Transcript: From Kalona to Kabul and Beyond: A Journey from an Amish Community to Global Economic Development

It is always a pleasure to return to a MEDA Convention, and it is a real honor to have the opportunity to speak to you this evening. 

There are a few questions I get asked all the time and in recent years people want to know: “What’s it like to work at the Gates Foundation?” Strangely enough, it takes me back to my childhood when one of my real pleasures was to go to town with my father.  Kalona was about 3 miles from our farm and Dad typically hitched up the open buggy so it was kind of like riding in a convertible. I would beg to go until Dad would say, “Well, you can go, but you have to keep up.” He did not slow down at all as he walked briskly from the bank to the feed mill and hardware store and the grocery to pick up a few things for Mom. And I would trot along behind, keeping up. So what’s it like for me to be at the foundation? “I’m just trying to keep up.” A weekend like this one is a welcome change, a chance to take a deep breath and slow down just a bit. 

(Slide)[1] The topic I was given to address falls nicely into 3 parts:  Kalona, Kabul, and Beyond, and I will talk a bit about each. A question often asked by young people is “How did you get to be where you are and to do what you do?” and in fact I ask myself that all the time.  I have never stopped thinking of myself as a little Amish farm girl from Iowa and have been truly astonished by the opportunities I’ve had and the places I’ve been. One of the joys of attaining a certain age is that one becomes increasingly aware of gifts received at an early age and from others along the way. Gifts that for too long are not properly recognized as we go about our lives thinking we have done it all on our own. The answer to how I got to be where I am and do what I do is simply that I owe a debt of gratitude to early influences and to the many people along the way on whose shoulders I have stood, leaned and occasionally cried.

Kalona

In Kalona, it began with my maternal grandparents, John Miller and Barbara Yoder. (Slide)[2] This Photo was taken sometime before they were married in 1894. He was 24, she was 19. They were an extraordinary couple, and I was fortunate to live with them in an extended family household. My grandfather was one of 12 children, but he was the only one who took the initiative to walk 20 miles along the railroad tracks to Iowa City and attend the University of Iowa long enough to get a teaching certificate. He was a public school teacher in the Kalona area for 5 years prior to getting married and settling into the more traditional farm life. But he never lost his love of books or curiosity about the world around him. (Slide)[3] He was highly respected in the community, both in and outside the Amish circles. I was only 7 when he died, but I still recall the hours spent sitting on a stool next to his rocking chair.  He with his black wire-rimmed glasses and long white beard taught me to read both German and English before I started school.  He said all the Amish children should learn English before they start school so they won’t be so far behind.  He made learning fun, encouraged curiosity, and let me know that even though most people were different from us, they were still good people and I never had to be shy or afraid.  

Barbara Yoder (Slide)[4] became a formidable woman and I was a little bit afraid of her.  She would send me back across the yard to my parent’s house when she thought I was spending too much time with grandpa. She had four children but also worked outside the home. The local doctor would come by and take her with him to other Amish homes when a young wife was about to give birth. She was not there to cook or keep house, but to stay at the home until the new mother could care for herself and her newborn, even serving as a wet nurse if needed. I assume the doctor paid her, but in any event she earned the love and respect of an entire generation of mothers in the Kalona Amish community. My grandparents wrote a monthly column for children in a popular German magazine found in most Amish households at the time known as the “Herald der Wahrheit.”  She was strong, she was competent, and she was very sure of herself.  

Living in an extended family with grandparents meant that every Sunday afternoon there would be visitors and I never tired of eavesdropping on the adult conversations. My favorites were my Uncles Thomas and Leroy who were terrific story-tellers and very funny. (Slide)[5] My mother was not a small woman, but next to her brothers she looks almost petite. There was another sister who died in a tragic household accident leaving 4 young daughters of her own. [One of those daughters is Larry Miller’s mother – Larry and I are from the same tribe].

Uncle Thomas (on the right) stepped in to fill the void left when Grandpa died and I loved him. He came to the farm and took me with him on day trips. He finished 8^th grade at age 12 and was the only Amish boy to attend Kalona High School, going on to college and also teaching school for a time.  He kept on teaching me, quizzing me with arithmetic, geography, and other memory games. “Our brains need exercise,” he would say: “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” He loved adventure. As a young Amish man he sold his horse and bought passage to Europe to attend the 1924 Paris Olympic Games, seeing in person the race made famous in the movie Chariots of Fire. He was a huge influence (pun intended) with his stories and puzzles and the sense of adventure that he brought to my early life.

