Reflecting on his most recent trip to Ethiopia, Philip chronicles 5 days, and shares personal and moving insights about the journey and the women, men and children the group met along the way.

Day One, 4:30 a.m., Thursday, September 23, 2010,
Hilton Hotel, Addis Abba

I arrived overnight from Austin and met with the group of twenty Glimmer donors and supporters from Austin, London and Dublin. We flew to Gondar, the former capital of Ethiopia, a fortified city on the northern Lake Tana shore, where our bags were loaded onto pickup trucks and we jumped into a fleet of white land cruisers and 4x4s – a clue to the terrain that lay ahead.

The first part of our journey was by boat – an old metal boat with its old, outboard engine grinding across the lake - driven by a local lake boy across the flat, muddy, brown waters on this sun filled morning. The boat waded its way thru the tall reeds and grasses as we made it to shore, to be greeted by villagers, and their mules. A few of us ventured to climb up into the old saddles, held onto the mules by string and rope. Others walked – until we understood how far away the village was - plus the terrain became very uneven and potholed underfoot –and none of the riders had fallen off or hurt themselves. So within 15 minutes we were all up in the saddles, enjoying and appreciating the ride, as we wound our way through the fields of tall grasses and maize on these small sturdy mules.

We passed by a small group of children, sitting in the dirt, under
a tree, surrounded by sticks, which they use as a classroom. We saw mud and straw “tukals” which they call home. Farmers were in the fields, ploughing the field with an ox. The quiet was broken only by the crack of the farmer’s whip or the sounds of the animals and the birds. I expect that this is what it was like over 100 years ago in rural Ireland, or Texas. Subsistence farming. No electricity. No roads. No cars. No comforts.

After about an hour, we reached the center of Robit, a dirt-poor, remote, rural village that Glimmer hopes to help by raising funds at the November event. These are the forgotten people - no longer forgotten - and whose faith sustains their human spirit. These are the “bottom billion”. These are the people we reach out to at Glimmer - and all of us were moved and somewhat changed by meeting them. For most of the people in our group it was the first time that they had seen, experienced and interacted with people living in such abject poverty, first hand and close up.

That day, in Robit, we visited children in the local dilapidated school – deep, wide cracks in the wall, broken windows, mud floors and no blackboards. We sat in shocked silence in the classroom, wondering what if it was us -or ours - that came to these classrooms
everyday.

We went to their water point – a wide river full of dirty brown water, and a bridge that broke, disconnecting one side of the village to the other.

It was in their “health clinic” that many of us simply broke down – inside the dirty, dark, dank rooms we saw empty, disused bottles of medicines lying around on the doctor’s table – and outside, around the back, we found a lady lying on a table with the IV drip hanging from the roof of the clinic. She was better off outside - the air was fresh - and about 10 other women, surrounded her, from her community who sat and waited in silence – and in helpless hope. Here was this woman, lying outside the back of the dilapidated clinic, no doctor in sight, waiting, simply waiting. It broke our hearts. It was just too hard to see. Too hard to acknowledge and accept.

I’m reminded of Bono’s line: “Where you live should not decide, whether you live or whether you die”.

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By Donna Berber

John and Breck Spencer at an unprotected spring in the Simien Mountains in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia.

Recently, 14-year-old Breck Spencer and his father John traveled to northern Ethiopia with A Glimmer of Hope to see the life of the rural poor. For Breck and John, the trip was transformational. I wanted to share with you an insightful letter John recently sent me about how the trip changed him from a skeptic to a man filled with optimism and hope for the future lives of the women and men in Ethiopia.

Dear Donna:

Having just returned from Ethiopia, I wanted to thank you and the rest of A Glimmer of Hope’s team. Foremost, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Eric, Tameru, Mary Clare, Daniel and Eric. Their incredible personal dedication to the Glimmer mission along with their attention to detail and concern about meeting our needs made the trip an overwhelming success. You have assembled a world-class team on the ground.

