The Muhammad Yunus Traveling Roadshow
by Joy Stocke and Angie Brenner
Muhammad Yunus and Hassan Becdach traveling from Quito to Guayaquil
by Joy E. Stocke
Traveling with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus has its advantages. Our group of assistants, business people, interpreters, journalists, and photographers (among others) are part of the entourage surrounding Professor Yunus and the people responsible for organizing his itinerary: Ivonne Baki, President of the Andean Parliament; and Hassan Becdach, Executive President of HJ Becdach Marketing Inc.
Today, we are rushed by motorcade to the Quito Airport, given tickets, and led into the executive lounge for refreshments before the short flight to Guayaquil in southern Ecuador. Dr. Yunus is scheduled to speak on the city's Malecon, followed by a grand lunch at Ecuador's oldest private men's club - Club de la Union - two more speaking events, and then to the hotel for another banquet. At each event, local businessmen and women will have the opportunity to hear Yunus's message and have their photos taken with him.
by Angie Brenner
The reality of constant attention, paparazzi, tight schedules, long days and nights can exhaust anyone, let alone a Nobel Prizewinner. But watching Yunus deliver his seventh talk in three and a half days at the Guayaquil Catholic University shows how determined he is in his quest to rid the world of poverty.
We have a brief opportunity to interview him as the motorcade speeds from the luncheon to the university, but the luncheon had been long and Yunus is tired. He prefers to talk about his daughter, Monica, an accomplished soprano who performs with he Metropolitan Opera in New York City, and is the founder of Sing For Hope, singforhope.org, "which maintains a roster of compassionate, world-class artists who donate time and talent to the humanitarian causes that inspire them."
Laptops closed, tape recorders off, we ride in friendly silence so Yunus can prepare for his speech. This will be the fifth time we've heard him speak and one of numerous times we've followed him through a gauntlet of photographers. But once he reaches the podium, he immediately connects with the students making us believe that we are hearing his story for the first time:
"I come from a country that started as probably the poorest in the world. Poverty everywhere. You didn't see a symbol of prosperity any place. That’s where Bangladesh began as an independent nation. During the Nixon era, Henry Kissinger called Bangladesh a "basket case." Meaning it could not survive. It would disappear.
So you can imagine what it was like to be living in that country and going through every day. But we were very enthusiastic about our future. Despite all the problems around us we never gave up hope. We continued to work. To see how to change all of that.
Back then, I was teaching in one of the universities in Bangladesh. Usually a university teacher doesn’t mix with the people next door. We broke the norm. We said, "Let’s go and talk to the people who live next to us, and see if there’s anything we can do. What good is all that knowledge if we're not good to the neighbors outside the campus?'
Everybody said it cannot be done. We went to the bank to persuade them to give money to us. Banks do not give money to the poor. We broke the rules. We gave money to the poor. We didn’t hesitate to do that. After a while, after we did it, people said, 'What a daring thing. How can you do that?"
But at that time we didn’t care. We weren’t exactly sure what we were doing, but we wanted to do something that worked. We broke the fundamental principle of banking where the more money you make, the more money you can get. We shattered that to pieces. We reversed it. We said, 'the less you have, the more you get. If you have nothing, you get the highest priority.'
And we meant it. Not only did we go to the poorest. We went to the poorest women who never had anything in their lives. Women were literally nowhere in the banking system. We destroyed the whole idea of collateral.
We said, 'We don’t need collateral. No guarantees. No lawyers.'
I’m not against lawyers, only we don’t need laywers in our work. They’re useful somewhere else. Because banks are afraid that you will take their money and run away. That’s why they bring the lawyers to tie you up so you can not run away. The law will pick you up wherever you are.
Imagine doing banking without collateral, without any legal tying up. Our bank is based on trust. People said, 'It will never work. Trust is something which never existed anyway. You can’t even trust your own brother.'
I said, 'We’ll try. We’ll build the bank.'
We've been making loans for the last 31 years and we've never had a second thought."
by Angie Brenner