Being a girl, my mother did not have the same opportunities as her brothers.  She would have made a wonderful school teacher but that was not an option. She never spoke of it to us, but I know that she wanted more for her two daughters. The evening before I hoped to begin high school, I listened on the other side of the door as she urged my father to allow me to attend. My parents by then had joined a church in the Conservative Mennonite Conference, but that still did not fundamentally change his views on education. He relented, but it was a conversation that was repeated to some extent nearly every year until my college degree was in hand.  That gift from my Mother is of such magnitude that I can hardly talk about it, and I deeply regret that she passed on when I was still too young to fully appreciate what she did for me.

And although my father did not put great value on higher education (to him ‘higher’ was anything beyond 8^th grade), he loved to travel and did so at every opportunity. (Slide)[6] After the end of World War 2, he volunteered to work on a cattle boat to Italy, the first of many international trips. After crossing the ocean and rounding the boot of Italy, they unloaded in Trieste the cattle that had been donated by Amish, Mennonite and Brethren farmers. The boat stopped in Venice for a few days of sight-seeing before returning home; Dad had photographs and stories of St. Mark’s Cathedral, the Grand Canal, and the Bridge of Sighs and purchased a brass gondola as a souvenir. That unique piece on his desk represented faraway places and I knew that someday I would go to Venice and see it all for myself.

It goes without saying that people in the community thought it strange that he would leave his wife and 2 young daughters for several months to take this trip. He was one of only two Amish men on the trip and the only one with a family. We took many family trips, going as far south as Mexico City, north to Canada, winters in Florida, traveling by train or hiring a driver in the years before we had a car. Dad died just as I began working for MEDA; I’ve always viewed my love of travel and the full-time guardian angel he always had with him as his special bequest to me.

Beyond the significant family influences, we had all the traditional community events that made for a happy early childhood, and much of the communal activity centered on Middleburg, (Slide)[7] the one-room school that defined our rural neighborhood and where I attended for 8 years. There were the threshing rings and quilting bees, gardening and butchering, bucking bales and canning the peaches brought in from Michigan by the truckload, cleaning the house inside and out to prepare for our turn at holding the church services in our home. This picture was taken when I was in kindergarten and the next when I was in 8^th grade. (Slide)[8] I am very sure that it was my 8^th grade teacher, Glen Guengerich in the upper right, who convinced my mother that I should continue my education. Middleburg was a public school and not all were Amish – there were Mennonites and non-Mennos - but we were all neighbors. It was a childhood that taught the value of hard work, the joys of simple pleasures, and the importance of helping our neighbors, to be kind to strangers, to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. 

There was not a lot of conversation about our faith beyond the daily and weekly rituals; it was simply our life. But I was fortunate enough to have the additional early influences of a fascination with the world around me, the people who inhabit that world, and to do so without fear. It’s no surprise that my first career was a teacher and that my first overseas trip included visits to Paris and Venice.

Kabul

Before I talk about Kabul, I have to talk about MEDA. (Slide)[9] In the mid-nineties I was in private practice as a CPA and getting restless, thinking there was more I wanted to do with my life. On an evening with friends from the Menno community in Boston, someone said “You should get involved with MEDA.” I had not heard of MEDA and was told it was too complex to explain – just go to the next convention. I did and was hooked; I signed on as a member; a few years later joined the board, and a few years after that transitioned to staff as part of what was then called the MEDA Consulting Group. It’s fair to say that that casual conversation changed my life, and the opportunity that grew out of it cannot be over stated.  I knew next to nothing about what MEDA Consultants were expected to do when we went to places I had never heard of before. Early on I was asked to go to Mali – I assumed they meant Bali – big difference; I nearly ended up booking travel to southeast Asia instead of West Africa. I didn’t know there was a Mali in the world. But the shoulders of my colleagues were broad and strong, and my early teaching experience and work in finance and accounting was helpful for the training and consulting work I was able to do with microcredit institutions in the developing world. 

