Christian missionary zealots think helping the poor around the world means first and foremost putting Jesus in the heart and then a little food in the belly. According to the missionaries, food helps short term, but Jesus saves the soul for eternity. 
Well, this strategy sucks. It doesn't help relieve poverty and it's condescending, not empowering.
So the selection of Muhammad Yunus for the Nobel Peace Prize was great news. Here's a man who helped millions of people lift themselves out of
poverty in rural Bangladesh. His mission began when he realized that
while he was teaching advanced economic theories, people were starving
in the streets due to a terrible famine. (And you thought economics was the dismal science. Sheesh!)
While a professor at Chittagong University, he led a field trip to a poor Bangladeshi village. In the village, he met a woman who made bamboo stools. And this is critical: he recognized profits
were eaten up by the extortionate rates of local lenders. So what did Yunus do? He didn't condescendingly stress the need for the poor woman to recognize Jesus as her personal savior. Instead he started
lending money himself in the form of "micro-loans" and in 1976 the
Grameen Bank Project was born.
Since then this remarkable man's ideas have reached nearly 70,000 villages and have made
small loans to more than 6 million customers! It is remarkable in many
ways, but most amazing of all is how almost all of the borrowers are women, and the loan recovery rate
is above 98 per cent!
Didn't Jesus say something like:
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." [Actually it was Lao Tzu. But that's not the point.]
If so, Muhammad Yunus is acting more like Jesus than the missionaries whose mission it
is to convert the poor, not empower them.
Congratulations Professor Yunus!
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