Last fall I had a fight with a dear friend. It was an unusually public fight, not loud, but waged in a large square in a major city. The short version of the cause was our conflicting expectations of how we had planned to spend that day.

For several days afterwards, I felt bruised, betrayed, and self-righteously angry.

Then I came to my senses and realized that this was not a friendship I was willing to lose.

I thought about how some of the best of my many beloved friendships had become even stronger when we could work out conflicts.

It's a tricky process, this mending of a ripped friendship. You have to be willing to listen and accept that some action you've taken has wounded another. You have to display your own vulnerability by claiming how you've been hurt. You must be willing to be very raw and uncomfortable.

Another difficult part is the acceptance of responsibility. My tendency was usually to accept too much blame (It must be all my fault.) For others the tendency is to accept too little (Right. It's all your fault.) You must each recognize that your actions have consequences, and that sometimes those consequences are not at all what you had intended or even remotely wished.

When we can admit our own hurt and our capacity to hurt others, then we can rescue a precious friendship from disintegration... and we can learn about and amend those aspects of our behavior that can get us into trouble in future.

My answering machine has been acting temperamental lately and I've been thinking of buying a new one. About 25 years ago, when an earlier generation of answering machine broke, I took it to a repair shop. That would be unthinkable now. Do repair shops for answering machines even exist these days? My guess is no. When things break, most of us simply replace them.

And how often do I repair something myself? I'll sew buttons on clothes, patch broken ceramics with Krazy Glue, but if something technological breaks, I'm helpless to resurrect it.

My friend Grove Harris says that fixing things is easier when you're in community than when you try to do it yourself. That's certainly true of the Tuareg. When my co-guide Sabina Wyss and I lead our vision quests and camel caravans in the Sahara Desert, we travel with a band of these indigenous, nomadic, matriarchal people and are out of touch with motor vehicles and electricity for two or three weeks. Since the Tuareg live off the land and have little money to spend, they must be very careful with their possessions. When something breaks, therefore, they mend it.

In 2008 Bob Harris was hired by Forbes Traveler to review some of the world's most deluxe hotels. For months he slept in rooms that cost thousands of dollars a night, learned that the restaurant at Dubai's Emirates Palace spends $300,000 a year on pure gold used only for pastry decorations, and toured Singapore in a Bentley.

Instead of lapping up this luxury, Harris came down with a case of what he calls "wealth vertigo." He started noticing what was behind the glitz and glamour: the workers who made it all possible and received none of the benefits. He met men and women who were earning earning $6-7 a day, a tiny fraction of what hotel guests spent on lunch. They often worked 10-12 hours a day, six or seven days a week. Most lived in camps, about ten people to a room. They were, Harris realized, "essentially indentured servants."

Harris had an epiphany: he would use his own good fortune to make the lives of people like these hotel workers better. With his entire fee for the review series, $20,000 before taxes, he began offering micro-loans to impoverished people.

Working through Kiva.org, he deals in transactions that often amount to $25-50. Current projects include helping a Cambodian family buy sacks of rice to resell, enabling a women's wool business in Bolivia to buy wool to make and sell sweaters, and making it possible for a Ukrainian family to built a greenhouse. Additional funding for these and other projects is raised from the general public on-line,

Because the rate of repayment has been nearly 99%, Harris has been able to re-loan the money to others over and over again. In his new book, The International Bank of Bob, he tells the stories of some of these enterprising people.

Dianne Monroe, "Radical Joy: Healing Earth from Human Damage," Living Green Magazine, February 20, 2013

Trebbe Johnson, "When It's Time for a Soul Vacation," Soul/Body Connection 2013 (Special edition of Spirituality and Health)
 
Schumacher College, Interview with Trebbe Johnson,  

Trebbe Johnson, "Reuniting with Wounded Places," The Ecologist, 1/21/13