without further ado, here we go.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

I absolutely loved this book. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." This is the main motto, which sounds a lot simpler than it really is. For example, a lot of the "food" that you eat isn't really food, it's highly processed stuff. So when he say's "eat food," there's a much more significant meaning to what he's saying than you might think ("But I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it--in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, along--is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term."). I think this is a great introductory book to changing eating habits, and how you see the food industry in general. There are some crazy statistics that really make you think about what you're eating, and why you're eating it (think: congressional lobbies). I've been wanting to read some more books on this topic since I finished this book, but just haven't gotten around to it. One of the cleverest suggestions from this book: shop in the periphery of the grocery store: it contains the freshest and least processed stuff (produce, veggies, etc., versus boxed meals). Some of my favorite quotes:

• "Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished."
• "...the processing of foods typically robs them of nutrients, vitamins especially."
• "By breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain."
• "Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet."
• "...and Americans are consuming a diet that is at least half sugars in one form or another--calories providing virtually nothing but energy."
• "It's hard to believe that we're getting everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat."
• MY FAVORITE: "[y]ou now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you'd have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago." INSANE (emphasis added).

On That Day Everybody Ate: One Woman's Story of Hope and Possibility in Haiti, by Margaret Trost

Jim (co-founder of Haiti Scholarships) sent me this book out of the blue. I actually was a little concerned about who had sent the book to me, since I had no idea where it came from, and someone clearly had my address, and new of my interest in Haiti, haha. But all was well, and no one was stalking me.

This is a really short and quick read, but very inspiring story--which, I'm sure, is why Jim sent it to me. It tells the real st

ory of one woman's journey to Haiti, and how she started an organization to help feed children in Haiti. It was great reading about someone going through a similar struggle with getting an organization started and off the ground, and seeing it succeed. I hope Haiti Scholarships grows to have the same success that her organization has. Some of my favorite quotes:

• "It took Haiti 125 years to pay off the debt to France (estimated at a value of $21 billion today with interest and inflation calculated in), and the effects on the society were devastating."
• "Iwas relieved to be back in the States, where the comforts and convenience and abundance overflowed. But at the same time, I felt nauseated." A feeling that's easily relatable for those who have traveled to similar places, I'm sure.
• "Normally, I planned out every detail of a business trip, complete with a typed agenda neatly placed in a folder." I was just relieved to see that someone else does this.
• A topic Reuben and I have frequently discussed is religion, and how religion seems to be more abundant in poorer areas: "'God is the first and last resource here. We feel God's presence more and more, because there is nobody else some days who can sustain us to allow us to survive. It's only God sometimes...Because the neighbor doesn't have enough, the friend's don't have anything, so we're praising God. God makes miracles. So we live by miracles, and as we live by miracles, we need faith. Our faith sustains us.'"
• "This led to the importing of heavily subsidized U.S. rice, which was cheaper than Haitian rice. After a few years, Haiti's peasant farmers could not compete and most went out of business."
• "Haiti is thethird-largest importer of rice from the U.S.--240,000 metric tons per year. Until the 1980s, Haiti was self-sufficient in rice production." Crazystatistic.
• "Or maybe because I was discovering more and more how unfair the world is, how cruel it can be. The disparity between my life and the lives of everybody I met in Tiplas Kazo weighed on me all the time."

Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots

Organization that's Winning the Fight Against Poverty, by Ian Smillie

This book was given to me by Reuben, and it's

another inspiring story about a nonprofit who grew quickly to address some pressing issues around the world (and curiously enough, the nonprofit that a good friend of mine went to work for in Haiti shortly after I finished reading this book!).

The title itself gives you a synopsis about what the book is about. BRAC is similar to Acumen Fund, which I mentioned on my summary of The Blue Sweater, both organizations focus on microcredit a

s a way to relieve poverty. I think one of the things I liked best about this book is that it was honest about what worked and what didn't work for the organization when it was first starting. It's great to know that organizations don't always get things right, but the difference is in manning up to that, and making it better. I'm gonna post some of my favorite parts, but this book is chalk full of great follow up resources, from other books, to articles, to organizations, etc. (I still have to follow up on all of these highlights, of course).