Also, I want to share with you how the trip changed my perception of Ethiopia. Before we went, I steeled myself for the shock of poverty and human misery that usually greets me when I travel throughout the Third World. Having worked and traveled extensively throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia, I had a pretty clear picture in my mind of what to expect – abject poverty breeding despair, dependence on western aid, and political corruption that blocked real reform. In short, I expected to see a place where noble people were robbed of any future by forces beyond their control and left hopeless. I plead guilty to succumbing to profound cynicism in regards to Ethiopia’s future - cynicism that this trip obliterated.

John & Breck on market day in the village of Robit, Ethiopia.

Our journey began in Dubai, where two days on the ground provided perspective and contrast for our trip on to Ethiopia. We saw what you would expect of a place shrouded in complete material excess – the luxury cars, the buildings, the restaurants and the lavish houses. What I didn’t expect, and what set the stage for my experience in Ethiopia, was the way Dubai is failing to invest in its future. While Dubai was at one point flush with cash, it remains a startlingly poorly educated population that imports close to everything it consumes. Their mass transit projects seem designed more to capture the imagination than actually move people and goods around the country. This lack of Dubai’s investment hit me hard.

With this in mind, we left Dubai on our way to the Ethiopian capital Addis a little depressed. Skipping over the small details, I was struck throughout my time in Ethiopia by its contrast to Dubai. Instead of comparing Ethiopia’s poverty to Dubai’s money, I became convinced of Ethiopia’s bright future because of the long-term investment of infrastructure being erected wherever we traveled. We saw the investment of bridges, roads, dams and electric transmission lines everywhere. A desperately poor country in sub-Saharan Africa was actually investing in itself! Wow!

But all of this macro-economic goodness is only as powerful as the investment in Ethiopia at the ground floor, and throughout my trip I witnessed Glimmer providing that ground floor foundation. At the village level, education, clean water and health care are the essential foundations for the future. Without these basic needs, further development like infrastructure, a modern banking system or economic development is futile. The eradication of preventable disease through access to clean drinking water and vaccines, coupled with a strong educational system and access to micro-loans, paves the road for the next generation.

Glimmer staff members Eric Schmidhauser (Austin, Texas) and Tameru Abasaba (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), along with John and Breck Spencer and the micro-loan recipient standing in front of his farm.

The picture snapped into focus while visiting a micro-loan recipient who built a future for himself and his family by using a $700 loan to irrigate his farm. Now his yield is some 30% higher, and he can plant twice a year. The farmer will repay the loan in full from the proceeds from his first harvest and plans to lease the adjacent plot with the proceeds from his second harvest. The whole thing makes me smile still. It is easy for me to believe that the children in the villages benefiting from Glimmer projects will one day become engineers and doctors.

In my travels throughout Asia, I became convinced that much of its economic success is the product of a culture that demands focus and self-reliance. There is absolutely no margin for error when tiny farms – the size of a modest suburban American backyard - are the sole source of your survival. Literally, rice farming has bred discipline into the Asian culture, and sloppiness out of it. And as we passed the equally tiny farms in Ethiopia, I sensed that the same work ethic, focus and self-reliance are being homegrown in the lives of the Ethiopian men and women.

John giving a pregnant Ethiopian woman a gift so she can purchase a donkey to help her carry water on her 3-hour trek each day to the local well.

To illustrate the drastic self-reliance I saw in the typical Ethiopian, I want to tell you about a 22-year-old woman with a four-year-old child that we met at a well near the new school funded by the ATA (Austin Tennis Academy). The woman expressed she was so grateful for access to clean water that she did not mind the 3 hours a day she spent walking twice to the well. As I was mulling this over, Mary Clare pointed out that this woman was also pregnant with a second child. In response, we attempted to buy her a donkey to help her transport water. We pressed upon her the obvious risks to her unborn child of walking three hours a day, bent over, with this enormous weight on her back. Her response floored all of us. She simply said, “Thank you, but I am not a beggar.”

