Selamat Pagi, Vietnam

During one sitting at a penthouse restaurant, observing a dispassionate grey Hanoi skyline while being bombarded by overly amped Vivaldi, my Mom spent nearly the equivalent of a Madiun-month’s worth of existence on cappuccinos and bruschetta. Having cleared my special visa for exit and reentry, I had blasted to Hanoi via Kuala Lumpur on AirAsia to meet my Mom and twin sisters. A lifelong obsession with Indochina and her sister’s multiple ailments sustained while in Indonesia combined to push my Mom towards a visit to mainland Southeast Asia instead of the archipelago. My week in Vietnam was a shock to my system, an influx of ephemeral four star living bookended by a mouse in the mandi and a poorly received lesson on the history of rock music at SMA2. They call it the good life for a reason.
Vietnam, while not suffering as badly as Indonesia did during the 1998 crisis, still took a major economic ass whooping. However, unlike Indonesia, the nation took the crash in stride, and since then has rebounded with nearly double digit annual increases in gross domestic product, nearing the skyrocketing rates of India and China. The country has capitalized on tourism, foreign direct investment, and homegrown educational policies, and is one of Asia’s most prominent leaders across the economic and political board.
The differences between Vietnam and Indonesia are striking. I arrived in Hanoi around 9PM, and after filing for my pre-arranged visa on-arrival, I was met outside the airport by a five foot tall, impossibly slim man named Tan. On the hour-long drive from the airport to central Hanoi, the Mercedes Sprinter van passed by sprawling miles of germinating rice paddies and dozens of cavernous boxes stamped with Yamaha, Canon, Samsung, and a host of other multinational brand names. “Tan,” I asked, screaming over the blare of Viet pop. “Do you Vietnamese feel resentment towards American tourists? I mean, it was only a generation ago that we practically destroyed your country.”
“Resentment, not my generation,” he drawled in his thickly accented English. “We have more important things to worry about, like making life and fashion. Some from older generation still mad, but Vietnamese people easy forgive.” It wasn’t the first time that I would wonder over the next week whether my kid would be holding a similar conversation in Tikrit or Basra some thirty years down the road.
After meeting my Mom and sisters for an Italian dinner at our four star hotel’s rooftop restaurant, I strolled around the old quarter, a cramped but elegant mish mash of French architecture, walkable sidewalks, and motorbike fumes. I found myself reflexively watching my every step, half-expecting the man eating holes of despair that I had become accustomed to in Jakarta, Surabaya, and any other Indonesian city of substantial size. But these were broad and clean sidewalks, albeit often blocked by crowds of Vietnamese eating pho, the national dish and pastime, or clogged by incredulously thick packs of silently snarling motorbikes. The newer more fashionable motorbikes were popular in Hanoi, and many of the seat cushions featured either punk rock style leather pleating or Louis Vuitton knock-off coverings. Multiplied by two million, those stylish seats and bikes contributed to the city’s unavoidable cosmopolitan and consumer conscious vibe.
Stumbling across the old quarter’s night market, only a stone’s throw from my hotel, I found myself transported down a conveyor belt of consumerism, pushed from behind by roving masses of teenagers, young couples, and middle-aged parents escorting one another down a half-mile long corridor of bags, sunglasses, fruit, electronics, and mountains of plastic knick-knacks. Most of the crap for sale was the same sort of Chinese manufactured garbage one finds anywhere in the world. But there were standouts amongst the piles that wouldn’t have graced the stalls and tables of a comparable Indonesian market. The broadly superior economic situation was evident in the MP3 players, advanced cell phones, massage rods, and scores of other medium-priced electronics not to be found on the street in Indonesia – perhaps within the confines of certain malls, but not at the markets. Markets in Indonesia are for the poor who can’t afford to shop at the malls, and the poor in Indonesia are in a different category from the urban poor in Vietnam.
