Me, Yu, and Sati.
(L to R) Celia, Muhammad Yunus, Satia
A few weeks ago I had the honor of meeting Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus at a conference for Social Business Development in Denver. During his introduction to the stage, the president of Regis University described Yunus as a small, soft and simple spoken man. I was totally blow away…without using a rash of fancy microeconomic business terms, Yunus spoke about poverty in his country, Bangladesh. He made an analogy of people in poverty vs. people who lived with financial wealth using a Banzai tree. Planting a seed taken from the largest tree in a forest inside a pot will give you a perfectly tiny Banzai tree. The size of the tree is not about the seed, it’s about the space that little seed has to grow in. Yunus believes that poverty affects people in the same way.
Later that day at a VIP reception I had the chance to meet Yunus who immediately embraced my daughter in the same loving way a father does…it was a great moment, one I hope she never forgets.
More about Yunus…
In 1974, Muhamad Yunus was a professor of economics at Chittagong University in southern Bangladesh, when his country experienced a terrible famine in which thousands starved to death.
“We tried to ignore it,” he says. “But then skeleton-like people began showing up in the capital, Dhaka. Soon the trickle became a flood. Hungry people were everywhere. Often they sat so still that one could not be sure whether they were alive or dead. They all looked alike: men, women, children. Old people looked like children, and children looked like old people.
Ashamed of not being able to do anything by teaching economics, he said, ” I needed to run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.”
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