villagefinance

Imagine if, each morning as you pulled out of your driveway, you were touched by the gaze of the same child, watching you from the sidewalk. Her gaze is as open and undemanding as the earth, and as curious and deeply conscious as any you’ve received from your own children. She is also visibly poverty-stricken.

I took this photo while visiting a small village bank in Cambodia. Whenever foreigners enter a village there, curious children gather to watch. These two stood quietly on the fringe of my meetings with the village adults for over an hour.

I have always believed that my birth into a middle class family in one of the world’s wealthiest nations was blind luck. And the more I travel and work in poor communities, the more obvious it becomes that no concept of justice could seek out this result.

Ten thousand years ago everyone lived in what we would now call ‘poverty’ – the constant struggle for food, the lack of education, healthcare, technology, and comforts. Now we speak of a ‘global village’ — nostalgically evoking a village-style warmth and connectedness we still hunger for. But in our ‘village’ we have made no place for the real villagers, like these children and their parents. You can read the truth of our ‘global village’ in their eyes.