When I returned from Tokyo in the summer of 2000, I started wearing a suit and tie. I had four major projects to carry out.I succeeded on two and failed on one. The fourth project remains undone because I've never found any support for it.
In my several decades of travel in third world countries, I found something few others seemed to have found. In the red dusty Sahel, in the vast flourishing markets of the Cameroon jungle, in tiny Puebla and Lake Atitlan villages, in Arab tents on the side of rocky hills, out in the rice fields of Laos and on the back ruble strewn roads of Southern India, I met countless people who loved their lives. They didn't want progress, they didn't want the Western world, they didn't want wage paying jobs or paved roads to their town.
The people I've met in third world countries don't want the modern world. They love their lives and they want their lives and their families to remain the way they are. They said it and they mean it. But they have no protection from us international purveyors of progress.
Most indigenous people seem to want a few more things available in their markets: battery powered music sources for their local music, a few effective medical supplies for childhood health, some useful farming implements and very little else.
There is no global project to protect these billions of people from the Western commercial onslaught. Creating such an institution is my fourth project.
I know how to do it but I have yet to find any allies to help me.
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