Travels in the Riel World

Have you ever had a desire for a last minute, spontaneous trip? Scott Kraft has, and over a few long weekends he’s managed to travel to Machu Picchu in Peru and Iguazu Falls in Argentina. He had a similar urge to see the Taj Mahal on a quick trip, but India is not so easy to get to. Still, he and some friends managed to put together a journey in which they spent just five days on the ground in India and saw the country’s Golden Triangle, from Delhi to Jaipur to the Taj city of Agra. He then wrote about his experience for the Los Angeles Times.

The sane traveler makes a simple calculation when planning a getaway: The longer it takes to get there, the longer the stay required to make it worthwhile. By that definition, my friends and I are not sane travelers.

We did Peru’s Machu Picchu over a long weekend in 2003. We used another long weekend in 2005 to see Iguazú Falls from the Argentine and Brazilian sides. We trekked to the ancient city of Petra in Jordan last year — and were back home by week’s end.

There was no place in the world, we figured, that couldn’t be conquered in a few days by a group of determined middle-aged suburban fathers with wanderlust, carry-on luggage and the ability to power through jet lag.

Interestingly, National Geographic Traveler also did a recent feature on sudden journeys and published 25 intriguing stories about last-minute travel decisions and the ensuing experiences, from Morocco to Ethiopia and Croatia to St. Bart’s.

We’ve all experienced them—those delightful, slightly irresponsible moments when we toss schedules and obligations to the wind and just take off. Whether it’s a college weekend when you pile in the car and just start driving or a mid-career break when you fly half-way around the world to try your hand at something new, stealing away from your daily routine is a true guilty pleasure.

On the one hand, automobiles are automobiles. It seems that there is, or should be, an objective way of producing vehicles. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be a surprise that even the design of cars is influenced by culture. That, at least, is the implication of a recent article, which notes:

The main language spoken at the Shanghai auto show is Chinese, but the vocabulary of the designs is polyglot: Italian flourishes, high Japanese roofs, German solidity, American assertiveness.

The Italian flourishes, German solidity and American assertiveness are all traits of those national cultures, so it makes sense that they should also be found in cars designed in those countries. The story that I linked to above is interested in whether China’s developing auto industry will eventually forge its own unique design characteristics.

China has the world’s fastest-growing auto market and has already overtaken Japan in domestic sales; it now trails only the United States. Both multinational and Chinese automakers have learned that it is a lot easier to build new car factories than to instill a new generation of Chinese designers and engineers with the sensibilities to have a lasting effect on global automotive design.

Chinese automakers like Chery, Great Wall, Landwind and others rely on Italian design studios to come up with concept cars that lend pizazz to their increasingly elaborate auto show displays. Production models remain similar to existing Western and Japanese models…

Such limitations are not stopping automakers from trying to determine what buyers in China really want. And with money and talent pouring into the industry, practically everyone here agrees that it is only a matter of time before China starts to become known for car design as well.

“Each country has their own vocabulary or tastes for design, and especially in China they have a very long history” to develop such tastes, said Katsumi Nakamura, president and chief executive of the Dongfeng Motor Company, a joint venture of Nissan and the Dongfeng Group.

Well, just when reports indicate that public affection is becoming more common in India, now there is word that an arrest warrant has been issued for the actor Richard Gere because of a public kiss. Really. Seems that Gere went a bit overboard during a charity event and planted some kisses on the cheek of the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty as he dipped her backwards. Shetty has also been issued an arrest warrant. The Washington Post reports:

Judge Dinesh Gupta issued the warrants in the northwestern city of Jaipur after a local citizen filed a complaint charging that the public display of affection offended local sensibilities, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

Gupta earlier viewed television footage of the event, which he called “highly sexually erotic,” saying the pair violated India’s strict public obscenity laws. Gere and Shetty “transgressed all limits of vulgarity and have the tendency to corrupt the society,” PTI quoted the judge as saying…

Shetty, 31, has said the embrace was not obscene and that the media should instead focus on HIV/AIDS awareness.

“I understand this is his culture, not ours. But this was not such a big thing or so obscene for people to overreact in such manner,” she told PTI last week. “I understand people’s sentiments, but I don’t want a foreigner to take bad memories from here.”

The article does note that other “such cases against celebrities” have been previously filed in India ”by publicity seekers.” Nevertheless, the incident certainly points out that cultural standards of public behavior are far from uniform around the world.