With one sentence, this 22-year-old woman taught me more about Ethiopian culture than the knowledge of 100 books. She only relented to our request when we told her this was not an act of charity, but rather that we hoped this would begin a cycle of kindness if she could in turn help someone else in need, and that person continued the cycle. Once she understood our purpose, she opened up and spoke of passing the donkey on when she no longer needed it. In response to this woman’s actions, I can only think of Mary Clare’s sage words that everywhere she went in Ethiopia, people said “Thank you,” when in reality she felt she should be thanking them.

I am truly thankful to the people of Ethiopia for what they have taught me. My experience completely disabused me of the notion that Ethiopia is yet another African country ripe with resources, but mired in a vicious poverty cycle because of corruption, repression and neglect that forces it to seek aid from the developed world. Instead, I saw only optimism. There is definitely hope in Ethiopia, and it is far more than just a glimmer.

John Spencer carries a student of the Ahzera School (back left of photo) in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, during the inauguration of the deep borehole water project at this school made possible by Dave and Isabel Welland.

Thank you for opening our minds and our eyes.

Sincerely,
John Spencer

To read more about what John’s son Breck is doing in response to his trip to Ethiopia with his father and Glimmer staff, check out Glimmer’s Donor Spotlight from August. Breck and the Austin Tennis Academy organized an event to share this experience with other students on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 from 5:00pm - 9:00pm:

Walk for Life
Austin Tennis Academy/ Spanish Oaks
6800 Spanish Oaks Club Blvd.
Austin, TX, 78738

(UPDATE: This event was a huge success! See the Tennis Academy on a Winning Streak article posted on philanthropy.com for more about this event.)

Donna Berber
Founder and Co-Chair

The Journey

by Donna Berber

“Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th Century.”

These words opened Michael Buerk’s first report on Ethiopia’s Great Famine for the BBC on October 24, 1984. Buerk’s words, and the accompanying images of “hell on earth,” shocked the world and famously motivated Bob Geldof to launch Live Aid.

As I watched one of the worst human catastrophes in history take place right in my living room, Buerk’s words also planted the seed for A Glimmer of Hope. I can still see the pain and suffering in the victims’ eyes. Over one million people died.

At the time, Philip and I were newlyweds, living in London and not in a position to do too much. Yet seeing those images flash across the television had a profound impact on me and left a nagging voice in my head that said if I was ever in a position to do something, I would.

Soon after, I became pregnant with our first son Ryan and my focus shifted to our growing family while Philip concentrated on his entrepreneurial career.

I settled into my new life and it was happy and fulfilling. By the end of 1998, we had three sons [Shane was born in 1990 and Jake in 1997] and we were living in Austin, Texas where Philip was doing very well with his hi-tech company CyBerCorp.

From time to time, I would hear my little voice and the more comfortably numb I became, the louder it grew. The time to take action had come. I began researching Ethiopia and what I uncovered was not good news. It remained one of the poorest countries in the world.

The average life expectancy was just 45 years and the average income was only about $100 a year. Severe food shortages were an ever-present part of life.

My research led me to the Embassy of Ethiopia in Washington D.C. and the office of Tameru Abasaba, the liaison officer for all US NGOs. He listened to my story and we cried as we remembered the Great Famine. It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting from a senior official at a major embassy.

At the end of our meeting, he calmly said: “Before you decide to do anything, you need to go and see it for yourself.”

I took his advice and in September 1999, my friend Kara Ferris and I flew to Addis Ababa. No amount of research could have prepared me for what I encountered. The ride from the airport to the hotel left me deeply saddened.

We checked in, showered and went straight back out to buy blankets, oranges and bread to give to some of the people we had seen. It was as if I needed to put a Band-Aid on myself. The level of suffering, the poverty and the disease I witnessed during that first 10-day trip was overwhelming. Yet, I was deeply moved by the spirit, dignity and beauty of the people. I felt a deep and inexplicable connection to Ethiopia.

