Today is William and Blaker's wedding! Tuck's in town, and he and Dad and I had a fun lunch yesterday at Wild Wing's. It sounds as though California is off to a great start.The weather is beautiful today -- lots of sunshine, clean air, and spring's-coming-warmth. I went running around the neighborhood and listened to a Planet Money podcast about Haiti.
The story was very uplifting. It was about Yvrose Jean Baptiste, who is the woman in the picture. The Planet Money reporters met her, by chance, while doing a story on economic recovery efforts after the earthquake.
Yvrose was a determined woman who built up a thriving food wholesale business with periodic $600 microcredit loans that she used in order to purchase food on the Haiti/Dominican Republic border. She would then re-sell the food to about 10 retailers, extending it to them on credit and earning her living on the "credit arbitrage." The reporters were explaining that she was a one-person example of how a credit system grows an economy.
What I really liked about the story was how Yvrose seemed like a wonderful person -- inspired to work hard for her children and her community, and perservering in the face of the terrible devasation of the earthquake. This was also an excellent piece of journalism, as it gave me a deeper sense of a person's life/perspective/feelings/challenges, in what seems to me -- even moreso after the earthquake -- a place that is very removed from my own comfortable life.