• "[D]eveloping countries are littered with failed income-generation projects that have generated little more than loss and disappointment. While there has never been a lack of bright ideas and good intentions among aid agencies, there has too often been a surfeit of amateurism that, combined with money, can be deadly."
• "It is a sad commentary on countries in Europe and North America that provide foreign aid with one hand--dispensed with lashings of advice about how poor countries must liberalize their economies and eschew subsidies--while simultaneously undercutting the world price of grain, dairy products,and other goods through generous subsidies to their own producers."
• "Generally, increasing the average amount of education in the labor force by one year raises GDP by 9 percent, a statistic that holds for the first three years of education."
• "'The role of education in reducing absolute poverty is decisive. Many research studies...[have] concluded that rising levels of education in a society were often accompanied by a sharp decline in absolute poverty. When poverty levels were correlated with such variables as mean years of schooling, adult literacy, and gross enrollment rates, it was clearly established that absolute poverty declines as education increases.'"

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn

I read this book on the plan to and from Haiti. It's a hugely successful book, with a movie in the works, as well as an organization of the same name that exists to combat all the ills against women that this book talks about.

The stories in this book, from real women around the world, are sad, and compelling. It's crazy to think that in our day and age, this things are still happening to women...to people.

Similar to Freedom from Want, this book is full of great resources that I have yet to follow up on.

• "'More weight is still given to the crime of stealing a thing than to the crime of stealing a person.'"
• "...21% of Ghanian woman reported...that their sexual initiation was by rape; 17% of Nigerian women said that they had endured rape or attempted rape by the age of nineteen; and 21% of South African women reported that they had been raped by the age of fifteen."
• "The United Nations Population Fund has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year..."
• "'It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.'"
• "In just the Congolese province of South Kivu, the UN estimates that there were twenty-seven thousand (27,000) sexual assaults in 2006."
• "One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad."
• "The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered...Some 99 percent of those deaths occur in poor countries."
• "The World Bank estimated that for every one thousand girls who get one additional year of education, two fewer women will die in childbirth."
• "'Women are not dying because of untreatable diseases. They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.'"
• "Another study suggested that it would cost an additional $9 billion a year to provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95% of the world's population...Suppose that the estimate of $9 billion per year is correct. It pales beside the $40 billion that the world spends annually on pet food..."
• "To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but--even worse-- to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men."
• "If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer to slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures."

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo

I think this was the first book we read for our book club. Not as difficult for me to follow as The White Man's Burden, but it's up there. This book tackles many difficulties in getting people out of the "poverty trap," including global health, education, economics, etc. My favorite parts of this book were the parts that made me look at situations through a different lens. Why don't poor people save? Why don't they get medical insurance for when they get really sick? Why don't they go to a doctor instead of a local? Why do they have so many kids? Why don't they realize the value of an education?

I'm not gonna lie, I'm pooped. So if you're interested, I'll have to owe you my favorite quotes from this book.

What I've Been Reading Lately...

Over a year ago, I wrote about reading series of books, and how it had become a bit of an obsession of mine. Lately I haven't been reading any series of books, per se, but have definitely fallen into a very particular genre of books. For Christmas, Jeff and I each got a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble from his parents. Let me tell you, we are both huge fans of reading, so we were pretty stoked about this gift, and didn't wait more than a day to hit up B&N and find something exciting to spend our money on.

Jeff mentioned I should spend my money on getting something "fun" to read this time, since every book I'd read before then was pretty serious in nature. I tried. But I just couldn't. I went to the Spanish section, where I usual find a good, light-hearted and entertaining read (and I get to brush up on my Spanish). There were several titles that looked intriguing, but not nearly enough so to make me want to spend my Christmas gift on them. I was itching to head back downstairs to the section that really interested me. And so it was that my gift card was used for the same type of "serial" reading that I've been doing lately. I feel the books I'm choosing lately are almost a self-education in a new area of study: I can't afford to pay for a masters in international development, but I'm reading a lot of literature about it, and maybe that's enough for now.

So here's my list of serial reading in international development/non-profit development so far:

It all really started with an ad in the online version of the New York Times for Three Cups of Tea. Jeff will tell you I'm a sucker for advertising. The reviews were great, I bought it, I read it. My initial reaction is to say that it was great, inspiring, moving, entertaining, etc. And I think it was (it's been a while), but I do believe it took me a while to actually get into it. If you haven't heard about this book before, it's the story of how Greg Mortenson started the Central Asia Institute, a non-profit that raises money to build schools in Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. It really is an inspiration of how much one man can accomplish, and a testimony to what a difference education can make.

