Every now and then, someone accomplishes something so remarkable that you just have to talk about it. The accomplishment I have in mind has quietly taken place over the past two and a half decades in some of the most remote, desolate villages on earth. These places are so isolated they're virtually never covered in any news stories and so desolate they have no rivers, streams, or other forms of running water to help keep them alive.

Sometimes when I wake up it's 1957 and I'm eleven years old. The genesis of this repeated misgiving is rooted in a time from my early childhood when my dad held a job at the local plywood plant and collected payments on magazine subscriptions at night. Between his two jobs, Dad earned enough money to put us just below the poverty line. We lived down a long, lonely, dirt road in a house so small Kareem Abdul Jabbar could have stretched out his arms and spanned the entire structure. But Mom had dreams. She would help us work our way to greater prosperity.