Back in Austin, I went into deep seclusion for about six weeks while I tried to process what I had experienced. I just couldn’t equate how such extreme poverty could exist side by side with such opulence in the same world. I called Tameru and we began to work on a new plan.

Then, everything changed.

In February 2000, Philip sold CyBerCorp to Charles Schwab and we found ourselves in a position to do more – much more.

I called Tameru: “I think we’re going to be able to do things on a slightly larger scale. Will you come and help us?”

He agreed and over the next year, Tameru, Philip and I spent long hours going over ideas about what our approach would be. Our model was taking shape as we settled on a number of key elements (scroll over links for more information):

• We would focus on the neglected rural poor.Few of the NGOs operating in the country did anything outside the major cities despite the fact that more than 85% of the population lives in rural areas. Special consideration would be given to projects that benefited women and children.

• We would create an endowment to provide a sustainable source of funding for projects and to cover all operating costs.We wanted 100% of our money to have an impact and we wanted our supporters to have the same opportunity.

• We would ask the communities what they needed and then we would help them get it.We would never assume to know what the Ethiopians needed better than the Ethiopians themselves.

• We would work with Ethiopian organizations as implementing partners and employ Ethiopian professionals to oversee our operations there.Only by engaging and partnering with local leaders and development experts from the outset – to find the solutions to their own issues – can those solutions be sustainable.

• We would work in co-operation with the Ethiopian government but not through it.It is important to work alongside the government yet funds do not need to be sent to nor through government channels and/or agencies. It was important that we create our own secure channel of distribution.

By the end of 2000, we were ready to fund A Glimmer of Hope’s first solo project – a new school for 500 children in the remote township of Dembi Dollo. The role of education in eradicating poverty cannot be overstated.

Just as work of the school was starting, Philip made his first trip to Ethiopia. This trip and a book called Lords of Poverty – about corruption in the world of International Aid – had a profound effect on him.

He came home, resigned from Schwab and joined me at Glimmer. I had never expected him to follow me on this path but I knew how driven he could be when he was passionate about something. I was excited about what this meant for Glimmer.

We set up offices in Austin and Addis and by June 2001, we had attended our first official inauguration at the Berhane Yesus School and held our first partner meeting.

I remember that meeting being an interesting one because our model was so unlike the bureaucratic processes they were used to. They were used to being told what they needed, being told all the hoops they had to jump through and then, waiting years to hear if they were going to receive funding for their project.

They had every reason to be cynical but Tameru and the rest of the Addis staff played in huge role in convincing them that we were going to follow through and that things were going to be different with A Glimmer of Hope.

From that point on, things happened quickly and by January 2002, we had released funding for 62 projects to be implemented throughout Ethiopia’s eight rural regions that year. By the time we had our second annual partner meeting in June, three quarters of those projects had been completed.

A cornerstone of trust had been laid and we have continued to build upon it ever since. The unique relationship between A Glimmer of Hope, its partners and the communities we serve has been a key to our success and there have been many highlights over the years. Some of them include:

• More than 2.5 million rural Ethiopians have gained life-changing access to clean water, health care, education, veterinary services and microfinance.

• 4,000 projects have been completed with impact being measured through spot checks, photos, videos and GPS coordinates. Our Addis team visited more than 500 projects in 2009 alone (no easy task in rural Ethiopia).

• Hundreds of thousands of women and girls no longer have to devote their entire lives to carrying heavy loads of filthy water, robbed of the opportunity to better their lives.

• Thousands of community-based organizations have been trained to operate, maintain and sustain the projects after they have been built.

• Support for our efforts and our 100% Promise has been climbing steadily every year. In 2009, we crossed the $5 million in donations barrier for the first time allowing us to reach more people at an ever-deepening level.

• People like Michael Dell and senior US diplomat Tibor Nagy have offered endorsements of our model. Ambassador Nagy recently went so far as to describe our integrated approach as being “the silver bullet for Africa.”