The first book I bought after I returned from my trip to Haiti was Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder. It tells the story of Doctor Paul Farmer, who I've already mentioned several times in Cielo Azul. With this book I started to fold the top corner of passages or quotes that I liked, or stuff I wanted to research more (but still haven't). Here are a few:

• "'Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights,'" quoting Dr. Paul Farmer, page 91.
• Page 116 describes Dr. PF's writing of The Uses of Haiti, which I want to eventually read.
• "There are more billionaires today than ever before...We are talking about wealth that we've never seen before. And the only time that I hear talk of shrinking resources among people like us, among academics, is when we talk about things that have to do with poor people...Margaret Mead once said, Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world...Indeed, they are the only ones who ever have." Quoting Jim Kim, page 164.
• "Change the world? Of course they could. [Paul Farmer] really believed this, and he really believed that 'a small group of committed individuals' could do it. He liked to say of PIH, 'People think we're unrealistic. They don't know we're crazy.'" Page 169.
• "If one pushes this ology to its logical conclusion, then God is to be found in the struggle against injustice. But if the odds are so preposterously stacked against the poor--machetes versus Uzis, donkeys versus tanks, stones versus missiles, or even typhoid versus cancer--then is it responsible, is ti wise, to push the poor to claim what is theirs by right? What happens when the destitute in Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, wherever, are moved by a rereading of the Gospels to stand up for what is theirs, to reclaim what was theirs and was taken away, to ask only that they enjoy decent poverty rather than the misery we see here every day in Haiti? We know the answer to that question, because we are digging up their bodies in Guatemala." Paul Farmer discussing his distrust of ideologies, page 195.

Next came Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking, by Timothy T. Schwartz. This book gives a critical look at how foreign aid has really affected Haiti. I think it's a great read for anyone wanting to work in this field, so you know what you're dealing with, and what you want to avoid. He spoke a lot about the effects of food aid, and large NGO's that work in Haiti. With this book, I moved it a step up from folding pages to....highlighting!

• "I came to understand that food aid crashed the local agriculture markets, driving peasants off the land..." (page 47).
• Speaking about what little there was to know about wind generators that had been installed in the early 1990s, and quickly fallen into disrepair: "But it was enough because it is the typical story regarding development all over Haiti: 'It is broken, can't be fixed, and nobody knows anything else about it.'" (page 66)
• "When I first arrived in Haiti...I was enthusiastic. My enthusiasm and belief that I could make a contribution kept me returning despite the hardships, the violence, the coups, and the embargoes. But ten years later I was a different person. Perhaps I was simply burned out...Perhaps more than anything else, by 2000, I no longer was an objective researcher. I was deeply angry at what I perceived to be the widespread fraud, corruption, arrogance, greed, self-interest and apathy that afflicted the entire development community which was, in my opinion, a total failure, serving only to make the poor poorer and the rich richer" (page 216).

Then, per a friendly recommendation, I read The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs. This book was a little challenging for me, since it's heavy on economics and numbers. Let's just say that in college I took the "economics for dummies" course. It had a lot of interesting information and thoughts on how poverty can actually be eradicated in time to meet the Millennium Goals. Curiously enough, the book I'm currently reading, The White Man's Burden, is a response to some of Mr. Sach's arguments. One of my favorite parts of the book was actually the forward by Bono.

• "More than one million African children, and perhaps as many as three million, succumb to malaria each year...There is simply no conceivable excuse for this disease to be taking millions of lives each year" (7).
• "The rich countries do not have to invest enough in the poorest countries to make them rich; they need to invest enough so that these countries can get their foot on the ladder [of development]" (73).
• "Eliminating poverty at the global scale is a global responsibility that will have global benefits. No single country can do it on its own" (327).
• "American political leaders and the broad public rarely recognize that the U.S. government has repeatedly made international commitments to do much more than the United States is doing, and even less do they realize that the lack of follow-through carries an enormous foreign policy cost" (337).
• On page 350 Sachs discusses the importance of education: "The wider the education, including in social and political principles, the more peaceful, sound, and progressive the entire society would be."