I took a midnight lap around Hoan Kiem Lake, one of Hanoi’s most prominent landmarks, home to the magnificent Turtle Pagoda, floating in obscurity at that time of orange oxidized light. For a Friday night, the city of over five million was dead. The only sign of nightlife were a few stray motorbikes tearing around the broad tree-lined boulevard that surrounds the lake, where many Vietnamese gather daily for sunrise tai chi. I was making my way back along the water’s edge, when I spotted another late night stroller walking in my direction. I couldn’t make out his face in the moonlight spackled darkness, but the man was tall and heavyset, in at least his late fifties, with a salt and pepper ponytail, combat boots, camouflage pants, and an old Army issue backpack. Before I had left Indonesia for Vietnam, I spent two days with an American Vietnam veteran. He said he hadn’t been back yet, that he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to go back. “I stopped reading about the war and the country years ago. No one’s experience was the same.” As the man shuffled by without greeting, I thought many thoughts, and let a tear fall while no one was watching.

My Mom and sisters left Hanoi early Saturday morning a week later, and I found myself with the rest of the day to wander about engaged in that solitary but surrounded headspace possible only amongst the crowds of the world’s great cities. We spent a fantastic week together, bouncing from an overnight boat tour of Ha Long Bay to the UNESCO heritage sites of Hue and Hoi An in the central coastal provinces. The country, while diminutive when compared to Indonesia, is still vast, spanning some two thousand miles of coast. A week being led by the hand constitutes the most basic old-school definition of tourism, but was only sufficient to cover the northern half of the country, and at a break neck pace at that. After a whirlwind of culture, cuisine, and ab cramping laughter, I was back alone in magnificent Hanoi.
The French may have royally screwed the Vietnamese for nearly two centuries, but they left behind food, architecture, and art that at the turn of the twenty-first century puts Hanoi on par with Paris, Krakow or Berlin, as opposed to the sprawling chaos of its less aesthetically endowed Southeast Asian neighbors. I bought a few loose Vinataba cigarettes, and proceeded to waste the rest of the day cruising along wide boulevards, skirting dreamy trees fighting through diesel fumes and haze, staring through wrought iron gates at balmy yellow ambassadorial palaces. I wandered, got lost, hired a motorbike taxi, and got lost again snaking through the intermittently tangled and tumultuous streets that criss-cross the remnants of France’s flirtation with Indochina. I found myself in front of the Hoa Loa Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton, where a twenty-something year old John McCain had spent six years after his bomber was shot down into a nearby lake. The city breathes a millennium and a half of bewilderingly accessible courage, doggedness, and irrepressible history.
Vietnamese families and crowds of friends were spending their Saturdays lazily chatting, perched on ankle high stools while slurping away at steaming cups of pho. It was chilly enough that most people were dressed in wool coats or down jackets, wrapped in scarves or trendy hats. It was Saturday, but most men were in button down shirts and suit jackets – a marked change from the flip flops, t-shirts, and sarongs that mark casual Indonesia. The women, skinny, refined, and effortlessly trendy, drooped themselves over their men’s shoulders while zipping around the crowded and horn filled streets on the year’s newest motorbike models.
I made my way through L’Espace Center Culturel Francais, which was holding a retrospective of French cartoonists, and on to the breathtaking opera house, a four storey colonnaded building surrounded by green gardens and the ceaseless bustle of the French Quarter’s epicenter. Navigating my way through the onslaught of grime covered buses, undaunted helmetless riders, and screaming lime green taxis, I crossed to the marble stairway of the cultural relic, still home to operas and ballets in a city of online gaming and burgers. Three separate wedding processions were arranging themselves on the stairs. Grouping together and sharing bouts of laughter, the marital entourages looked on as the brides and grooms, all in modern Western tuxedos and lacey white gowns, posed for posterity. The brides smiled radiantly, the grooms glowered, and friends giggled from their motorbike perches while shooting cell phone photos.
In this land where the American War was only the most recent rejection of unwelcome foreign invaders, I began to comprehend how the country could be so successful despite its recent history. Only thirty five years ago, the U.S. had dropped two million tons of munitions on Hanoi alone, destroying would-be guerilla outposts along with imperial palaces, urban infrastructure, and tens of thousands of innocent lives. On our drive to Ha Long Bay three hours east of Hanoi, my Mom, the girls, Tan, and I stopped at a roadside gift shop staffed by mentally and physically disabled twenty-somethings suffering the generational knock-on effects of Agent Orange. Inside the sprawling complex, while crafting marble statuettes and weaving silk shirts, these hunchbacked and deformed kids no older than me would look up and smile, exchanging glances daily with those responsible for their disabilities.