• Our first fundraising event – Let There Be Hope – was a huge success raising $1 million in one night to provide integrated development to two villages in northern Ethiopia.

• Barron’s Magazine ranked us 6th on their 25 Best Givers in the World list.

• Other publications to feature our work have included: the Wall Street Journal; Worth Magazine; BusinessWeek; the Austin American-Statesman; and, the bestselling book Be the Change by Lisa Endlich.

It’s been a truly remarkable first 10 years. Even a glance at the Our Team page on our website makes me think about just how far we’ve come since we started out in our old offices in Austin and Addis.

In closing, I would just like to say that now, in the 21st Century, A Glimmer of Hope is doing all that it can to make sure that history never repeats itself in Ethiopia. We have developed a model that can be applied in other developing countries around the world.

I want to thank you all for the vital roles you are playing in our efforts and for your willingness to respond when we ask for help on behalf of those who are unable to ask for themselves.

Donna Berber
Founder and Co-Chair

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Study of A Glimmer of Hope’s Impact

By Donna Berber

Recently, students from Harvard, UT and Gondar University completed a major impact study in the village of Burbax in northern Ethiopia. Burbax was one of the two villages selected as a beneficiary of our Let There Be Hope, event held towards the end of last year.

Construction is already underway in the village but, before those wells, schools and clinics go into operation, we wanted to create a baseline against which we could measure the impact of those projects in the future.

Using criteria such as food security, child mortality, income levels and incidence of disease, we also wanted to learn how we can continue to deepen our impact throughout rural Ethiopia.

The impressive team was led by our programs director Norma Van Horn. Over five days, Norma and her team interviewed more than 150 villagers to gain an appreciation of the most intimate details of their daily lives.

Here is her account of the time she and her team spent in Burbax, gaining a true appreciation of the extreme poverty that exists in rural Ethiopia:

“Having just returned from spending five days in the dusty hills of Burbax kebele (village) in the Amhara Region, I am struck by the paradox of Ethiopia: that a country that has so little, owns so much joy.

Students from Harvard, the University of Texas and Gondar University get their instructions from A Glimmer of Hope’s Norma Van Horn (not pictured).

The purpose of the trip was to conduct a baseline survey of the area before A Glimmer of Hope constructs water points, schools, health posts, and veterinary clinics there – a model called integrated area development.

We went to speak with the villagers and to gather metrics on what their lives are like and the nature of their poverty. Glimmer’s integrated model goes deep rather than broad within a community creating the infrastructure needed for people to pull themselves out of poverty. We have just begun construction in Burbax and this baseline information will allow us to measure the impact of our work in the coming years.

Participants in the study wait to be interviewed.

We collected data about the village’s illnesses, crop yields, child mortality, school absenteeism and enrollment rates. Helping conduct this field work was a team of 11 joint Harvard Business School-Harvard Kennedy School graduate students, three LBJ School of Public Policy Students (University of Texas) and 14 Gondar University students. This team tirelessly interviewed more than 150 villagers to gain an appreciation of the most intimate details of their daily lives.

The information was haunting. Ethiopia is the 11th poorest country in the world and, with limited funding available, it faces difficult choices when it comes to investing in the welfare of its people. Every choice comes with a consequence and a cost.

If they construct a clean water source in one village, someone in another village will continue to suffer from water-related diseases. If they construct a school in this community, children in that community will not have an opportunity to get an education. Who wins? Who loses? What is the cost? How can anyone choose who to help and who not to help when what we all want is to help every one of them?

In A Glimmer of Hope’s case, our Ethiopian NGO partners are highly skilled at maximizing the amount of benefit achieved through every investment. And, the information gained through this study will allow us to further refine our implementation practices to achieve even greater impact and ultimately, to save more lives.

Children squat behind makeshift desks in the existing Minziro Elementary School in Burbax. Photo by Lynne Dobson.