After scanning a few stands at Barnes and Noble, I came across The Rainy Season by Amy Wilentz. What I loved about this book is that it was an interesting way to learn about the historical context of Haiti, including the end of the Duvalier regime, and the rise of Aristide.

• "Haiti's stuck in an uncomfortable position now: the earthquake has opened the country up to all sorts of interventions, speculations, and exploitations, but unquestionably the help is needed. There's very little room for resistance in this disaster. The country's lying there like a rape victim waiting for further onslaught" (introduction, xiii).
• "It took me a little while to realize that if you wait long enough in Haiti, and really not so long, the tyranny and violence is likely to return, and that a people's victory is not always in the end what is seems to be in the beginning" (20).
• "Whenever change is effected without bloodshed in Haiti, it means that an equitable deal has been struck among all interested parties" (129).
• There is an interesting paragraph about the culture of voodoo and it's perseverance despite foreign opposition to it; too long to type out now though :) page 165.
• Page 183 provides great insight to the relationship between poverty and religion.
• Page 267 talks about trees, and how there are many NGO's that want to give trees to farmers in order to improve deforestation, but farmers are weary of planting trees because they can't afford to use what precious water they have on growing trees, trees that are not going to be quick cash returns.
• Speaking to an AID worker about Haitian's that don't support NGO projects because they know these projects fail to follow through on promises made: "'I know, I know,' he said. 'But at a certain point, who cares if they want it? They need it, and they're going to have it. They don't understand. What Haiti needs is infrastructure, and we are going to make sure they get it whether they want it or not'" (284).
• Some of the most sobering passages of Wilentz's book are graphic descriptions of violence surrounding elections.

I then went back to the beginning, and decided to read the sequel to Three Cups of Tea: Stones into Schools, by Greg Mortenson. This book follows Mortenson's quest to start building schools in the most difficult regions of Pakistan. I sadly just realized I didn't highlight much on this one, but I did find it a much more entertaining read than Three Cups.

• "Amid the rush to provide tents, food, and medical supplies, few of the western NGOs seemed to be giving much thought to schools. Based on past experience, however, the militant groups who were busy setting up their aid networks fully understood the power of education under such circumstances" (179).
• Mortension writes about Chritopher Kolenda, and a book written by him called Leadership: The Warrior's Art. On my follow up list.
• "...I am told that there will be roughly 200 children who will study at the school; and that the skills they will learn and the ideas to which they will be exposed may usher in changes--some good, others bad--which no one can foresee" (epilogue, 375).

My last read was The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, by Jacqueline Novogratz. Novogratz is the founder of Acumen Fund, and talks about how she began developing for-profit enterprises by and for the poorest populations around the world.

• "I began to see what it meant to put into practice the idea of extending basic services as simple as bank accounts that the middle class took for granted to people who are often invisible to those in power" (17).
• "Cote d'Ivoire became a place where just walking down the street filled me with questions about justice and compassion, power and money, and the randomness of where we are born and how much that determines who we become" (23).
• "In this case, well-intentioned people gave poor women something 'nice' to do, such as making cookies or crafts, and subsidized the project until there was no more money left, then moved on to a new idea. This is a no-fail way to keep already poor people mired in poverty" (76).
• "Meanwhile, I found myself frustrated once again by development 'experts' who looked in from the outside and suggested clever solutions that created a lot of noise, distorted markets, resulted in systemic corruption, and accomplished little" (94).
• Somethings to check out: Next Generation Leadership, Three Guineas Fund
• "Patient capital is money invested over a longer period of time with the acknowledgment that returns might be below market, but with a wide range of management support services to nurture the company to liftoff and beyond" (229).
• "That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, and a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen, grow, and solidify into a system where people forget to question until an event or series of events awakens the next generation" (275).
• "They balance their passion for change with an ability to get things done. Mostly, they believe fundamentally in the inherent capacity of every human being to contribute" (277).
• "...scientists are finding, not surprisingly, that the one factor that does bring greater happiness is serving others.." (279).

All in all, I'm quite enjoying my current series. Feel free to send me any recommendations you think might fit in :)

*PS: this is my 200th blog entry. Can't believe I've been boring you guys with my thoughts 200 times already.

