All the while David continued making regular trips back to Manila to check on things there, and he was impressed with the progress being made. Leigh had done a great job setting things up, and TSPI was busy making loans to enterprising poor people in Manila. Already small businesses were up and running, creating jobs and income for people in the barrios.
David also made trips back to Bali to check up on things there. Priyadi Reksasiswaya was doing a great job running MBM in Bali, and he and David were looking to set up similar programs in other parts of Indonesia.
Finally, in 1984, the time was right to begin setting up a microfinance scheme in India. David and Leigh traveled together to Bangalore and met with Vinay. Located in southern India, Bangalore was a large, overcrowded city, so overcrowded that the year before, the city government had forcibly removed a fifth of the city’s population who lived in slums to an area outside the city, called Lingarajapuram. Vinay and his wife, Colleen, had then moved to Lingarajapuram to minister among the relocated poor people. Already Vinay had established a school for children whose parents could not afford to send them to regular schools. He had also established a children’s home and a health clinic.
David was impressed with Vinay’s practical approach to ministering to the poor. He was particularly moved when he visited the children’s home. Here were children just like he had been—abandoned and considered by most to be at the bottom of the barrel in society. David knew how it felt to be in that position, yet he also knew that it was possible to rise above it and to shatter people’s expectations about you. With love and care and education and access to resources, he hoped and prayed that the same might be true for these children in Lingarajapuram.
In Bangalore, David oversaw the establishment of The Bridge Foundation (TBF) to make and administer small business loans to the poor. As he had done in Manila, he helped to select and train both the board members on the new foundation and TBF’s executive director, Paul Roby, a former squadron leader in the Indian Air Force. Once the foundation was set up and the board of directors installed, David left Leigh to help set up the loan programs and train the new staff in all the various facets of microfinance.
David would return to Bangalore every other month to check up on things and meet with Vinay Samuel. It was on one of these trips back to Bangalore that David was introduced to the poorest group of people he had ever met—rag pickers. The rag pickers were a group of boys, some of whom were only nine years old, who slept in drains or out in the open by night and who by day spent their time rummaging through rotting garbage wherever they could find it, searching for mostly scraps of paper and cardboard but also for plastic and metal that they could sell to be recycled. The boys took the collected paper to a small store, where it was baled and weighed, and they would be paid for it. With the money they would buy food for themselves.
James Solomon, a worker from a local Christian charity, pointed out to David that most of the time the boys were ripped off by the merchant, who always told them that the paper they had collected weighed far less than it actually did. During the monsoon season, when the paper became sodden and not fit to be sold, the rag pickers lived a precarious existence, stealing or searching for food amid the garbage to keep them alive. If that were not bad enough, the local police took advantage of the rag pickers, arresting them for minor offenses and taking the money they had made from collecting and selling paper.
James tried to help the rag pickers as best he could. He had set up his own paper collection center, where the paper was weighed honestly and the boys were paid a fair price for it. He had also started a small literacy program to teach those who wanted to learn to read and write, and he had plans to set up a shelter where the rag pickers could sleep at night. But all of this cost money, which James did not have.
David admired James’s commitment and was moved by the plight of the rag pickers. In conjunction with Leigh Coleman and TBF, David and James came up with a plan to help the rag pickers. Their approach was two-pronged. They would financially support the setting up of an expanded literacy program, along with a health clinic, a shelter for the boys to sleep in at night, and a training program to teach the boys skills. They would also set up several collection centers and work to make them as profitable as possible so that the profit could be used to help sustain the project. It was hoped that the project would eventually become completely self-sustaining and the boys could run it themselves. David wrote a proposal for the project and found donors in Australia and Europe to support it.
David also then kept an eye on the rag-picker project on his many visits to Bangalore. Things were going well. James was doing a wonderful job with the boys. He had won their trust and confidence, and David was delighted when the first boy left the life of a scavenging rag picker and was able to get a paid job using the carpentry skills he had acquired in the training program. Other boys who were able to leave rag picking behind soon joined him.
If he thought the rag pickers were the most destitute group he had ever laid eyes on, David was in for a surprise when he visited Pakistan at the invitation of Michael Nazir-Ali, the Anglican bishop of Raiwind. Michael introduced David to the brick kiln workers who worked in the brick kilns scattered across Pakistan and occupied the lowest rung of society. The brick kiln workers were virtual slaves of the kiln owners, locked in by an endless cycle of debt. No matter how hard these people worked, they could never get ahead of the debt they owed to the kiln owners, who advanced them money to survive during the monsoon season when it was too wet to make bricks. During the dry times, each family of brick kiln workers was expected to make twelve hundred bricks a day. If they failed to make this quota—and they often did fail—they became even more indebted to the owner. Whole families lived in squalid thatched huts, and as soon as the sun came up each morning, the family would start making bricks and would not cease until the sun went down at night.