The lives of remote, rural Ethiopians are hard. They experience food shortages and regular recurrences of what are easily preventable diseases by Western standards. They love their children every bit as much as I love my children, yet nearly everyone I spoke to had lost a child, sometimes two, before the age of five.

Jambarie Teshale (61) has three children who will attend the new Minziro School for grades 1-8 (under construction in background).

Students frequently miss school because their families need help to gather crops or collect water; it’s a vicious cycle from which it is difficult to recover. Livestock – the measure of wealth in rural Ethiopia – is just as susceptible to preventable diseases as their owners are. The death of one of these prized animals can have a devastating effect on a family.

By May, fetching dirty water from a hole in the ground will be a thing of the past for these women.

Added to all of these problems, soil degradation is causing the land they depend on for their livelihoods to lose abundance at the same time as the costs of staple goods are increasing. The hardship they bear – all the while maintaining a quiet dignity – is inconceivable.

A Glimmer of Hope has found that integrated rural projects have tangible impacts on people’s lives. They are the best way to help people move themselves out of poverty.

I greatly look forward to returning to Burbax next year and speaking with the same villagers to learn of the improvements in their lives. In the meantime, I have returned from Burbax a changed person. Beautiful friendships, joyful dancing and laughter, and shared hard work are the memories I carry in my heart.

The efforts of the impact study team will have an impact that is felt throughout Burbax and beyond.

Fossils tell us that our earliest ancestors came from Ethiopia; in a very real way, we are all Ethiopian. The bones that lie in those hills are our ancestors. It is incomprehensible to me that such poverty can exist side by side with such prosperity in this day and age; that the country of our forbearers can be one of the poorest countries on Earth.

Ethiopia and its people do not have any easy choices. And, the world doesn’t have all the answers either. Surely, if it did, something would have done to put an end to this level of extreme poverty by now.

The information we gathered on this trip will help us understand what impact our work is having and enable us to make more informed decisions in the future. It will allow us to impact more lives, more quickly and help us to find partners with strengths that complement our own to have an even greater impact.

In the meantime, what Ethiopia needs from us is not our sadness. It needs our passionate hearts, our strength and our outrage that there are those among us who are not able to speak for themselves.

And until they can, we must be their voices.”

Norma Van Horn
Programs Director

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My Journey 2009: Perspective and Reflections

By Donna Berber

I recently returned from a magical 10-day trip to Ethiopia with an extraordinary group of people – friends and supporters of A Glimmer of Hope who dared to embark upon an adventure and step into another reality.

We arrived at the end of the rainy season which was a treat. The countryside was alive with vibrant colors and incredibly lush – certainly not the image most people have of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa, the capital, was buzzing with activity, construction and development.

Most of our time was spent in the Amhara Region in the northern part of the country, famous for its history and magnificent 17th century castles. We spent our days visiting recently completed projects as well as observing desperate need and extraordinary hardship. We shared our time with the people in the communities who expressed their love, deep gratitude, their critical need but mostly, their joy.

Standing next to a woman, the first time she gets to draw clean water from a well, is always an awesome experience.

I used to feel embarrassed when inaugurating a school or water well as the celebration and ceremony that went along with it was often overwhelming. This time, I began to deeply appreciate being present with these beautiful people and, by sharing in their joy, we could all celebrate together, creating union and connection. Their appreciation that we would travel where strangers don’t often go, for them to feel that they were not forgotten and alone, that others from a different country, a different world, would care enough, to simply be with them, was a gift in itself.

For me personally, there is no greater happiness than standing alongside an Ethiopian woman who has been bearing the weight of her burden on her back for her whole life and finally, she no longer has to walk for hours every day to collect water from an unprotected, filthy, stagnant river or pond.