Reflections

I wasn't planning on writing anything on my blog about the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake--I figure today is the one day when everyone else will be talking about it, and I don't think there's much I can add that I haven't already shared with readers prior to today, and what every news broadcast is already doing. But I came across a blog entry of a good friend, so I wanted to share some of that with you guys. I'm only sharing a part here, but I recommend reading the whole thing. Here's the excerpt that got me:

"First, I ask you to take a moment of silence with the rest of the world at 4:53 eastern (2153 GMT) to remember the approximate quarter of million people who died in the disaster. But please go further than that. One moment of silent prayer or reflection is not enough for a disaster this large. It demands several moments.

So please also take a moment when you walk into your house. Remember those Haitians (about 1 million) still without a house.

Take a moment when you turn on your tap and water instantly appears. Remember those Haitians who must carry their water miles to and from clean water sources.

When you flush your toilet, remember those who are still using pit toilets, or having to flush only once a day to conserve water.

As you prepare to come back to school, or go to work, imagine your life totally upended. Family members no longer here, plans scrapped. That is reality for millions of Haitians."

This is something that was really difficult to deal with when I first returned from my trip, and something I know is constantly on mine and Abby's mind. How can we not feel guilty about everything we have, when people around the world have so little? How is this fair?

I'm not five years old anymore, so I don't need my mom to tell me that life isn't fair...I know it isn't...but I don't know why is has to be SO unfair (ok, maybe I'm still five). I think about how much water we use just to shower or wash our hands...and people in Africa don't even have enough water to drink. It's crazy, right? (or is it just me...?)

I came across an interesting passage in a book I just finished, called The Blue Sweater, by Jacqueline Novogratz. Novogratz is talking about celebrating the wrap up of a big project in Rwanda, and standing in line at a local store with two bottles of champagne. While in line it hit her that these two bottles cost more than most Rwandans made in a whole year--she was embarrassed when it came time for the Rwandan store clerk to ring her up. In the end, her companion convinced her to buy them: " 'I know it doesn't make a lot of sense on one level. We're working with the really poor, and you and I couldn't be more privileged in relative terms. But don't pretend to be someone you aren't. If you were at home, you'd celebrate with champagne. If you want to remain happy and alive in this work, you need to reconcile this part of who you are and understand the inconsistencies with the work you do and how it all fits into your whole way of being.' " (page 115).

The whole "don't pretend to be someone you're not" is pretty intense, and true. We have been born into privilege, maybe not rich-trust-fund kind of privilege, but we have abundant resources nonetheless. We can't deny that, and we shouldn't. As Novogratz puts it: "The challenge wasn't whether to buy a couple of bottles of champagne; it was instead not to take our privilege for granted and to use it in a way that served the world and our highest purpose" (116, emphasis added).

So today, take a minute to reflect. How can you use your privileges to serve the highest purpose?

Book Review: A Long Way Gone

Abby and I were wandering the halls of the Miami international airport, our last stop before boarding a plane to Haiti. We had a bit of a layover, and I really wanted to find something worth reading. I perused the bookstore for quite a bit of time, hoping to find something cheery and uplifting. I knew I was headed to a county that had been devastated by January's earthquake, so I didn't want something that was super serious or a "downer" by any means.

With those search criteria in mind, I came across "A Long Way Gone: memoirs of a boy soldier," by Ishmael Beah. How's THAT for a light read? I held on to that book for a while as I tried to find something "lighter," but nothing else really caught my attention, and I really had been wanting to read this book for a while. So the memoirs of a boy soldier it would be.

I'm a little torn on my review of this book. I think it gives a good account of what children soldiers have to go through, how they get where they are, and how they're able to carry out the orders they're given (which I know I didn't really understand before reading this book). The book gives a good first account of someone who has had to live through horrific and terrifying scenes, scenes which most of us can never even imagine.

I think my only criticism is that the author is simply telling his story, and I was wanting to read something "more." The author's purpose is to tell his story, not necessarily to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. He's not concerned with the flow of the book, or embellishments, or making sure things sound good, he is concerned with letting the world know what he had to live through. I think the book is exactly what you expect, and not much more. Like I mentioned before, it wasn't quite the book I was in the mood for, but I'm still glad I read it. It's a good read, especially if you've never read or heard about children soldiers, but in the words of a good friend, it's "not overly insightful or surprising." I would still give this book a read if you're in the right mood for it.