Easter Slumday

On Easter Sunday morning, I went to a small church in a slum in Accra. Tin roofs, containers for houses (and those were the nice ones), the whole bit. Chickens and kids all barefoot in the dust, both shouting at me when I rolled into town. One of my favorite things is to hear the kids that would normally shout, “Obruni!” at me, instead use English…so they point at me with a mixture of glee, horror and mystification, and say, “White man!” It’s great.

Anyway, so I went to this church. The church is held upstairs in a school that some entrepreneurial person likely built as a second-floor, rent-out portion of their residence. School desks, stacked precariously on the 2-foot-wide porch outside, looked as though a strong wind might bring them down. I went to the church with my Ghanaian pastor friend John, who had been invited to preach there. He had me start the preaching, so I got up (it being Easter and all) and said something about the scandal of Christ’s resurrection, how we shouldn’t get used to it and all that.

Then John got up to preach. And John started in the most logical place, of course – by talking about MicroEnsure. Part of it was to explain why this White Man was here, but most of it was to talk about God’s work in the world, and how it's ongoing, active, practical, and deliberate. And for John, microinsurance is part of that work. John explained a basic product to the people assembled in the church: for $1.40 (2 Ghana cedis), very poor people can have their loan with a microfinance bank paid back in case of death or disability, property covered in the event of a fire or flood, AND (not “or”) a lump sum funeral payout of around $175 in the event of a death of any family member, including the children. We can do all this because we serve 3.5 million people around the world, so we know the pricing and benefits and all pretty well in order to get a low-price, high-value product.

I was as surprised as you might be at what happened next. When John finished his very basic explanation of the product and its benefits, the people stood and cheered: shouting, clapping, hugging. It was like Ghana had won the World Cup.

It goes without saying that this experience showed me, in a new way, the power of our work. The poor know the risks they face – the evidence is everywhere. They want to be protected, and they will pay a little bit of money to get that protection through a sustainable mechanism. Problem is, no one thought until now that a range of insurance products could ever work among the poor...but it is working.

I’ll never forget that moment when they stood and cheered - certainly not as long as I’m in this job, maybe for as long as I live. The hope and joy that I saw that morning wasn’t a feel-good moment…it was a moment to observe the power of the poor: their capability, diligence, awareness, sacrifice, passion. Who am I to respond to their honest expression with my typical dose of self-serving do-gooderism? No, the moment made me think that all they need of me is to be good at what I do. They can handle the rest.