This is wonderful to see an another asian being honored with Nobel Peace Prize after 14th His Holiness Dalai Lama in 1989. Although Mother Teres has also won the Peace Prize before his holiness while working for Missionaries of Charity, Calcutta in 1979 and was born in Skopje, then Turkey.
Full coverage on the Mr. Muhammad Yunus is here
Nobel winner to use prize to help poor - CNN.com
This part of the news is really encouraging:-
Yunus told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview that his "eureka moment" came while chatting to a shy woman weaving bamboo stools with calloused fingers.
Sufia Begum was a 21-year-old villager and a mother of three when the economics professor met her in 1974 and asked her how much she earned. She replied that she borrowed 5 taka (about $0.09) from a middleman for the bamboo for each stool.
All but $0.02 cents of that went back to the lender.
"I thought to myself, my God, for five takas she has become a slave," Yunus said in the interview.
"I couldn't understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things," he said.
The following day, he and his students did a survey in the woman's village, Jobra, and discovered that 43 of the villagers owed a total of 856 taka (about $27).
"I couldn't take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves," he said, and pay him back whenever they could. The idea was to buy their own materials and cut out the middleman.
They all paid him back, day by day, over a year, and his momentary generosity grew into a full-fledged concept that came to fruition in 1976 when he began to set up experimental microfinance projects in rural parts of Bangladesh. Grameen Bank was formally founded in 1983.
Congratulation to Mr. Yusuf and All the Bangladeshi and Asian people.
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