This morning I went to visit a friend's church which meets in a primary school conveniently located right in my new hood. (An excellent day is when I don't have to leave the peninsula!)
The speaker was a man named David Bussau, who was the founder of Opportunity International and started the idea of Micro Enterprise Loans, or Micro Finance, although he doesn't like that term. (I've been interested in ME loans since I learnt about them partly because they seem to follow the 'teaching a man to fish' ethos and also because my dad has been involved in some ME loans in the Philippines.)
Listening to David Bussau give an extended interview (he doesn't do conventional sermons very often) was quite inspirational. Like so many of our most successful citizens, David Bussau is actually a New Zealander. He grew up in a boys home where he told us this morning that 80% of those who grew up there went into crime later in life. He never knew his parents, but he sees his childhood as a huge part of the reason he turned out the way he did.
“I didn’t have the constraints of family holding me back. I didn’t have sibling rivalry or relatives intruding on my space and time. I wasn’t shaped by parents determining who I should be, how I should react and how I should imprint myself on the world. In fact, I changed my name by deed-poll and determined, by myself, who I was going to be, what goals I was going to achieve and the time-frames I was going to achieve them in.”
Bussau's first business venture was a rented hot dog stand at age 15. By the time he was 35 he owned several construction companies and was a self-made multi-millionaire. After an incident with Kerry Packer he started to question if what he was doing, was all there is to life. In 1975 he moved his family to Indonesia and helped rebuild a town destroyed by an earthquake. (If you want to know more about his story check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGXW_Ld0eqo)
What I really liked about listening to David Bussau speak was his incredibly humility. You could tell that it wasn't the humility of someone who knows that they're supposed to be humble, but someone who actually doesn't think that they're better than anyone else. My dad has met him a couple of times through the ME work he has done and told me 'He doesn't think he's above anything.' The way he talked about his faith was so honest and gentle. He said he thinks that his drive to work towards the alleviation of poverty is because he really enjoys a challenge, he didn't claim a pure Christian devotion towards love of others. He spoke a lot about the answer to poverty being empowering the poor. Not giving them stuff and creating dependency but about giving them ownership and responsibility. Another thing he said (that I'm quoting wrong because I don't understand car-talk) was there are a lot of people living with 6 cylinder engines under the hood, but only using 2 cylinders. Not doing what we're capable of because we're afraid of taking risks.
When he moved with his wife and two daughters to Indonesia and gave up the lifestyle he was living of accruing wealth, he explained it as 'the economics of enough.' I find my own wealth quite confronting, in that I have trouble thinking of myself as wealthy because when I look around me I see mostly people who have more money than I do. But when I compare myself to the world (where 1% of people have a University degree, 3% of people have internet access and more than half the world's population live on less than $2 a day) I have to think about when my enough will be enough?
(If you want to watch some interesting stats on poverty check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA6MhyK60iI&feature=related)
The speaker was a man named David Bussau, who was the founder of Opportunity International and started the idea of Micro Enterprise Loans, or Micro Finance, although he doesn't like that term. (I've been interested in ME loans since I learnt about them partly because they seem to follow the 'teaching a man to fish' ethos and also because my dad has been involved in some ME loans in the Philippines.)
Listening to David Bussau give an extended interview (he doesn't do conventional sermons very often) was quite inspirational. Like so many of our most successful citizens, David Bussau is actually a New Zealander. He grew up in a boys home where he told us this morning that 80% of those who grew up there went into crime later in life. He never knew his parents, but he sees his childhood as a huge part of the reason he turned out the way he did.
“I didn’t have the constraints of family holding me back. I didn’t have sibling rivalry or relatives intruding on my space and time. I wasn’t shaped by parents determining who I should be, how I should react and how I should imprint myself on the world. In fact, I changed my name by deed-poll and determined, by myself, who I was going to be, what goals I was going to achieve and the time-frames I was going to achieve them in.”
Bussau's first business venture was a rented hot dog stand at age 15. By the time he was 35 he owned several construction companies and was a self-made multi-millionaire. After an incident with Kerry Packer he started to question if what he was doing, was all there is to life. In 1975 he moved his family to Indonesia and helped rebuild a town destroyed by an earthquake. (If you want to know more about his story check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGXW_Ld0eqo)
What I really liked about listening to David Bussau speak was his incredibly humility. You could tell that it wasn't the humility of someone who knows that they're supposed to be humble, but someone who actually doesn't think that they're better than anyone else. My dad has met him a couple of times through the ME work he has done and told me 'He doesn't think he's above anything.' The way he talked about his faith was so honest and gentle. He said he thinks that his drive to work towards the alleviation of poverty is because he really enjoys a challenge, he didn't claim a pure Christian devotion towards love of others. He spoke a lot about the answer to poverty being empowering the poor. Not giving them stuff and creating dependency but about giving them ownership and responsibility. Another thing he said (that I'm quoting wrong because I don't understand car-talk) was there are a lot of people living with 6 cylinder engines under the hood, but only using 2 cylinders. Not doing what we're capable of because we're afraid of taking risks.
When he moved with his wife and two daughters to Indonesia and gave up the lifestyle he was living of accruing wealth, he explained it as 'the economics of enough.' I find my own wealth quite confronting, in that I have trouble thinking of myself as wealthy because when I look around me I see mostly people who have more money than I do. But when I compare myself to the world (where 1% of people have a University degree, 3% of people have internet access and more than half the world's population live on less than $2 a day) I have to think about when my enough will be enough?
(If you want to watch some interesting stats on poverty check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA6MhyK60iI&feature=related)
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