I first went to Afghanistan (Slide)[10] in November of 2003 when MEDA was asked to send a consultant to prepare a business plan to start up a microcredit program. I was there for a month with a colleague and we completed the assignment.  As it happened, the work we did on the business plan helped secure funding and soon after I got a call: “Joyce, you helped write the business plan – do you want to go to Kabul for a year and get the program started?” “Yes, why not?”  I figured I had been running around telling other people how they should manage their programs; this was an opportunity to see whether I could actually do it myself. Again, I had no idea what I was getting myself into and repeating personal history, more than a few of my friends and neighbors, not to mention my two children, now thought it very strange that I would turn on a dime and go to Afghanistan, but I truly didn’t give it a second thought.  At least not until I was shown to an empty room in Kabul and told, “This is for the credit program.” (Slide)[11] This is the room and these are the first loan officers I hired to work in the program that continued to be supported by MEDA in the years since.

I want to tell a quick story about something that happened during those first weeks in Kabul and it will explain this photo. (Slide)[12] It was after dinner and I was in my room at the guest house when there was a knock on the door.  Nadeem said there was someone at the gate to see me. Who is it? He didn’t know, but the man had arrived on a motorbike.  Is he Afghan?  He wasn’t sure. I told him I did not know a single person in the entire country, so he would have to get more information. And then he said, “He told me to give you this” – and he handed me a copy of the Mennonite Weekly Review. You can appreciate how surreal that was, but it was an excellent calling card and I had to check it out.  Al Geiser had come by to welcome me to the country and invited me to join him, his wife and their guests from Goshen to a picnic on Friday next.  This image of a Menno picnic in a lovely area about an hour outside of Kabul is not an image of Afghanistan that you will ever see on the news. 

In spite of that lovely and welcoming gesture, I won’t pretend that the year in Kabul was easy; it was the most challenging year of my professional life, but personally it was the most rewarding. (Slide)[13] This is the staff at the end of the year, and although I stayed on in Afghanistan 3 more years with organizations other than MEDA, it was these people that I stayed in touch with – visiting them in their homes, attending engagement and wedding parties, celebrating births, mourning deaths.

On my first leave back in the states, my only Aunt passed away at age 95. My sister and I made plans to attend the funeral in a small Amish community in northern Missouri.  “What are we going to wear?” she asked.  “I don’t know; all my Amish clothes are in Afghanistan.” What I meant was that any clothing I had that would be appropriate for such an occasion would be exactly the same clothes that would be appropriate to wear in Kabul. It was a rather startling observation but it started a pattern of noticing things in Kabul that felt familiar, starting with the fact that my Mother often wore a long black shawl (Slide)[14] and here I am on the right in a long black shawl.

“What’s it like living in Kabul?” For people who knew my background, I often said, “You know, it’s not all that different.” Of course there was and is a great difference at the macro level with the government and military and development workers in the big white SUVs, but when it came to the daily lives of ordinary Afghans, almost every day I was reminded of something from my childhood:  the clothes hanging on the line to dry, the old-time cement mixers like the one Dad had on the farm, the horse and carts, extended families living together in one compound, young girls beating the dust off the carpets with a broom, wearing the same kind of headscarves tied under their chin and the same prairie-style dresses that I wore, although certainly more colorful than mine.

“So did you have to cover your head in Afghanistan?” I’m always a bit amused by this question. Look, I had to cover my head and wear unusual clothes for much of my young life – so it really wasn’t a big stretch to wear modest clothing and a head scarf when walking outside. That’s not my usual answer, but you are not my usual audience. And besides, it is not only the Holy Quran that says a woman should cover her head.  The Holy Bible says so as well.    

And every day I worked with Patmana who reminded me so much of a younger me.  She too was dependent on her father’s permission to work outside the home. In fact, I learned much later that her father never knew that after she arrived at the office she went out again to work in villages outside the city to visit clients. (That was something else we had in common – not telling our fathers what they didn’t want to know).

The Afghan society is patriarchal, (Slide)[15] men and women are separated in the houses of worship, and women are not permitted to speak in the mosque. There was even an eerie if somewhat comforting similarity between the call to prayer from the mosque and the sound of the Vorsinger who leads the singing at all Amish church services.         

