Pearl, Yunus, and History

When I blogged rising delinquency at the Grameen Bank, I referred to Yunus's public response to the Wall Street Journal exposé, but couldn't find it online anymore.I just found it. Grameen removed it from its website, but the Wayback Machine saved it! I won't try to summarize or analyze it. Grameen created a veritable subsite on the WSJ article, posting copies of e-mail Q&A's between Pearl and Yunus, the rest of their e-mail correspondence, Yunus's public response, Yunus's correspondence with a "Friend" (must be Sam Daley-Harris), graphs, and more. Somebody independent must someday write a history of the Grameen Bank, and when she does, this will be prime material. It is poignant in retrospect: the correspondence brackets 9/11 and there are mentions of Pearl's wife perhaps days before she became pregnant with a son who, we know, would never meet his father. It gives us Yunus more intimate than usual. We see him wrangling with tough questions about the Bank's sustainability and taking pride in the transformation underway at the institution.If you like immersing yourself in primary sources, this is for you.