Sitting on the stairs of the opera house, watching newly married couples prepare to embark on their way through life, I couldn’t help but think how the U.S. had torn this place apart. And for what? Someday will I find myself and my family on a tour of the Tigris and Euphrates, listening to a post-adolescent Iraqi explain the harrowing significance of yet another opaque American war?
A pretty girl with fashionably dyed hair, couture jeans, and big trendy sunglasses smiled at me as I strolled away from the historically bewildering imagery of a nation at peace and in control of its future. I smiled back and said ‘Hi.’ She turned away giggling.

Waking Up in a Micro Kind of Way

With Ibu Radinem and Mlese Village, Neigborhood #8 treasurer. Ibu's grant of US$20 let her rebuild her sundries shop, which now supplies her with $5 income per day.

In Indonesian, the root word bangun means “to wake up.” Pembangunan, the noun, means “development.” When I used this word around Indonesian friends my age, they didn’t really know what to make of it. In response to questions about what I studied in college, I often replied “pembagunan internasional,” international development. “You mean like sukarelawan, volunteerism?” Not quite. “Construction?” Nope. “Modernization.” Well, sort of.
Ben Anderson, the political scientist and master of Southeast Asian languages, wrote in 1990, “Pembangunan has no more than instrumental implications, and derives whatever moral thrust it has from the revolutionary ethos of the past…. [A phrase] that evoke[s] the memory of Sukarno’s historic 1945 [independence day] speech proclaiming the moral basis of an independent Indonesian state… icons attesting to the coherence of present and past, or the life of the past in the present, though they are experienced by many as their fundamental negation – military authoritarianism and an economy subjected to foreign capital.”[1]
Trained extensively in the study of languages, Anderson shied away from the use of the word pembangunan, loaded with nearly four centuries of linguistic colonial undertones. Yet, development, no matter how it is ultimately translated, cannot be disregarded as easily as Anderson would hope. Development was the stated reason for the original Dutch foray into the East Indies. The Liberal Party of the Netherlands, believing in the free market above all else, had instituted Eurocentric policies meant to expand the East Indies plantations and their lucrative agricultural exports. The Liberals had promised that, as the economy expanded, the lives of natives would be improved through the “trickle down” prosperity of local economic opportunities.[2] It was the failure of this system that in part led to Indonesia’s ultimate uprising and dismissal of the Dutch.
Where “Revolution” was the embodiment of Sukarno’s reign, pembangunan would come to symbolize Suharto’s New Order. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, newly discovered sources of state revenue melded nicely with vast amounts of international aid to spread Indonesian development far and wide.
Despite the corruption, collusion, and nepotism that ultimately came to symbolize the last years of Suharto’s reign, his New Order did achieve some significant strides towards pembangunan, the holy grail of his thirty-two year administration. For all the inconceivable graft, innocent deaths, and unconscionable plundering of the government coffers that took place under his watch, Suharto’s New Order did institute a host of national policies that were pro-poor. It was these policies, populist in many ways, that probably kept Suharto in power for the last two five-year terms of his three decade presidency, and beloved by the vast majority of Indonesians still ten years after his forced dethronement. During the New Order period, the average annual increase in GNP was a stupendous 6.7 percent, which on a per capita basis made Indonesia a leader amongst the fastest growing economies in the world.[3]
Friend writes, “Suharto had a peasant’s commonsense understanding that you must eat to live, that education helps you earn more money, and those with more money eat better and live longer. He showed great appetite for the burdens of state, demonstrated early aptitude, hired good advisors, and listened to them…”[4] Several projects in particular stand out as testaments to Suharto and his multiple cabinets’ development prowess. The channeling of oil revenue surpluses to economically backward areas detracted much criticism (with the exceptions of Aceh and Papua) from what otherwise would have created immense archipelagic rifts. The construction of massive infrastructure ranging from airports to harbors to bridges to dams, and a well-managed set of macro- and microeconomic policies (until the late 1990s), [5] generated the type of economic growth that central bankers and development economists from the North Atlantic Western world have wet dreams about.
