|
Travelling to more than forty countries
over eight years, John Stackhouse met and lived with hundreds
of the world's poor. Shattering the cliches of poverty and
development, he weaves through desperate lives in a journey
of discovery mixed with heartbreak, humour, courage and
chaos.
To understand the lives of the poor, Stackhouse
buys an island in Bangladesh, travels with Somali warlords
and takes up residence with a village of subsistence farmers
in northern India. He journeys with some of the most remarkable
unsung heroes of development, dines with prime ministers,
parties with Jakarta millionaires and gets caught up in
riots. He travels from an Indian village where families
live on roots and tree bark to Borneo's blackened peat bogs,
where fires raged as a direct result of an Indonesian dictator's
last wish.
In Africa, he finds a continent almost ruined
by good intentions. But in the remote reaches of Mali, in
the deserts around Timbuktu and in the cotton fields along
the Niger river, Stackhouse finds emerging democracy, free
markets and small local banks run by women. For these people
and for most of the world's poor, there will be no riots,
no massacres and no starvation either. What's happening
across much of the world is a slow process in which the
poor are beginning to set their own agenda, chart their
own futures, veto ridiculous schemes and vote the warlords
out of office. Time and again, Stackhouse has seen what
happens when people have a say in the fate of their schools,
forests, fields and governments: they do what no development
agency or government mega-project has been able to achieve.
They thrive. They may continue to be humble but they are
no longer desperate. John Stackhouse's eight-year journey
among the poor leads us away from despair. Poverty, he writes,
is not an inevitable part of the human condition but a direct
result of human actions -- and something that can be remedied.
Few journalists have travelled to more
villages or remote districts than John Stackhouse. As the
Globe and Mail's development issues reporter, Stackhouse
was based in New Delhi from 1992 to 1999, but spent much
of his time living with poor farmers, fishermen, lepers
and slum-dwellers, travelling by third-class rail through
India or by boat through Bangladesh. His work has been nominated
for six National Newspaper Awards in seven years, and won
the top prize in three different categories; he has also
won a National Magazine Award and an Amnesty International
prize for foreign reporting. He lives in Toronto with his
wife, the photographer Cindy Andrew, and their two children.
|
