David continued his globetrotting ways, crisscrossing the world for weeks at a time. On some of his trips Carol accompanied him, and once a year he took Natasha and Rachel with him on one of the trips. He kept busy advising on development projects and overseeing the establishment of new lending partner organizations. With the growing number of partner organizations, more and more of his time went into encouraging the board members and workers in the field of these organizations. He also challenged them to seek new opportunities for reaching out to the poor.
David’s trips often took him to Chicago, Illinois, where IIDI had moved its headquarters to from Vienna, Virginia. At one of the board meetings in late 1988 it was decided that, given the growth in the number of projects in which IIDI and Maranatha Trust were partners, the partnership should be given a name. The partnership of the two organizations from then on would be known as Opportunity International. Soon afterward, David split off from Maranatha Trust the part of the trust that funded microfinance projects and named it Maranatha Foundation. In time, Maranatha Foundation became known as Opportunity International Australia. Meanwhile, Maranatha Trust continued to support David in his ministry and to fund such enterprises as church planting, evangelism, and educational programs.
After the name change, David set about forming Opportunity International partner organizations in Great Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, and Canada. The purpose of these organizations was to raise money for Opportunity International partners in developing countries, known as implementing partners, to be used to fund microfinance schemes around the world. While David was doing this, Leigh Coleman kept busy in Asia expanding Opportunity International’s presence there.
With their various responsibilities within Opportunity International, David and Leigh did not get to travel together as much as they had in the past. David always looked forward to those times when his schedule brought him and Leigh together for a trip. One such trip was in 1990, when they traveled to India and Pakistan to meet with partner board members. When their meeting in Bangalore finished a day early, the two men decided to head straight to Lahore, Pakistan, and rest for a day before attending meetings there. They knew their time in Pakistan would not be easy. Things weren’t going well for the lending partner, Alfalah, that they had established in Lahore. Alfalah, under the leadership of Younis Farhat, had actually been quite successful at making loans to poor women and investing in a preschool program, a health center, and literacy and vocational training for girls. The program made no distinction between those it helped, regardless of whether they were Christian or Muslim.
The trouble was that Alfalah’s success had generated a lot of resentment and jealousy on the part of other groups. As had happened to Michael Nazir-Ali, these groups tried to scare and intimidate Younis Farhat. When that didn’t prove effective, they began inundating the organization with frivolous lawsuits. This left Alfalah’s staff so busy fighting in court that they didn’t have time to collect loan payments from clients, thus causing the organization to lose money. David hoped that there was something he and Leigh could do to support Younis and the staff and board members of Alfalah, as well as to come up with a strategy to get the organization through this difficult time.
When they stepped off the plane in Lahore, however, a grim-faced board member from Alfalah met David and Leigh. “I tried to contact you to tell you not to come to Pakistan,” he said after a brief greeting. “But you were already on your way.” The man thrust a copy of a local newspaper into David’s hand. “You cannot stay here. It is not safe for you. You must stay at a hotel tonight, and I will see that you get out on the first flight back to India tomorrow.”
Surprised by the panicked tone of the board member’s voice, David unfolded the newspaper. There on the front page were pictures of him and Leigh. Because David could not read the Urdu headline above their pictures or the text below, the board member quickly told him the gist of what it said. “Charges have been filed against you for antistate activities. The authorities plan to arrest you tomorrow when you arrive on the plane from Bangalore. Thankfully you have arrived early, and the authorities do not know you are in the country. This is to your advantage.”
David and Leigh spent a sleepless night in a hotel room in Lahore, listening for any noise outside their room and half expecting the police to crash through the door and arrest them at any time. This did not happen, however, and soon after the sun came up, they headed back to the airport and booked themselves on the first flight back to India. As they waited in the departure lounge for the plane to board, the two men tried their best to blend into the mill of the other people waiting to board the flight. Armed military police were waiting on the other side of the thin wall that separated the departure lounge from the arrival hall to arrest David and Leigh, thinking they were on the airplane that had just touched down from Bangalore. Moments later, David and Leigh boarded their plane and were soon airborne and on their way back to India.
“I wonder if the military police have realized their mistake yet,” David said.
“Probably,” Leigh replied. “That was close. I did not want to spend time in a Pakistani jail.”
“Me neither,” David said with a deep sigh of relief.
This was the last trip David made to Pakistan. He was no longer welcome there. Not long afterward, Younis Farhat was also forced to flee the country, leaving Alfalah to an uncertain future.
