Where do I start?

For every chapter that I read in half the sky I wonder what exactly is the problem to a solution? Donating money, doing charity, or maybe more! Question is where to start? What resources do I need? If I need to help the less fortunate what to do I give them. What have I taken from the book Half the Sky is that where there is a will there is a way. My dream is to adopt a certain village and create an economy that can sustain itself very well. Something on the lines of what Professor Mohammad Yunus did. Micro finance got an altogether new face thanks to him. Today there are tons of people who follow it some successfully and some very very unsuccessfully. Like the recent bubble that has happened in RamNagar in Bangalore, India. Micro Finance started with a big bang. The first lady who borrowed it started another fast food cart with the money business grew so did her aspirations. She continued to add to her line of fast food cart and then one fine day an idea cropped up her mind. She decided to use not her profits but another set of loan to buy TV and refrigerator for her house. One after another her desires grew and very soon she started faulting on her earlier loans. The problem with Micro Finance is that it is very much self sustaining if people do not default in their payments. Apparently one lady's wrong step brought down the entire system down. Pretty soon the local bank did not have enough funds to lend and other vendors were hit. As a result economy of Ram Nagar has tanked making it a subject of study in lot of schools. 

What went wrong was that in a miniscule manner the banks became little reckless as far as lending is concerned something which happened in big scale during the Asian crisis and recently in the US. I on the other hand plan on making loans to one person who then will lend what ever he or she owes me to the other person and the third party will pass on the loan to the fourth party and so on. This way each one of them would be interdependent for loan from one party and for returns from the other. This model is definitely flawed but if given some more thought can help uplift villages in India. Here it will important that villagers trust each other when lending and not misuse the loans by lending to the first of their kin. Some of these risks probably won't be measurable but it will be quintessential to build a model that gets rid of even unmeasurable risks. A model that will consider qualitative and quantitative risks.

Key is to keep things simple. There is a potential for growth in every single village. In fact there are some white and green revolution centers that still implement programs very successfully in rural India. It has helped lift economies of quite a few villages. Everything for now is a plan. My first step would be to work with such NGO's that are into micro finance or uplifting of villages using such schemes. What can be more fulfilling for me than helping villages in India at the very grass root. As I said I have to start somewhere and somehow. With each day that passes I write down ideas discuss it with some of my peers and brain storm. Sometimes ideas look good sometimes they do not. And when some ideas do not work I read books, books such as Half the Sky that motivate me to take action. The book sits on my study desk all the time reminding me that life has a bigger purpose. A purpose that is not defined by vengeance or wars. A purpose that is defined by one fellow human being helping another fellow human being.