Michael Nazir-Ali took David to a kiln to see firsthand the brick kiln workers’ plight. David watched entire families, from the youngest to the oldest, toil in 120-degree heat, seven days a week, digging clay, molding it into bricks, and laying the bricks out in the sun to bake dry. He watched as old men and women, too infirm to walk, were carried to the clay pit to lend their hands making bricks. For a family to make their brick quota, everyone had to help. David couldn’t help but notice the despair etched into these people’s faces. For them, life was nothing but agonizing toil. Michael told David that he was doing what he could to help these people, providing literacy programs for them and health care as well as warm clothes to wear on cold winter days. “But what else can we do? What’s the long-term solution here?” he asked David.
This was a good question, and David didn’t have an immediate answer. Yes, they could pay off a family’s debt to the kiln owner, but then what was that family going to do? David pondered the situation, searching for a business solution to the problem. Finally he said, “Why don’t we build our own brick kiln and let the workers work their way out of bondage. That could work as a long-term solution.”
Soon a plan had been formulated. They would set up their own brick kiln on leased land, buy workers out of their debt, bring them to work at the new kiln, and provide them housing in a nearby village, where medical and educational facilities would also be available. For the next eighteen months the families would work to repay the money that had been paid over to buy them out of debt, and then they would be debt free. During that time, however, they would also get to keep 10 percent of the bricks they made so that at the end of eighteen months, each family would have enough bricks on hand to build themselves a house on the land in the village.
As he had done for the rag pickers, David wrote a proposal for the project and went in search of donors to fund it. He found a willing donor in the Australian Council of Churches. Soon David was making regular visits to Pakistan as well as to India to check in on the progress of the brick kiln project.
One thing the plan in Pakistan had not reckoned on was the backlash of the brick kiln owners. These owners had made comfortable lives for themselves through exploiting less-fortunate people in society, and they were not about to let that slip away from them. They began to harass and intimidate Michael Nazir-Ali. As time went on, their harassment escalated to threats against Michael’s English wife, Valarie, and then to threats of kidnapping and killing their two sons, Chammi and Ross. Eventually Valarie took the two boys and went home to England while Michael stayed behind in Pakistan. David tried to help and support him in every way he could, but finally the threats against Michael became so great that he, too, was forced to flee Pakistan for England. Thankfully, Michael’s departure did not mean the end of the brick kiln project, which carried on without him, much to David’s relief and the kiln owners’ chagrin.
When he was not in India or Pakistan, David continued traveling the world, overseeing the expansion of microfinance schemes. One place that was about to experience a rapid growth in the number of microfinance programs was the Philippines.
Chapter 14
Opportunity International
David was at home in Sydney on February 23, 1986, huddled over the television in the living room with Carol beside him, watching the extraordinary event playing out in the Philippines. Overnight, more than a million people had spilled out of their homes and into the streets of Manila, calling for the ouster of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and for him to be replaced by Corazon Aquino, the widow of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, who had been assassinated three years before. David was not surprised by the situation. It came on the heels of a closely contested presidential election, which Marcos had won, most people believed, fraudulently. David had seen firsthand the excesses and heavy-handedness of the Marcos regime, and he was not surprised that after laboring under it for so long, people were calling for change. He only hoped that things would go peacefully. And so far they were, with the army refusing to fire on the crowd in an attempt to restore order.
Things continued to go peacefully. By February 25, Marcos had fled to Hawaii, and the Philippines had a new president. One of the first things Corazon Aquino turned her attention to was eradicating poverty in the country. Aquino called for private enterprise to become involved in the process. Her call for help brought David to Manila, where TSPI was planning to take up the challenge by expanding throughout the country. David encouraged the TSPI board to follow the model he had used in setting up the organization: find committed Christian leaders and local businesspeople who understood their communities and form them into boards. Then the TSPI board should work with the boards for the new organizations to help them put lending programs into place that were tailored to their local situation. Before long a new partner organization, Kabalikat Para Sa Maunlad Na Buhay (KMBI), was operating in the Manila suburb of Valenzuela. Within two years, six more partner organizations had been established throughout the country.
At the same time David was traveling to Indonesia, where micro finance lending programs were expanding. Priyadi Reksasiswaya had already established lending partner organizations across Indonesia that were overseen by a new organization, Duta Bina Buana (DBB), which David had helped establish as a national organization to service all the lending partners in the country. David was impressed with the work Priyadi was doing. He knew he had chosen well when he originally picked Priyadi to lead the small-loans program.
