[Book excerpt] Forgiving debt could change the world

from The Tennessean

Rock star Bono leads the way in helping the 'bottom billion'

By CHARLES M. NORTH and BOB SMIETANA
Excerpted from Good Intentions

In 1985, not long after performing in the Live Aid concert, which raised more than $200 million for famine relief in Africa, the Irish rock star Bono and his wife, Ali, traveled to Ethiopia. There they spent five weeks working with the Christian charity World Vision at an orphanage and food-distribution program. The lead singer of U2 wanted to find out about poverty and famine firsthand. What he saw seemed beyond belief: a nation of proud, almost regal people reduced to absolute, wretched poverty. In recalling that trip, Bono told Brian Williams of NBC News about "waking up in northern Ethiopia and mist leaving the ground and watching people coming, walking all through the night, coming, thousands of them coming to a feeding station to beg for food—to beg for their lives."

When it came time to leave, Bono told Ali that he would never forget what he had seen in Ethiopia. "Of course, you'll forget," she replied.

She was right. There are some problems too big even for a rock star to solve. Despite his best intentions, the challenge of poverty in Africa was something the then-twentysomething Bono was not ready to grapple with. So, Bono went back to "life as normal" in the developed world. He lost himself in work and family, putting thoughts of Ethiopia out of his mind.

Like many Christians who try to address global poverty, Bono realized that the problems poor people face appear insurmountable. A billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Many governments and economies in poor countries are in shambles. AIDS, famine, malaria, contaminated drinking water, and disease conspire to kill millions each year. According to a report from the World Health Organization, 22,000 people die each day from poverty-related causes, most of which are preventable.

People living on less than a dollar a day suffer from "extreme poverty." They miss more meals than they eat and live in ramshackle housing, without even the basics of a roof and a chimney. They lack basic clothing items such as shoes, have no clean water or access to sanitation, and have little or no health care; their children rarely attend school at all; their babies die at dramatically high rates; and poor nutrition makes 10-year-old children as small as American 7-year-olds. Extreme poverty means that life is a daily struggle to survive, and too many lose the fight. As William Easterly, a former World Bank economist, puts it, poverty is "dying babies, starving children, and oppression of women and the downtrodden."

To put the numbers in perspective, consider this. In 1981, more than 1.4 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, thanks mainly to the remarkable economic growth of China, India and other Southeast Asian countries, more than 400 million people have been lifted from that misery. Left behind, however, are the "bottom billion"—a group more than three times the population of the United States, living in desperate, almost unspeakable conditions and with little hope of escape. One out of every six people in the world falls into this category.

Unlike the rest of the world, things have gotten dramatically worse in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of people living in extreme poverty has nearly doubled since 1981, and where war, famine, and AIDS claim millions of lives each year.

In the 1990s, nearly a decade after his first trip to Africa, Bono began to see a ray of hope. When he learned that African nations were paying more than $250 million per month, more than had been raised at Live Aid, to repay loans to the world, he found a cause to believe in. Most of that loan money had been squandered by inept governments or stolen by kleptocratic leaders like Mobutu Sese Seko, who allegedly pocketed more than $5 billion during 30 years as president of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. If the burden of those loans could be lifted, and enough new aid money for relief and development could be spent in the developing world, then the bottom billion might stand a fighting chance.

That's the argument he made in 2004, while speaking to leaders of the British Labour Party, which included current Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The plan was already working, Bono said. In Uganda, where debt had been canceled, "three times as many children" were going to school. Still, more had to be done; so Bono asked the British government to "double aid, double its effectiveness, and double trouble for corrupt leaders" in Africa.

Bono pleads for the poor

While speaking in the United States at the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast, Bono made an impassioned plea for what is known as the "ONE Campaign," which aspires to "make poverty history." Following up on debt relief pledged but not fully delivered by the G8 summit, a gathering of some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world, the ONE Campaign wants the United States and other rich nations to spend an additional 1 percent of their national budgets to provide "clean water for all; school for every child; medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty."

"One percent is not merely a number on a balance sheet," Bono said.

One percent is the girl in Africa who gets to go to school, thanks to you. One percent is the AIDS patient who gets her medicine, thanks to you. One percent is the African entrepreneur who can start a small family business, thanks to you. One percent is not redecorating presidential palaces or money flowing down a rat hole. This one percent is digging water holes to provide clean water.

Bono made the same comments a few months later at a leadership conference sponsored by Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Ill. After sharing the story of how he came to faith in Jesus, Bono said that he had experienced a second conversion while visiting Africa and seeing firsthand how poverty destroys people's lives. He asked the more than 8,000 leaders gathered at Willow Creek (and more than 70,000 others who tuned in via satellite) to get their churches involved in ending "stupid poverty," the kind that causes children to die from easily curable diseases.

So is Bono right? Can forgiving debt and the ONE Campaign save the bottom billion? And should Christians act to make these visions come true, to make extreme poverty "history"?

Bono's Willow Creek remarks followed an address by Bill Hybels, the church's pastor. He told a story about a recent trip he had taken to a village in Zambia. Willow Creek feeds and educates about 1,100 AIDS orphans in that village, so that at least in that one place "there are no AIDS orphans uncared for," Hybels said.

One day, Hybels met an old woman who was dragging a bag of a life-sustaining maize product given out by the church. She was caring for two orphans and two of her grandchildren, and the five of them were dragging the bag along the road. Hybels offered to carry the bag to her home, which was about two miles away. During that journey, Hybels said, he had a moment of "penetrating clarity." When church leaders are faithful and effective, he said, when they preach the Word of God and help people come to faith and teach them that to be a follower of Jesus Christ means to have compassion for the poor and to care about widows and orphans, "then people live." If church leaders fail to do these things, "people die."