Brother, can you spare a hut?
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After settling into our new bamboo-thatched house on stilts, built for us by the village council, we sat one day with our neighbors for storytelling. When my turn came, I showed our new friends a collection of photographs of Chicago. I was planning to wow them with the enormous buildings of an American city. Shortly into my presentation, however, I was stopped by Moia, one of the village leaders, who had spotted two homeless men on the Michigan Avenue sidewalk with crude signs propped between their legs.
Moia asked me. ‘What are these two men doing?’
“I was stunned. We stumbled over explanations of difficult logistics, scarce money, and government bureaucracies, but the councilmen wouldn’t take no for an answer. They wanted action.
“I could see in their eyes that this dream could not easily die. Over the coming months, they worked with us on other projects, and their wish to import the two homeless men slowly disappeared like a fading rainbow.”