A small group of U.S. university students recently took an “anthropological excursion” with a professor in an effort to learn more about the Muslim world and to spark dialogue with individuals in other societies. In all, they visited nine Islamic countries and spoke with dozens of students and community and religious leaders in those nations. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

With the future of the United States and the Muslim world linked more closely (and painfully) than ever, a professor and four young Americans headed off in 2006 to find answers to those questions in the mosques, madrassahs (religious schools), cafes, and universities of nine Muslim nations.

Talking with students, sheikhs, government leaders, and democratic and Islamic activists, the group encountered widespread anger and frustration, but also an eagerness to talk, even among those whom many Americans would call extremists.

What did they learn from their journey?

“Stereotypes I had – that Mus­lims were ignorant of what was going on in the world, that they hated Americans – were very much challenged,” says Texan Hailey Woldt, a junior at Georgetown University in Washington. “I was amazed at how much they read. They listen to CNN and BBC and were very informed about American politics. And I was overwhelmed by the hospitality and open-mindedness.”

Frankie Martin, a graduate of American University from Maryland, agrees. “Even the most conservative Muslims welcomed us. I thought they would not be as receptive,” he says.

A book about Islam and the lessons learned from this trip, Journey into Islam, by Professor Akbar Ahmed, will be published in June.

It’s easy in the West for us to assume the democracy is a natural state of government, or at least something that people in every country long for. That’s why I was intrigued by an article about Bhutan in the International Herald Tribune. It seems that the king of Bhutan has decided his Himalayan country is ready for more democracy, but the people are embracing it warily -  in some cases only because it has been ordered by the king!

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who recently announced his plan to abdicate, has ordered parliamentary elections for next year. In preparation for the real thing, more than 125,000 Bhutanese citizens participated Saturday in what the government called “mock elections” …

The Bhutanese monarchy turns 100 this year, and Jigme apparently decided this was an auspicious time to further reduce its power. The national elections next year are part of a process that began nearly a decade ago, when the king introduced party-less elections to choose members of Parliament. Next, day-to-day governance was handed over to the Council of Ministers. The proposed Constitution would remove the king as head of the government, set a mandatory retirement age for the monarch at 65, and empower an elected Parliament to oust the king altogether with a two-thirds majority vote…

The prospect of self-governance seemed to send shivers down many spines here. Why have politicians? people wanted to know. Wasn’t the king always supposed to know what is best for his people and guide them accordingly? Couldn’t they see what democracy had wrought on neighboring countries?

“I’m a little bit skeptical,” Sonam Wangmo said as she waited in line Saturday to cast her vote in a neighborhood school with calla lilies blooming in the garden. “I’m not sure whether it will work, or whether it will be better for our country.”

Many Bhutanese seem cautious about embracing democracy, if only because they believe things are already going well in their country and they don’t feel a need to embrace change.

“The going is good,” said Tshering Tobgay, 42, a retired civil servant who is working with a former cabinet minister to start the People’s Democratic Party. “We want more of the same.”

This is one reason, he said, that even would-be politicians like himself find it hard to sell their message to the citizenry. “We are not starting a party because we have an ideology. We’re not starting a party because we have a vision for a better Bhutan. We are starting a party because the king has ordered us.”

He sat on the patio of a bar, cupping his beer can in a napkin, because this was Friday and alcohol sales were prohibited on the day before the election. “It’s a big compliment to the king that no one’s very enthusiastic.”

Another patron in the bar, Kesang Dorji, 36, said he was puzzled by the royal order to vote, but intended to obey. “We have to stand fast to the wisdom of our monarch,” Dorji said. “He knows what’s best for us. Any normal person would think, ‘Why this, when everything is okay?”‘

Ernesto Portillo wrote a somewhat thought-provoking column in Sunday’s Arizona Daily Star, in which he discussed both the tragedy of last week’s Virginia Tech shootings and the way in which society often judges an entire population based on the actions of one of its members. Altough Portillo notes there have been no reports of anger aimed at Korean-Americans in the wake of last week’s events, he does make the point that many non-Caucasians had similar feelings of dread when they heard about the shootings.

