Book
Review: A Path Appears, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn;
non-fiction Knopf
This
journalism team (husband and wife) has received Pulitzer Prizes for
their work twice (1990 and 2009.) The present 2014 book is about
people who think and work outside the box, for the benefit of
humanity. The brief and fascinating chapters cover many more
individuals and groups than can be summarized in a brief review. I
have selected three as representative:
:
THE
PERFECT PRODUCT: CHEAP, CLEAN WATER.
Yuri
Jain, at Hindustan Unilever Ltd., was aware of the problems India
has in supplying clean water to its more than one billion citizens.
Public water systems are poorly maintained, and most people must boil
their drinking water to avoid diarrhea and other life-threatening
diseases.
Even
though Unilever sold no water purification products anywhere in the
world, he and his team pushed the corporation to develop a product
meeting high standards of performance: filter out bacteria, parasites
and viruses, portable and stand-alone, needing no electricity, fuel
or other outside energy source, simple enough for the uneducated to
operate—put water in, get water out—and shut off automatically
when the filter can not take any more dirty water.
In
2004, Unilever introduced “Pureit” producing safe drinking water
at about ½ cent per liter, with the initial cost of $35. For those
in poverty, the company partners with local groups, the Grameen Bank
for example, to furnish microloans,. Unilever itself is not a
philanthropy, but appears to be doing its best to provide a reliable
product at the lowest possible cost. Their goal: “to provide clean
drinking water to hundreds of millions of people by 2020.
A
DOCTOR WHO TREATS VIOLENCE
Dr.
Gary Slutkin had spent his career freeing San Francisco of a
tuberculosis epidemic, dealing with a cholera epidemic in Somalia and
AIDS in Africa, where he had to hire local translators to ensure
communication with his patients. Now, after job burnout and a failed
marriage, he returned to his native Chicago, looking ahead. He began
studying inner-city violence and noted the similarity in its spread
with the contagious diseases he had worked with: “exposure among
'susceptible people with low resistance or compromised immunity'.
Like with his patients in Africa, he needed interpreters who spoke
the local “street language”, and 'violence interrupters'—someone
respected among the street gangs—often ex-cons with a long rap
sheet, who can stop violence in its tracks.
He
cites a dramatic episode where a wife has killed her husband in self
defense. She's in jail, but his gang members want vengeance and are
gathering outside her apartment to shoot it up. Five kids and their
grandmother are inside, and Grandma calls the neighborhood 'violence
interrupter'. “China Joe? This is Linda Harris. The Vice Lords,
they're bangin' on my door. Come quick or we'll all be dead!”
China
Joe, and some drug dealers he was counseling when the call came,
arrive to find a crowd of angry Vice Lords. He and the dealers tell
them,“You know you got no business messing with someone's family!
Two of those kids are Brown's own! You ain't helping him, you're
hurting him!” China Joe could soon knock on Linda's door and tell
her “You're safe now.” He remembered later, “They were just
acting out of emotion. Once you talked to them, they knew it was the
wrong thing.
Working
on the principle that urban violence is not solely a moral problem
nor a criminal issue, Dr. Slutkin likened it to a disease epidemic
spreading among people of low resistance. His organization Cure
Violence, in
neighborhoods of Chicago with high crime rates and vulnurability, has
met with such success that its program has been used in many parts of
the USA and other countries.
ABSENCE
FROM WORK OR SCHOOL
Elizabeth
Scharpf's studies at Harvard Business School led her to investigate
tropical Third World countries where she discovered a common problem:
Sanitary pads are unaffordable, so women and schoolgirls stay home
out of sight at their “time of the month”. One explained, “What
if I get called to the blackboard, and I have a stain on the back of
my skirt?”
After
graduating, Ms. Scharpf began designing a company to manufacture “cut
price sanitary pads for Africa and Asia, distributed by local women
themselves, on a franchise system.” The cheapest pads in Rwanda,
for example, made in China, sold for $ 1.10 for a pack of ten. Her
own team of villagers, agriculture experts, and textile engineers
researched locally available materials and found that banana trunk
fibers really soaked up coke (their substute for blood.) They
engineered a biodegradable sanitary pad costing sixty cents for a
10-pack, still too costly for many women. The team organized
'Sustainable Health Enterprises' (SHE) a supply chain of 600
small-scale banana farmers, mostly women. Aid groups will help fund
distribution at schools and refugee camps.
Problem
solved? Although girls appreciate the help with menstrual hygiene,
one study suggested that bicycles would help more girls attend
school; another suggested that aspirin for the menstrual cramps would
be more effective. Not every good idea proves successful.
Kristoff
and WuDunn best sum up their philosophy of the source of new
innovations by observing, “Earl Warren, as chief justice of the
Supreme Court, had a huge impact on ending segregation. But so did
Rosa Parks.”
