"Truly Remarkable" is the first thing I could think of when I heard this on the radio this morning...
"The bank said that the poor were not creditworthy. After all my efforts, over several months, failed I offered to become a guarantor for the loans to the poor. I was stunned by the result. The poor paid back their loans, on time, every time! But still I kept confronting difficulties in expanding the program through the existing banks. That was when I decided to create a separate bank for the poor, and in 1983, I finally succeeded in doing that. I named it Grameen Bank or Village bank.
Today, Grameen Bank gives loans to nearly 7.0 million poor people, 97 per cent of whom are women, in 73,000 villages in Bangladesh. Grameen Bank gives collateral-free income generating, housing, student and micro-enterprise loans to the poor families and offers a host of attractive savings, pension funds and insurance products for its members. Since it introduced them in 1984, housing loans have been used to construct 640,000 houses. The legal ownership of these houses belongs to the women themselves. We focused on women because we found giving loans to women always brought more benefits to the family.
In a cumulative way the bank has given out loans totaling about US $6.0 billion. The repayment rate is 99%. Grameen Bank routinely makes profit. Financially, it is self-reliant and has not taken donor money since 1995. Deposits and own resources of Grameen Bank today amount to 143 per cent of all outstanding loans. According to Grameen Bank's internal survey, 58 per cent of our borrowers have crossed the poverty line.
Grameen Bank was born as a tiny homegrown project run with the help of several of my students, all local girls and boys. Three of these students are still with me in Grameen Bank, after all these years, as its topmost executives. They are here today to receive this honour you give us.
This idea, which began in Jobra, a small village in Bangladesh, has spread around the world and there are now Grameen type programs in almost every country."
This was just a small part of Muhammad Yunus' Nobel lecture in Oslo on December 10th, 2006. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microcredit. The complete lecture is here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunus-lecture-en.html
I hope that Dryden can work to support something similar to get the HUD loans that we have in a bank account out to local business owners. I hope we can make a difference that spirals upwards creating jobs and businesses and an environment where business and people can thrive.
Jack Palance died today. I will probably always remember him first as that spooky guy from Ripley's Believe it or Not when I was growing up. I used to think he was Ripley. He was so convincing and scary. He always had a young female co-star on the show - I always thought they were his daughters.
Later in my life, he was in City Slickers and I realized that he wasn't Ripley. He told this story about having just finished being in Shane and having this director tell him he would win an academy award. And bam, 50 years later he won for City Slickers. After that I was always attached to Jack Palance. He was the grandfather I never knew. My own grandfather died in 1979 and I have no real memories of him. Jack was Ukrainian. He was successful. He was a hero in City Slickers - playing a parady of himself as a bad guy in all those westerns. He was an original and I think I always liked that about him.
When you're a kid you dress up as your heroes at Halloween. When you're an adult and get invited to costume parties and 