Perhaps most significant though, was rice, nasi in Indonesian. Constituting in 1960s-era Jakarta nearly one-third of the average consumers’ yearly expenditures, under Suharto rice was subsidized and insulated to the point of national self-sufficiency.[6] In 1965, Sukarno had famously predicted the “year of living dangerously.” Shortly thereafter, rice prices soared an astonishing 900 percent, contributing to the social unrest that led to his ouster. Twenty years later, under Suharto, Java had increased its rice yield by 98 percent and its total production by 156 percent. The outer islands were even more successful.[7] Suharto’s focus on development led to undeniable economic success across all social strata, which in turn allowed him to remain one of most beloved and long-lived dictators in modern history.
However, the fact that it took until the late 1970s for pembangunan to really kick-in is indicative of larger problems within the New Order apparatus, namely corruption. While the economic improvements achieved under Suharto are undeniable, the long-term effects of New Order policies saw Indonesia lose its position in world trade, to the point where its share by the 1990s was almost one-third of the levels under the Dutch.[8]
Lieutenant General Ibnu Sutowo provides an illuminating example. Sutowo had been head of Pertamina, the state-owned oil company, since its nationalization in 1957. By 1974, Sutowo’s mismanagement had left the company US$15 billion in debt. Sutowo’s younger brother was a Communist. However, since Pertamina was an integral part of Suharto’s pyramid of power, the family connection that would have ruined others was ignored. As Vickers writes, “Through Pertamina, Suharto, and other members of the power group had ready access to an ongoing source of funding which meant that they were not accountable.” In the 1970s, Indonesia was one of the major world oil producers. Following the Middle East crisis in 1973, this meant an unfettered flow of income to the country’s military and political elite. Sutowo himself paid over US$1 million for his daughter’s wedding in 1973, and fitted pure gold rims around the license plates on his personal Rolls-Royce.
Sutowo was never held accountable for his negligence, mismanagement, and blatantly rampant vice. In fact, all fines and jail terms were passed along to deputies, and Sutowo was allowed to retire as head of the Indonesian Red Cross. Perhaps most shocking of all, during the early hours of New Year’s Day 2005, Sutowo’s youngest son was arrested in the bar of the Hilton Hotel, Jakarta, owned by his older brother – another concession to Sutowo for his “service” to the nation. When the woman whom he was partying with had her credit card declined by a young part-time waiter, Sutowo the Younger said, “Don’t you know who I am?” and then pulled a gun and shot the waiter to death. [9]
I have already talked about corruption at length, but this is just another example of how truly pervasive it was throughout Suharto’s house of cards. As Vickers adds, “The Sutowo story was typical of the way Indonesia’s vast wealth was used during the Suharto years – some deployed for projects to help the poor, but not before huge amounts were raked off for the benefit of the governing group.”[10] Personal and family greed should have been recognized early-on as the grim reaper it ultimately turned out to be. If KKN had been controlled and suppressed more effectively, the benefits of Suharto’s epic strides towards development might still be in effect today.
Two years after Suharto’s abdication in 1998, rice had fallen to five percent of GDP, from thirty percent in 1970. The revered nasi had lost its prominent role as the Indonesian engine of economic growth, replaced by more industrially and technologically advanced systems. But, as Friend recounts, “the politics of rice was again suddenly drawing debate. Rice was the largest single employer in the country, the provider of half the protein caloric intake of the population, a socio-cultural phenomenon.”[11] The rapid rise and fall of rice prices following Suharto’s departure alerted the world, the nation, and its 200 some-odd million citizens to the fact that an old pre-Suharto era problem was wrapping itself in a new hull.
Two questions followed that neither Harvard-trained economists nor Javanese rice farmers have yet been able to answer – How to achieve long-term economic growth to lift people out of poverty? [12] And, How much short-term suffering will those poor endure before latent tensions explode, as they have so many times in recent Indonesian history?

On October 13, 2006, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering use of tiny, community backed loans to lift millions of people out of poverty. With the news, microfinance and its derivations – microlending, microcredit, and community savings programs – have shown that pembangunan internasional is on the cusp of change. While the microfinance revolution may just be starting, for those who care about defeating poverty and achieving realistic development goals, the path towards a more sustainable solution now seems clear. Much more than just a gift, Yunus’ work has provided the wealthy industrialized world with a brilliantly simple way to save the world while making a profit.