During the past year, I spoke with two people, also raised Amish, who spent years in overseas work.  Bertha Beachy left my home church to work in Somalia; Harold Miller and his wife Annetta Wenger have lived in east Africa for years. Both Bertha and Harold used almost identical words in describing their experiences: “Every single day my Amish background helped me better understand the people I live and work with.”

(Slide)[16] What are these enduring values that may make those of us who grew up in close knit ethnic communities, Amish or otherwise, particularly well suited to live and work in other cultures? How can it be that people of two such seemly different cultures can find commonality?  Well, for starters there is the centrality of family, respect and care for the elders, children who immediately become part of the rhythm of the family life and remain so even after they marry. There is a sense of place, a family home, a deep connection to the land, a unique mother tongue, an oral history, a village, a community, and yes, a tribe.    

Underpinning all of these are the cultural traditions and the faith that is less spoken of than simply lived.  And in fact, in both cases it is equally difficult to distinguish between the two: is it theology or is it tradition? Islam, like Christianity, has numerous sub-groups, all followers of the same prophet but with very different interpretations and practices.  We who are Christian easily accept that there are many different groups who all are followers of Jesus and yet it is much too easy for us to view all Muslims as one group, too often a group that is feared rather than respected as part of the family of God.    

(Slide)[17] If we are careful to listen and observe, we soon understand that we are more alike than we are different. What was so heartbreaking in Kabul was to see how hard it was for ordinary families to hold it together – to reclaim and rebuild their family homes that had been destroyed in the decades of war, to struggle each day to provide a living for their family, stay healthy and send their children to school – the same things that are important to us.  What I took away from my time in Kabul is a profound respect for the astonishing resilience of ordinary Afghans in the face of constant threats and well-meaning interventions that are too often misguided and help the wrong people.

“Was it safe in Afghanistan?” is difficult to answer.  I did not live inside a walled compound and every morning I made my coffee and went to the window to watch the activity in the street below. If the shops were open, children dodging traffic on their way to school, traders pushing their vegetable carts into place, and car horns blaring, then I knew I was OK. If the street was empty, then something was up. Afghans knew much more than I about whether it was safe, and they didn’t have the option to take an armored car to the airport and leave on the next plane out.  My assistant Frozan on a morning commute missed a bus bombing by less than a minute; Afghanistan is far more dangerous for her than for me, and thus my discomfort with the question. As though my safety is somehow more important than hers.

Beyond

(Slide)[18] The Core Value of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is the belief that “All Lives Have Equal Value” and with it the objective that “every person should have the opportunity to live a healthy and productive life.” 

It’s been about 4 years since I moved beyond Kabul to join the foundation with a passion to do just that - give poor people the opportunity to live more productive lives and to experience the dignity that comes with being able to provide for your family I am part of a small team called Financial Services for the Poor and all of our work is framed around having an impact on the life of the Boss, and no, our Boss is not who you think. This is our Boss. (Slide)[19]  Before any grant is approved, we have to be able to answer this question: “How will this project improve the life of the Boss?”

There are now 7 Billion people on the planet.  Of that amount, about 2½ Billion live on less than $2 a day and are considered the ‘global poor’. If you do the math, you know that a family of 4 lives on an average of $250 per month. There is another group of 1½ Billion who live on less than $4 per day and are at constant risk of falling back into poverty because there is no margin to deal with shocks, whether natural disaster, political instability, crop failures, or health.  What we have learned is that for every 100 people who are able to move out of poverty, 95 fall back in, so if we really want to have an effect on global poverty, we need to not only provide opportunities for the poor to lift themselves up, we need to provide protective mechanisms to help them not fall back in. 

Much of the work in the past 30 years in microfinance has focused on providing access to micro-credit, and while this remains part of the solution, we encourage organizations and governments to think more broadly about the full range of formal financial services – savings, insurance, payment systems, money transfers - needed by the poor and more cost-effective ways to reach the poor with these services where they live.  

The Boss not only lives every day with financial uncertainty and risk, there is a good chance she does not have access to clean water, to sanitation, to health care, to education, and she surely does not have access to the range of formal financial services and tools that we enjoy in the rich world.

What the Boss does have is a cell phone.  The Boss has a cell phone.   And if the Boss happens to live in Kenya, she has a better chance of being able to manage her financial life and to handle those shocks that almost inevitably will come her way.  So what’s special about Kenya? It is a country of about 40 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa and 58% of them live on less than $2 per day.