When the first news reports about Monday’s Virginia Tech shootings came out, a fearful thought crossed Will Li’s mind. “I hope he’s not Chinese,” Li, a 36-year-old University of Arizona employee, said he told a friend…

And Aamir Shaalan, an Egyptian Muslim, was almost elated to learn it was not a Muslim responsible for murdering 32 people, the worst killing of its kind in this country. “I can’t imagine what the backlash would have been,” said Shaalan, 27, an engineering graduate student.

Such is the state of race-related sentiments felt by some religious and ethnic minorities … in response to horrific crimes: Let’s hope it’s not one of us. In a post 9/11 America, foreigners in our midst are on their edge.

I understood their feelings. I had a similar reaction when I first read of the shootings. I was cringing at the thought of the consequences if the Virginia Tech killer was discovered to be a Latino immigrant or, heaven forbid, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico…

So fearful of retribution of any kind or even the hint of resentment, the Korean community in this country apologized for Cho’s slaughter of students and faculty members, some of whom were from abroad…Krishnan, who is from southern India, understood the Korean community’s reaction. He called it natural. But he also called it irrational that some people would scorn a whole ethnic group for the crimes of a single person.

But our reaction to questions of race, ethnic and religious relations is often irrational.

Food for thought.

Although India has made most of the outsourcing headlines in recent years, it is far from the only region of the world that is attracting such business. The NY Times, in fact, just ran an article about the growing business of outsourcing in Eastern Europe.

Prague is turning into a center for outsourcing white-collar jobs like bookkeeping, data crunching and even research and development. The Czech Republic and other Central European countries like Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are clamoring to serve the needs of multinational corporations — and themselves.

The United States may turn to India to fill many of its call-center jobs and the like. But Western Europe is turning more frequently these days to its own backyard, transforming a few urban centers of the former Communist bloc into the Bangalores of Europe. American companies are cashing in as well. In recent years, I.B.M., Dell and Morgan Stanley, among others, have outsourced services to Eastern Europe.

The countries of Eastern Europe offer their own unique mix of benefits to companies in Western Europe and North America, which include not only lower costs but also a multilingual language pool and geographic proximity.

What is unusual about Eastern and Central Europe is that their most advanced cities offer a potent mix of attributes that even Bangalore cannot rival: a highly educated, multilingual pool of talent in an increasingly affluent consumer market — all barely a stone’s throw from its prime clients…

The reasons for Central Europe’s new attractiveness for outsourcing are not limited to promising talent at cheap prices… But there is no doubt that low wages in the region appeal to Western companies. Employees in Hungary and the Czech Republic earn a quarter of what employees in Western Europe make; Slovakia’s pay runs only a fifth as much, the statistical agency Eurostat says.

(Also), unlike other regions that compete for outsourcing work, like India or the Philippines, where English is the sole operating language, employees in Accenture’s Central European business speak a variety of languages, giving clients access to people who speak English, French, German, Russian and local languages.

“The key thing is language,” said Andrew Grech, an Australian native who directs Accenture’s operations here. “The other factor is a stable political and economic environment. The Czechs are in the European Union and NATO.”

As one travels around the world, it becomes obvious that different cultures have varying ideals of beauty. A recent Associated Press article touches on this subject, focusing on the West African nation of Mauritania, where some families force feed their daughters because obesity is considered a sign of beauty and wealth.

Mey Mint struggles to carry her weight up the flight of stairs, her thighs shaking with each step. It will take several minutes for the 50-year-old to catch her breath, air hissing painfully in and out of her chest. Her rippling flesh is not the result of careless overeating, though, but rather of a tradition.

In Mauritania, to make a girl big and plump, ‘gavage’ _ a borrowed French word from the practice of fattening of geese for foie gras _ starts early. Obesity has long been the ideal of beauty, signaling a family’s wealth in a land repeatedly wracked by drought.

Mint was 4 when her family began to force her to drink 14 gallons of camel’s milk a day…By the time Mint was 10, she could no longer run. Unconcerned, her proud mother delighted in measuring the loops of fat hanging under her daughter’s arms.

The government launched a public health campaign to warn of the health risks of obesity. It has had some successes, although more in urban than in rural areas.

Only one in 10 women under the age of 19 has been force-fed, compared to a third of women 40 or older, according to a survey conducted by the National Office of Statistics in 2001, the most recent available.

Those still forced to eat were overwhelmingly from the country’s rural areas. But although the canon of beauty is changing, entrenched values are hard to uproot. “My husband thinks I’m not fat enough,” complained Zeinabou Mint Bilkhere.

