The International Bank of Bob
Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Hired by ForbesTraveler.com to review some of the most luxurious accommodations on Earth, and then inspired by a chance encounter in Dubai with the impoverished workers whose backbreaking jobs create such opulence, Bob Harris had an epiphany: He would turn his own good fortune into an effort to make lives like theirs better. Bob found his way to Kiva.org, the leading portal through which individuals make microloans all over the world: for as little as $25-50, businesses are financed and people are uplifted. Astonishingly, the repayment rate was nearly 99%, so he re-loaned the money to others over and over again.
?After making hundreds of microloans online, Bob wanted to see the results first-hand, and in The International Bank of Bob he travels from Peru and Bosnia to Rwanda and Cambodia, introducing us to some of the most inspiring and enterprising people we've ever met, while illuminating day-to-day life-political and emotional-in much of the world that Americans never see. Told with humor and compassion, The International Bank of Bob brings the world to our doorstep, and makes clear that each of us can, actually, make it better.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A well-meaning entrepreneur, Harris accumulated the experiences for his memoir as a journactivist: in Dubai to report for a luxury travel site, he encounters migrants working under extreme imbalances of wealth and quality of life. His ideals and desire to help at a grassroots level are supplemented by travel to more complex economies, ultimately coalescing in personal microloans, the same economic lending policy championed by Bangladeshi Nobel-laureate Muhammad Yunus. Brandishing his new volition, Harris discovers a loaning organization and, with its benediction, creates and tracks his own loans to needy beneficiaries abroad. The experience takes him to far-flung economies, many rebuilding after the strife of internal war and genocide, or recovering from violent political and governmental upheaval. With as much objectivity as possible, Harris investigates his specific microlender's field operations as well as those of non-affiliated financial players. The narrative is buoyed by anecdotes from politically and economically-scarred places, the local characters he meets and expected travel drama he must overcome. Although his feet are firmly planted, Harris spends equal time considering both the celebrated and negative aspects of microlending. There's ample humor and empathy, yet the book's tone, sentimentality, and extensive footnotes undermine the well-meaning intentions of his literary, if not his actual, enterprise.