It will be a travesty of mankind if the twenty-first century is allowed to repeat the development blunders of the last. The international development strategy only really began with the end of World War II, when the United States issued low-interest loans to those European countries still suffering from the fighting. The Marshall Plan is the most famous example, granting billions of dollars for infrastructure reconstruction and the like to countries that would have otherwise been confined to a perpetual cycle of poverty. While walking the streets of London or Paris, it has struck me to think what would have become of these magnificent capitals had the billions of dollars in foreign funding not been available.
When I was still in college at Dartmouth, I would often take ice climbing or hiking trips to the ravines of New Hampshire’s tallest peak, Mount Washington. Driving across on route 5, one of the most beautiful scenes in all of New England is the snow creeping down the Maple-splattered flanks of Mount Washington, the cog railway closed and no longer puffing its cancerous black clouds, the magnificent Bretton Woods Hotel cradled at the mountain’s base. The agreement signed at Bretton Woods in 1945 paved the way for the establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The new system promised massive loans on the scale of tens of billions of dollars to nations that proscribed to the macroeconomic overhauls recommended by the new theoretically multinational institutions. With American bankers and diplomats at the helm, unprecedented loans were issued to pull Europe from its ship of shambles.
Over fifty years later, much of the international aid system remains virtually unchanged. Massive loans are made to build electricity grids, dams, roads, airports, and the other mainstays of developed, modernized society. Unfortunately, as the Dutch discovered in the Indies and as countless others have repeatedly pointed out, much of the funding supplied to help the world’s poorest rarely “trickles down” to where it is needed most. Instead, the money is siphoned-off by corrupt bureaucrats, or is assigned and used imprudently, leading to the construction of multibillion dollar “bridges to nowhere” and inoperative, unsafe hydroelectric dams, amongst other failed projects.
In Indonesia, the Suharto regime made the inefficiencies of macro-development painfully obvious. Government sanctioned Rolls-Royces, one billion dollar pay-offs, and scotch-free murder are uncomfortable bedfellows with the estimated sixty million people who continue to scrape by on less than a dollar a day. The Indonesian macro approach oftentimes generates more ire than admiration. Last October in Aceh, where nearly 200,000 people died in the 2004 tsunami, the manager of the US$2.4 billion BRR was taken hostage, and only released following the intervention of the provincial governor, 36 hours later. In November, I spent two weeks trekking in the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra. In some parts, TVs, motorbikes, and cell phones are still as abstract as America. Jakarta bustles and hustles with the veneer of a modern city, but what sort of modernity permits un- and underemployment rates of near sixty percent?
While education, infrastructure development, and property law reform are all still pivotal in the effort to develop the poorest regions of the world’s developing countries, microfinance should be touted as a strikingly attractive and much needed boost from the bottom. I had to go out and experience this micro-revolution in the field before I could become a believer.
During weekends and days off from school, I worked as a liaison between the Los Angeles-based Real Medicine Foundation and the Central Java-based KOMPIP Foundation. Providing a measure of accountability for the U.S.-based operation, I worked with KOMPIP distributing very small loans to extremely poor Javanese villagers who could not qualify for loans from conventional banks. No collateral is needed and repayment is based on an honor system. Each community uses varying sets of rules, interest rates, and other stipulations, but the effects were similar wherever I went. Interest rates were similar to those offered at national banks, but did not require the nonexistent collateral required by the big Indonesian lenders. The equivalent of Indonesian loan sharks, to whom poor villagers would otherwise turn, oftentimes charge up to ten percent a day.
Sitting under his thatch roof and cement walled home, a Javanese villager named Pargito explained his community’s approach to me. The first time I visited him, four months after the earthquake, he, his wife, and their three children were still living in the wreckage of their home under a blue tarp supported by bamboo poles. Mlese, his village an hour’s drive north of Jogyakarta, was destroyed in the massive earthquake of May 2006. Using supplies donated by the Christian NGO World Vision and supplemental income generated through his micro-finance funded vegetable delivery business, he was able to rebuild his home seven months after the distribution of his fifty dollar loan.