Italy’s Amalfi coast is a stunning series of cliffside villages. When Nicole Cotroneo recently decided to spend a week there, she chose to rent a villa in the small town of Praiano. She did get more exercise than she bargained for, since the town has a vertical landscape connected by staircases, but she also felt more a part of the local village than she would have in the more touristed destinations of Amalfi and Positano. She wrote about her experiences for the Washington Post travel section.

I ended up in Praiano for two reasons. I wanted to be in a town away from tourists, where I could experience town life by living it instead of watching it; and I wanted to cook. I had been traveling through southern Italy for two months, a journey that was nearing its end, and I wanted a winding-down period after all the moving around — and a celebration of all the good food I’d eaten along the way…

My kitchen was small, with a gas stovetop, an electric-blue refrigerator with matching toaster oven and, happily, a dishwasher. The rest of the villa far exceeded my expectations…The bedroom’s French doors open to a flagstone patio, where we drank espresso in the morning under the shade of an olive tree.

Terra cotta stairs lead to the private terrace roof with its flowered pergola, chaise longues and an outdoor shower to cool our bronzing skin…The mountain sloped below us. We could see the cathedral and a stone watchtower where the land dropped off into the sea. Capri peeked out from behind the Sorrento peninsula. To our right, across the bay, was Positano’s picturesque jumble, changing color in the shifting light as the sun rose from behind Capo Sottile, arced across the sea and sank behind the bluffs.

Silence reigned, except for the sound of church bells or the slapping of a speedboat far below. Sometimes, around lunchtime, we could hear the clinking forks and muffled voices of a family in a house above us.

The Post’s Sunday travel section also includes a sidebar on how to rent an Amalfi coast villa.

Each year, the United States government allocates 65,000 visa slots for foreign workers who have high-tech or other scientific skills. Numerous U.S. companies, particularly in the computer field, have lobbied for a higher annual limit on these visas. As if to prove the point, the U.S. on Monday began accepting applications for those 65,000 visas for 2008 - and, according to this article, received 150,000 requests in one day!

That means, of course, that more than half of the first day applicants will be turned away. This has caused consternation in several high-tech companies, although it does raise the obvious question - where are all the U.S. technology workers and scientists? Does the demand simply outstrip the supply that our population is realistically able to provide, or are too few Americans going into math and science fields?

Employers seek H-1B visas on behalf of scientists, engineers, computer programmers and other workers with theoretical or technical expertise. At Microsoft, about a third of its 46,000 U.S.-based employees have work visas or are legal permanent residents with green cards, said Ginny Terzano, a spokeswoman for the company…

Compete America, a coalition that includes Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and others, voiced its opposition to the visa cap in a statement Tuesday.

“Our broken visa policies for highly educated foreign professionals are not only counterproductive, they are anti-competitive and detrimental to America’s long-term economic competitiveness,” said Robert Hoffman, an Oracle vice president and co-chairman of Compete America.

The group’s opponents say that increasing the visa limit would bring down wages and discourage American youngsters from pursuing technology careers.

Indian weddings are often lavish affairs involving large extended families. When these take place in North Ameica, they can be an interesting blend of cultures and of contemporary and traditional elements. The Arizona Daily Star yesterday ran an interesting, in-depth article on such a wedding that involved families in both Arizona and India.

Flowing silk, georgette and crepe in bright oranges, greens, reds and turquoises swirl in a sea of dancers. Gold jewelry glitters on wrists, ears and noses, and long matching scarves are flipped over shoulders. Excited chatter in Hindi and other regional Indian languages occasionally competes with hip-shaking Bollywood and Indian folk tunes. The extravagant traditional Indian wedding involved three days of jubilant celebration. The event, with its four Tucson locations and almost 400 guests from the world over, was more than the marriage of a man and woman; it was the joyous union of two families.

The article covered events during all three days of the wedding celebration. Here is a section of the story that explains the marriage ceremony:

The wedding ceremony consists of about 10 mantras and rituals recited and conducted by the priest and the bride and groom as well as members of their families. Each element is rich with significance.

The bride and groom exchange garlands made of red roses and white carnations to signify that they accept each other as life partners. A knot tied between their clothing symbolizes the couple’s union and Rachna steps on a stone to signify the strength of their relationship. A fire is built in a small cauldron and the couple adds rice and ghee, clarified butter, while circling the flames and praying for the god of fire to bless their marriage bond.