After the episode in Pakistan, David was glad to get back to Sydney, where Carol had good news for him. She had taken on the role of pastoral assistant to Les Cliff, the Uniting Church chaplain at nearby Prince of Wales and Prince Henry hospitals. David was excited for her. Carol had an innate ability to connect with people, especially when they were under severe stress. She had been involved in pastoral care at their local Methodist church, and David was amazed at the way she knew what gesture would mean the most to a person at a particular time. He knew she would make a wonderful assistant to Les Cliff.
At an Opportunity International board meeting in Chicago in late 1990, the organization decided to begin working in Africa. For much of the next year David was occupied in Africa helping to establish the first partner organization in the nation of Zimbabwe. In 1992 the new partner organization called Zambuko Trust, funded by Opportunity International, began making loans of up to three hundred dollars to poor people in Zimbabwe to establish small businesses. The program thrived, and soon microfinance programs were spreading to other African nations.
In June 1993, Carol’s mother, Phyl, turned eighty years old. She was still sprightly, and for years she had lived alone in New Zealand. But now that she was eighty, she decided that it was time to move to Sydney and live with David and Carol. David was delighted to have her around. He had a soft spot for his mother-in-law, who arrived just in time for her granddaughter’s wedding. On January 22, 1994, David escorted twenty-two-year-old Rachel down the aisle as she was married to a young man named Richard Ford. Ten months later he did the same for twenty-four-year-old Natasha when she married Adam Florence, an engineer for Qantas Airlines and two years her junior.
David was both happy and a little sad at his daughters’ getting married. He was glad that Rachel and Natasha had both found nice young men to marry but sad that they would be moving out of the house to set up their own homes.
As soon as Natasha’s wedding was over, David was on the move again. With the collapse of the Communist governments in the countries of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, unprecedented opportunities were now unfolding for Opportunity International to set up microfinance programs. One such program was being set up in the city of Nizhni Novgorod, the fourth largest city in Russia. Opportunity International’s director in Russia, Stacie Schrader, had invited David to come there and train the board members of the new partner organization, Vostmozhnost. To get to Nizhni Novgorod, David caught an overnight train from Moscow. He found his way to the four-bed sleeper on the train, stowed his bag on the rack above, and sat down. On the seat opposite him sat three grim-faced Russian men who stared coldly at him. David tried to communicate with the men, though it was not easy, since he spoke no Russian. But the men continued to sit grim-faced, their eyes burrowing into him.
As the journey progressed and the expression on the men’s faces did not change, David began to feel nervous. Something was not right, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. That was when he decided he should not sleep. Instead, he pulled the notes he had made for the training session from his scuffed briefcase and began going over them, all the while hoping that the three men would tire and fall asleep. But they did not. They just kept staring at him, and he decided that they were hoping he would fall asleep. Finally in the early hours of the morning, David had to leave the compartment to use the bathroom. He took his briefcase with him.
Upon his return to the compartment, David found that his bag on the rack above had been rummaged through and many articles of clothing were missing. And still the three men sat grim-faced staring at him. David found himself in an odd situation. It was obvious that the three men had robbed him, yet what could he say? He had no way of communicating with them. He thus was forced to sit for the rest of the journey with the men who had robbed him. He was relieved when the train finally reached Nizhni Novgorod and he could leave the carriage. This was not the first time David had been robbed in the course of his work. He had been robbed in Pakistan and Africa and three times in the Philippines, but this was the strangest robbery ever.
After spending a week training the new board members of Vostmozhnost, David was once again on the move, hoping that his few remaining items of clothing would not be stolen on the return trip to Moscow.
By 1996 Opportunity International was growing rapidly. The organization now had fifty-seven partner organizations working in twenty-seven countries and making over one hundred thousand loans per year. Things had come a long way from the first small loans David had made back in Blimbingsari nineteen years before.
As the explosive growth within Opportunity International continued, the need for more structured management within the organization also grew. David understood this need, yet at the same time he personally struggled against it. He was an entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs did not fit well within highly structured organizations. Now instead of his being free to move about the world as he had done for so long, David was living under the watchful eye of the people within the organization who wanted to know where he was, what he was doing, and with whom he was meeting.
David chafed against this. He was a people person. His contribution to the organization now consisted mostly of nurturing the staff and board members of Opportunity International and its lending partners. He liked nothing better than to travel to a country and observe how things were progressing, listen to the staff’s concerns, offer suggestions, and encourage and challenge the staff in the work they were doing. He also acted as their champion within Opportunity International, making sure that the voices of the partners working around the world were heard within the organization. This was work David loved and was good at. He was good at it because it flowed freely and spontaneously from him. But now he was being asked to confine his spontaneity to a box on a management flowchart and account for what he was doing. As a result, the work David had loved for so many years was becoming frustrating to him, and he tried as much as possible to resist being pigeonholed into a management structure.
