Google AdWords&Guerilla Marketing

A Passage to the Continent of Africa

The Third World vs. the Modern World

Reality check in Mozambique

by Perry Marshall

The Moringa tree grows naturally in Africa and has seven times more Vitamin C than oranges, four times more Vitamin A than carrots and four times more Calcium than milk.

I travel a lot - that wasn't always the case. But I've never looked at the world the same way since touring the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil four years ago.

Today, I'm living an upper-middle class lifestyle in Chicago, hobnobbing with entrepreneurs, company presidents and business leaders; eating in nice restaurants and going to Disney World for vacation and running my business operation from my basement office world headquarters.

It's all too easy to get absorbed in that comfort zone and forget about the rest of the world.

So when my wife Laura and I finally wrenched the credit cards and Dilbert cubes from our necks, we made this little deal: every year, one of us keeps the kids and the other one goes to the jagged edge. This time it was my turn. I went to Africa.

After a week in Mozambique, which is one of the world's poorest countries, I realized I don't have any problems. None. My life is a punchbowl compared to the third world. Every day in North America is Christmas and every night is New Year's Eve. Of course, when you turn on the T.V. and see a refugee camp, you can't possibly relate.

It looks like a different planet, and it practically is. There's a number on the screen to call and give some operator your credit card number, but for all you know, somebody could be stashing 90 percent of the money and funding terrorism. So what can you do?

I won't give you a blow-by-blow of the trip here - I'll save that for a Web site - but I will cut to the chase. There's an economic lesson in all this that's pertinent to every person reading this magazine.

I went to Beira, Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean, just northeast of South Africa. Laura's brother, Alan, runs a relief organization for kids in third world countries, and he's got a project there that consists of a school, a church, a medical clinic and a feeding program.

Most people in Mozambique live in mud huts, women walk barefoot with baskets on their heads and boil manioc roots (that tastes like potatoes) over an open fire. They grow rice and dry it in the sun. Now living in a hut is a bit like a camping trip in the mountains - it's not necessarily as bad as it might seem. No, the real eye-opener was the heath problems I saw during the days I spent with Robin Perry, an RN, who travels from village-to-village with her makeshift medical clinic.

She would take a box of medicine into a hut and sit down at a table with a translator, then an endless line women and children would form outside the door. I sat next to her and saw a little bit of everything - Malaria, parasites, malnutrition, asthma, AIDS, burns, measles - you name it.

The sheer quantity of the problems was staggering. But the important realization was how simple, how basic, most of these problems are.

We can solve most of the disease problems by educating people about hygiene and helping them dig wells. AIDS stops spreading when people keep their pants zipped up. (The witch doctors tell men that they can cure themselves of AIDS by having intercourse with a virgin, believe it or not). Africans can solve most of their nutrition problems with plants and herbs that grow naturally in their own back yards. Literally.

Merely throwing money at the problem is not going to help. If that were true, the problems would already be solved. No continent has been the object of more generosity (or more thievery) from the West than Africa. What third world countries need is time and attention from people in the first world.

This includes education, mentoring and empowerment. Nutritionists need to show them that the Moringa trees growing in their back yards have seven times more vitamin C than oranges, four times more vitamin A than carrots, four times more calcium than milk, three times more potassium than bananas and almost as much protein as an egg.

Unless someone gets completely inside the problem and understands it from a grassroots level, we're wasting our efforts. Only helping hands will work, and the best kind of helping hands are those of people who already live there. That's true leverage, and it's the only way to effectively help poor communities and third world countries get out of poverty: invest in peoples' ability to help themselves.

People in poor countries are often told that North America became successful by stealing from them. Political liberals usually look at the world as a pie that needs to be divided some different way. Although there is some truth in those ideas, the essential reality is that business is alchemy.

Remember the alchemists from the middle ages? They craved a formula that would turn lead into gold. They never found it, and of course, the idea itself was flawed. If they could make all the gold they wanted, it would become worthless.

Robin Perry, an RN from Minneapolis, runs a makeshift medical clinic in a hut in Dondo, Mozambique.

But they were right about one thing: wealth is all about the reinvention and re-formulation of existing resources. It's about transforming useless things into useful things.

Essentially, business is about the conversion of lead into gold, about moving resources from areas of low return to high return, and harnessing the natural forces of nature so they produce food and wealth for everyone.

Politics might be about cutting the pie, but innovation is about baking more pies, not cutting them up.

I was first exposed to the concept of economic alchemy about 10 years ago when I heard Paul Zane Pilzer speak about his book Unlimited Wealth. He nailed it. It was an idea that changed my life: wealth is not distributed, it's created. In other words, they are not poor because we're rich.

Abundance is the true reality. Yes, we all have to work for what we get, but there's plenty to go around. Scarcity is the great illusion - and it's one that causes people to be envious of each other, wage war, and destroy the abundance that's already there.

People start wars to get others' wealth, but in fact nothing destroys wealth faster than war.

And in the end, whether you're shopping for a business opportunity or trying to assist the downtrodden on the other side of the world, there's no way around it: we all have to be taught how to create wealth for ourselves. We must learn the art of alchemy.

Alchemy is not an idea or a construct. It's reality. A very liberating reality, once you truly understand it. It doesn't relieve us of the responsibilities that come with having money. It doesn't mean we can turn a blind eye to the woes of the world. It doesn't excuse us from being our brothers' keeper or answering the WWJD question.

But what it does mean is that there's nothing wrong with having money. There's nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur or a manufacturer or product developer. It means that all of us who operate in an innovative, competitive marketplace are making a positive contribution to the world around us in a very tangible and important way.

Don't ever apologize for being in the business of making things, or for being in business in the first place. The only people who should be apologizing are the bureaucrats standing in your way.

Perry Marshall is an author, speaker and consultant in Chicago, Illinois. If you'd like more information about the "Ray Of Light" project in Mozambique or sponsor a child, visit www.childrensrelief.com.

AdWords(TM) is a Trademark of Google Inc., Mountain View, California.
Perry S. Marshall & Associates is an independent consulting & publishing firm, and is not affiliated with Google.