“Sir, let me talk to you about my daughter. She is very good. Very pretty. See the picture.” A crinkled photo emerges from deep inside a pocket. “And,” he says quietly, almost a whisper, “she’s a virgin.”

I spent a few months traveling around East Africa this past summer doing research, and this scene repeated itself every week or so. On buses, in church, or visiting someone at their home, both mothers and fathers alike would offer me their daughter’s hand in marriage. Needless to say, this happened entirely without the daughter’s knowledge or consent.

The first time it occurred, I made the mistake of saying, “I’m so sorry, but I really can’t marry your daughter, I’m leaving to return to America in August.”

“But,” the parent said, “That is why you must marry her. Take her to your country.”

The set-up was clear enough. Every time a foreigner came through the village or got on a bus, whoever was lucky enough to engage them in conversation first would try to arrange a path for their daughters to America where, as one resident put it, “even the poorest person would be rich in Africa.”

That may not be true; many of America’s poor would be poor everywhere. But the fact remains that there is a serious economic gap between the developed countries of the world, and those still embroiled in poverty. Where people live on a few hundred dollars a year, the average American forty-grand annual income is unfathomable. So it comes as no surprise that people do everything they can to get themselves and their family to a nation such as ours, so they can leave behind their poor country. They are looking for a way out.

This blog, however, will be looking in the other direction. It will be about the developing world, rather than the developed. It will be about the unique set of issues that confront the poorest people on the planet, and the countries they live in. It will be about how people are helping them, and how they can help themselves.

Up until the last few centuries, practically the entire world was poor. Now, that portion is getting closer to about a third of the planet. While there have been great, great strides in the right direction, this still means that billions are living on just a few dollars a day. That few dollars a day is supposed to cover food, housing, shelter, water, medicine, and all the needs of life for billions of people. So the question to ask, then, is how could their lives change with just a few dollars more?