On an unseasonably cold Friday night in east London, a crowd of photographers, journalists and activists gathered at Host Gallery in London for the opening of photographer Ed Kashi’s photo exhibition, Curse of the Black Gold. It features images taken in the Niger Delta since the discovery and extraction of oil in the region began five decades ago. Amidst the cold gloom of London, Kashi’s images burned with the fire of oil flares, with the desire of displaced families and with the brutality of a military seeking to protect the government against its own people.
Here I am in Morocco. For three months, I’ll be working for Al Amana, the largest microfinance institution (MFI) in the country. Despite Morocco’s status as a middle-income country ($3,800 GDP per capita), its poverty rate is a shocking 19% due to the expansive rural zones where 65% of the population live on less that $2 a day. Due to the dire conditions, local NGOs began to take interest in development via microfinance the 1990s, following the lead of successful implementation of other microfinance ventures such as the Grammeen Bank in Bangladesh that pioneered microfinance in the 1970s.
It was on a train in the middle of the night from Lisbon to Madrid that I started to read The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, Joan Didion said that one characteristic of successful people is that they believe anything can be resolved with a phone call, or a letter or a visit to the right person. They do not take “no” for an answer. It’s not stubborn or arrogant; it’s that “no” just doesn’t happen to them that often, so when it does, they don’t take it seriously…