A miracle occurs. We start to pump and like magic, clean, potable water fills the jugs and the jerry cans, and life is no longer the same. It’s a beautiful moment, for encapsulated in it are massive and empowering repercussions. Her children will have the opportunity to go to school (especially the girls) as they won’t be needed to spend their days helping to fetch water. The health of the whole family and community will be greatly improved. Women can focus on their families and contribute to other activities that improve their lives rather than deplete it.

Elsa, a teacher, wants nothing more than a better future for her students.

In Ethiopia alone, 3.7 BILLION work hours are lost every year due to water gathering and 80% of all illnesses are a result of dirty water. It’s not necessary and it’s not right.

We visited and inaugurated several Glimmer school buildings being welcomed by children in their hundreds with burning lights in their eyes, full of promise and wonder – singing, dancing and clapping often having waited several hours for us to arrive. We wandered around the old school buildings, decrepit, foul smelling, filthy and dusty where rocks on the floor serve at chairs and leaky corrugated iron roofs as ceilings. Children cramped together knee to knee, elbow to elbow, often 80 or more to a tiny room. We leafed through the one textbook that each child receives, worn out, incredibly old and often shared with another child from a different shift.

At one of these schools, we listened in awe as a young English teacher named Elsa spoke of her dreams to change the world for her students. We would listen as the children described their own dreams, no different from those of our own children. Strangely and sadly, no different at all. We rejoiced together as we wandered through the new, beautifully constructed school buildings, with new desks, chalkboards and large windows that let the light shine through – an environment that encourages children to attend school.

If the school environment is no better than the home one, which is a mud hut with a dirt floor, then why would any child want to go there? In this country, where 30% of children in the rural areas do not attend school and six out of every 10 children between the age seven and 14 have to work, there has to be engagement in education to end this cycle of poverty. Without providing every school-age child the simple and deserved right to an education, how can we ever address the core issues of poverty?

I met a woman named Bosena. She was so proud to show me her home and tell me how her life had been transformed through microfinance.

When her children were still young, Bosena could not afford to take care of them and she was forced to send them away to live as servants for other families. Around this time, she took out her first microloan in the amount of $89 so she could start growing oranges to sell at the local market. By the time I met her, she had just taken out her 5th loan in the amount of $317 to buy an ox to help grow her business.

Bosena, whose life has been transformed through microfinance, is one of the richest people I have ever met.

She had done so well that she had been able to save about $1,000 as well as pay for her children to return home. Today, they work alongside her on the family farm and live in adjacent houses that Bosena was able to build for them.

I was able to share with her that in America, families are oftentimes scattered far and wide gathering together only a few times a year if they are lucky. Through the blessings of microfinance, not only had her life improved significantly in a material sense, but the riches she had accumulated by being able to have all of her children and grandchildren living around her were priceless.

The more places we visited, the more I began to notice that with every village where Glimmer has a presence, hope and excitement for the future are very much alive. Through our integrated approach to development, that includes the people in the process, we are building a trail of hope. It’s as if A Glimmer of Hope is now thousands of Golden Glimmers connecting water wells, schools, health clinics and microfinance loans from village to village, people to people across the country.

The impact is tremendous and obvious. Lives are radically changing through this simple and strategic approach that supports the people from the ground up. Where there is hope, there is purpose.

Honestly, it makes me swell with pride and my heart overflows as I think of how many lives are being improved. Upon returning I feel even more inspired, re-energized and rejuvenated to reach more, engage more donors with the core messages of our 100% Promise, engage more deeply in development and microfinance (particularly for the women) and continue to spread the golden glimmers of hope.

There are thousands upon thousands of villages scattered throughout this strikingly beautiful country, each with tragically painful contrasts of life-threatening deprivation and exquisite majesty. As I visit them, I ponder the simplicity of such a life.

I am deeply touched by the inherent joy of the people. Their lives are focused and deeply connected.

They are there for each other in times of feast and famine – mostly famine. They live within the true beauty of community and communion and they share riches uncommonly felt or seen in the West.

They are gentle and graceful people who build their lives upon deep faith and great humility.

They are my teachers.

Donna

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