The saptapadi ritual involves the groom escorting the bride to take seven steps, each signifying a different aspect they hoped to have in their marriage — pleasures, energy, riches, overall well-being, progeny and seasons/longevity. The last step — friendship — legalizes the marriage…

Chandola asks everyone to raise their hands in blessing and many toss rose petals at the couple. Women from both sides of the family whisper good wishes into the bride’s ear and the newlyweds touch the feet of their elders, signifying their highest respect, and hug them.

English has for some time now been a common second language around the globe, used in technology, tourism and business. Now, some universities - particularly business schools - are beginning to teach courses in English, regardless of the language of the country in which the school is located. In part, this is being driven by a desire to attract international students. According to this NY Times article:

In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization…

Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities…

“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives. “It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”

Some argue that this is merely the natural adaptation of an older custom of utilizing a common language for universities.

Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalization, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca most used by universities.

“English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.”

Google has launched an initiative through its popular Google Earth program to call attention to the tragedy of the Darfur region of Sudan. According to this San Francisco Chronicle article:

In an effort to raise awareness about atrocities in Sudan, Google Inc. has updated its online satellite mapping service with images of burned villages, refugee camps and wounded children.

The project, done in partnership with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers users of Google Earth a bird’s eye view of the aftermath of four years of fighting between the East African nation’s Arab-dominated government and the largely black residents of the Darfur region. The United Nations has said that more than 200,000 people, many of them Darfur civilians, have died and 2.5 million have been displaced in the conflict.

Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs, said the new high-resolution images are intended to encourage individuals to act against what he — along with U.S. officials and many human rights groups — describe as genocide.

If you don’t have the free Google Earth software, you can get it here.

There is a nice travel story in the NY Times about Fez, Morocco. It describes this 1,200-year-old city as the soul of the country.

… this mazelike city of minarets, shrouded figures and forgotten passages can seem impossible to decipher — yet tinged with a deep enchantment.

“It’s a mysterious place,” said Abdelfettah Seffar, a craftsman and cultural entrepreneur, as he stood on the roof of a beautiful but dilapidated 18th-century Moorish estate that he is restoring into a vast guesthouse and arts center. “It’s even a mystical place.”

Around us, crowing roosters and shouts in Arabic and French reverberated through the tangled streets — wholly bereft of automobiles and all but the simplest machines — as black smoke billowed in the distance from the city’s old ceramic workshops. Farther off, beyond the ramparts, a late-afternoon glow illuminated the hillside tombs of the Merenid sultans, who presided over Fez’s Golden Age in the 14th century.

“Fez is really just the medieval city that it was,” Mr. Seffar went on, contrasting his hometown with its fast-developing jet-set sister and rival, Marrakesh. “We are a little scared of what Marrakesh has become. Fez is the soul of Morocco. It’s the last bastion of what Morocco really is.”

Faded but stately, crumbling but proud, the walled city of Fez might well be the largest and most enduring medieval Islamic settlement in the world. It is indisputably Morocco’s spiritual and cultural heart.

It’s hard to believe that a country of more than one billion people could be short of workers. But that is the problem now facing the high tech and outsourcing idustries in India. According to an Associated Press story:

Nearly two decades into India’s phenomenal growth as an international center for high technology, the industry has a problem: It’s running out of workers. … “The problem is not a shortage of people,” said Mohandas Pai, human resources chief for Infosys Technologies. “It’s a shortage of trained people.” …

For now, industry is keeping up, but only barely. A powerful trade group, the National Association of Software Services Companies, estimates a potential shortfall of 500,000 technology professionals by 2010.

Part of the problem is that industry is growing faster than capable workers are being educated and trained. But another problem lies in the educational infrastructure.

India has technical institutes that seldom have electricity, and colleges with no computers. There are universities where professors seldom show up. Textbooks can be decades old.

Even at the best schools — and the government-run Indian Institutes of Technology are among the world’s most competitive, with top-level professors and elaborate facilities — there are problems.

The brutal competition to get into these universities means ambitious students can spend a year or more in private cram schools, giving up everything to study full-time for the entrance exams.

Instruction is by rote learning, and only test scores count. “Everything else is forgotten: the capacity to think, to write, to be logical, to get along with people,” Pai said. The result is smart, well-educated people who can have trouble with such professional basics as working on a team or good phone manners.