“If we cannot pay the loan on time, we must go before the other community members to answer their questions. Maybe we will have to explain what we did with the money, why we cannot pay, why we are irresponsible people.” Wearing a clean but worn plaid shirt, sipping on jasmine tea and smoking a kretek cigarette, he laughed with lean cheek bones and sparkling eyes. “In Javanese culture, this would be the biggest shame imaginable, going in front of your friends for questioning. I would first go to a family or friend from another village to ask for help paying the interest. I would even sell my TV before community shame like that.”
Anyone, regardless of family history, can qualify for a loan, which means that generational cycles of poverty are broken across the board. In a country like Indonesia, oftentimes paralyzed by corruption or bureaucratic incompetence, it is obvious why independent businesses rather than the government are seen as a better way to solve social problems, first and foremost poverty. Whether villagers use their loan – the average is about US$15 – to buy a bicycle to deliver rice, invest in a year of school fees, or start a brick making facility, they go from subsistence level peasants to entrepreneurs literally overnight.
In Mlese, accompanied by Akbar, the CEO of KOMPIP, we visited one fifty year-old woman named Ibu Radinem. Indonesian rap blasted from a window-rattling stereo, chickens pecked at scraps of corn husks, naked bulbs hung from the exposed terracotta roof. Where there was rubble six months ago, there stood a tile roofed, brick-walled house with glass windows and a cement floor. Before the earthquake, Ibu Radinem owned and operated a sundries shop that was destroyed. For the six months before the loan dispersal, she had no steady income, and spent her days sleeping, chatting, and eating at friends’ houses. She borrowed the equivalent of about US$20 to rebuild her sundries shop. With two payment periods left, Mrs. Radinem has almost fully repaid her loans. She now makes nearly five dollars a day selling soft drinks, shampoo, soup, and chips.
Beyond the sheer economics, which are astounding, the self-help benefit is also compelling. People gain a new appreciation for the value of their lives, and realize that with just a little bit, a whole lot is possible. According to Akbar, “The most important thing we do is social preparation. Accountability, planning, and transparency. Making sure everyone who borrows understands their commitments.”
I was skeptical at first. My Dad always said that anything that sounds too good to be true, particularly with money, usually is. “Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly,” Yunus told an audience at Oxford University in 2006. “We have remained so mesmerized by the success of the free market that we never dared to express any doubt about it.”[13] Yunus’ plan does not call for a Marxist style abolition of capitalism. As a former Fulbright scholar to Vanderbilt University with a PhD in economics, he knows that free market capitalism is the only way to achieve widespread increases in quality of life and standard of living. Yunus is not calling for the destruction of capitalism – he is calling for its enlightenment.
Lasting peace, real democracy, and advanced human rights cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways to break out of poverty. The macro-aid system does not and will not guarantee such a conclusion by itself. “Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development,” the Nobel citation said. Macro-aid is still needed to bring life saving clean water, electricity, and roads to the billions of people living without the perks of a modern life. Yet, microfinance is estimated to have already helped some 17 million people worldwide – estimates for Indonesia do not exist, yet. That help was delivered at a tiny fraction of what has been contributed to the macro-aid “trickle down” system. As Yunus said, “If you stay with the same old thing over and over, you don’t get anywhere.” If the world is serious about waking up those who are still economically, politically, and socially asleep, it is clear to me that we need to embrace the new micro way.
[1] Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. p. 188
[2] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 16
[3] Dick, Howard, et al. The Emergence of a National Economy: An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 2001. p. 198
[4] Friend. Indonesian Destinies. P. 137
[5] Hill, Hal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. pp. 198-9
[6] Friend. Indonesian Destinies. P. 139
[7] Hill. The Indonesian Economy Since 1966. Pp. 128-36
[8] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 186
[9] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 185
[10] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 186
[11] Friend. Indonesian Destinies. P. 142
[12] Timmer, Peter. “Tensions in Indonesia’s Food Policy.” USINDO Brief. November 17, 2000
[13] Prasso, Sheridan. “Saving the World with a Cup of Yogurt.” Fortune. February 5, 2007, pp. 44-9

Test

I was unable to post for a while, this is a test to see if I now can.