There are at least 15 million people in Kenya who not only have cell phones, they have a special application that essentially functions as an electronic wallet that allows them to store monetary value on the phone and transfer that value to another person who has the same application. This service is known as M-PESA (Slide)[20] and was offered by Safaricom, the mobile network operator, who had not idea what this would become. The people figured out how to make use of this service in all sorts of creative ways, and Safaricom responded by placing agents all over the country to serve as cash in/cash out points where people could exchange their hard currency for electronic money.   There are 28,000 such agents in the country.  In Nairobi, it’s like Starbucks in Seattle – there’s an agent on every street corner.

How does this help the Boss?

She is a toddler living in a rural village and has developed an eye infection. Her father is working in the city and her mother does not have on that day the few dollars needed to purchase the medicine. The infection worsens and over time could even to blindness.  In Kenya, her mother can call the family member working in the city. He can instantly transfer electronic value from his mobile phone to hers and she can go to an agent, cash out and purchase the medicine – that very day.    

Before long, she may not even have to cash out the funds – she might be able to keep the money digital and transfer it directly to the pharmacist who also has an M-PESA account. Taxi drivers in Nairobi now prefer to be paid electronically so they aren’t driving around with a lot of cash.  Our research shows that the millions of poor people in Kenya with M-PESA are better able to withstand the shocks that will inevitably come their way.  

As wonderful a service as M-PESA is, it is not financial inclusion.  It is an incredibly useful tool, but it does not bring people into the formal financial system.  We look at this and think – we have to figure this out. There must be a way to use this new tool – the ubiquitous cell phone – and the technology which is already there – to connect the billions of unbanked to the formal system.  We want poor people to be able to access a money transfer service not only for person-to-person transfers, but person-to-bank account, employer to person’s bank account, government to person’s bank account – just like us. Poor people are trapped in a cash economy – let’s figure out a way get more of their transactions digital – just like ours.  

The key is to create national networks of agents trained to facilitate these cash-in/cash-out transactions. We are working at this and I have two rather large projects in my portfolio – one in Pakistan and one in Bangladesh. In Pakistan we are working with one of the largest commercial banks to reach out to the 85% who are poor and unbanked with a technology platform developed by the bank called “Omni.”  (Slide)[21] In every rural village or urban neighborhood, a shopkeeper is trained and designated as an agent of the bank and provided with the mobile technology and connectivity so that he can serve the people in that neighborhood with banking services.  MEDA, by the way, is working on a piece of this project with us.  And because we want to work in the formal system, we are engaging bank regulators, a number of whom have issued new guidelines around what is called “branchless banking.”

 (Slide)[22] This idea of technology-enabled financial services available to the world’s poor at their doorstop is a relatively new concept, but one that we believe will make a huge difference for hundreds of millions of the global poor over the next decade. This will not happen overnight, but we also believe that there is a special responsibility that comes with being part of a large organization that has the capacity and resources to address the really big problems in the world.  Alongside the foundation’s belief that all lives have equal value is another core value that “To whom much is given, much is expected” and that applies to all of us who have the opportunity to diligently and thoughtfully expend those resources for the greatest possible global impact.  (End of Slide Presentation)

Closing

I’d like to close by saying a few words to the students here tonight.  First of all, I’m so glad you are here and thank you for your interest in MEDA and their work.  I was asked once which was most important in life:  competence or luck. It’s kind of a silly question, because luck is by definition something outside of one’s control. But I also believe that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.  You are now in preparation mode and that may continue for some time. That’s the easy part. The tricky thing about opportunity is that it can be hard to recognize because it doesn’t always look like what you expect or hope for. But if you walk through an open door, it will very often lead to another. It’s OK to walk the first mile without knowing where the last mile will take you. It’s also OK to be in a situation where you feel like you’re trotting along, just barely keeping up with all that’s going on around you.  You are already fortunate because you have an amazing and enviable network available to you – starting right here in this room. Don’t be shy about using all the resources available to you and as you embark on your journey, you too will be humbled and grateful for the people who give you a lift on the road and on whose shoulders you can stand, lean, and even cry.     

Thank you all very much for your attention.