What do Turkish kebab sandwiches have to do with German culture or the German economy? Plenty, these days, according to this story in the Los Angeles Times, which recounts how Germany is trying to create a system for kebab chefs to be integrated into the workforce. If the labor angle is uninteresting, you might still enjoy the article for its mouthwatering descriptions of Turkish kebabs.

… one must appreciate the sauce-drenched, onion-scented, shaved-meat beauty in a pita known as the doner, or spinning, kebab. Fat and messy, it is the Turkish immigrant’s gift to Germany, a bit of meal-time chaos in a nation that doesn’t like its peas to roll too close to the mashed potatoes.

Integration is often not a success story here, but the kebab has found a home, slipping in amid the sausage and beer like a distant, exotic uncle. It’s munched on the run and can fill the brawniest of laborers. When the bars close, and the soul is still restless, the kebab beckons, a late-night snack for the subway ride home. It sheds lettuce, bleeds tomatoes and has challenged dry cleaners from Hamburg to Hesse.

Now that maddeningly persistent German virtue known as order is being imposed on the untidy kebab. The Vocational School for Gastronomy and Nutrition here is offering a six-month course that in July will award the first kebab diplomas … The aim is to enhance the image of the kebab industry and give its workers, most of whom are first- and second-generation Turkish immigrants with limited educations, training toward better opportunities.

“In Germany if you are not integrated in the labor market, you are not integrated,” said Metin Harmanci of Entrepreneurs Without Borders, an organization that advises immigrant businesses and seeks equality in the workplace. “It’s difficult for immigrants to enter the labor market.”

If you have a hankering for wine and a trip to Europe, but Italy and France aren’t options, perhaps you should consider Portugal. The NY Times travel section recently ran a story on Oporto, Portugal, the home of port wine and with a city center that’s been declared a Unesco World Heritage site.

But what that word (Oporto) — the name of Portugal’s second-largest city — ought to conjure is an almost impossibly picturesque town of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings cascading down a steep gorge to the banks of the Douro River just before its waters reach the blue Atlantic. …

However multifaceted Oporto has become, it hasn’t forgotten its vinicultural roots. The Alto Douro wine region is itself a Unesco World Heritage Site, and 2006 marked its 250th anniversary as a demarcated wine region, making it the oldest designated wine region in the world. A trip upriver — be it by boat, car or helicopter — reveals a landscape of steep hills terraced into vineyards and dotted with centuries-old quintas, as the wineries are called, most of which are open to the public.

I was intrigued to see two related opinion columns recently that each discussed creative, business-oriented solutions to poverty in developing countries.

The first was written by Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times, who devoted a piece to microfinancing, the practice of providing small loans to budding entrepreneurs, a concept that was developed by the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Through Kiva.org, Kristof was himself able to make $25 loans to individuals in Afghanistan and the Dominican Republic, money that enabled those individuals to build their businesses. He wrote:

Small loans to entrepreneurs are now widely recognized as an important tool against poverty. … A young American couple, Matthew and Jessica Flannery, founded Kiva after they worked in Africa and realized that a major impediment to economic development was the unavailability of credit at any reasonable cost.

”I believe the real solutions to poverty alleviation hinge on bringing capitalism and business to areas where there wasn’t business or where it wasn’t efficient,” Mr. Flannery said. He added: ”This doesn’t have to be charity. You can partner with someone who’s halfway around the world.”

The second column, by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, centered on an interview with microfinancing guru Yunus, who now says the next step is to create a generation of “social businesses.” He described this as businesses that “do good” and are “designed not to lose money.”

”There is only one type of business in the whole theory of capitalism: business to make money,” Yunus responded. ”There should be another kind of business incorporated into the theory of capitalism: business to do good to people. I call them “social businesses,” he added.

Anticipating my next question — how do we convince business people to create ‘’social businesses”? — Yunus argued that many business people have a natural desire to help the poor, but just don’t have the vehicle to do it.

‘If we had this structural theory that there is a profit-maximizing business, and social businesses, some people would say, `I’ll do both. I’ll make money, and I will do social business,’ ” Yunus said.

‘You will say: `Are people crazy like that?’ People are crazy anyway, because people give charity. If people give away their own money, social business with money is much easier,” he continued.