Stories & Testimonies

What a sensational, sunny morning for a motor-scooter ride, I thought to myself, as every mile proved more interesting than the previous one. I was following a two-lane "highway," a rural Burmese road that became increasingly narrower and potholed as I journeyed past endless rice fields, villages filled with waving children, and a row of towering mountains on the right that paralleled my track. Soon our entourage turned towards those mountains to follow a winding, upward path—a former road carved into the mountains during World War II, deep into a region that no Westerner had seen in six decades. I felt adrenalized.

A small child stares through a frosted window, studying a freshly-fallen blanket of snow. He longs to run outside to build a snowman, but a white-coated warden tells him that he can't, because his tattered cloth shoes are inadequate to protect his feet and keep them warm. Besides that, he's suffering from tuberculosis, as are the other 120 children with whom he lives inside the same massive, concrete building. Their home is Cornesti Orphanage, one of 43 such state institutions scattered across Moldova, Europe's poorest nation. Cornesti is reserved for children with TB.

"I was a slave!" he said, and everyone in our circle laughed. They had been taking turns sharing how their lives had been impacted by their recently received micro-loans. Kenyan pastor Elijah Muyekho continued to tell his story with vigor: "I worked for a man who owned a rock quarry. I used a hammer and chisel all day long. My job was to break huge rocks and chisel them into rectangular blocks that are used to construct walls and buildings. On an average day, I made about a dollar."