The Happiest Man in the World:
Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist
By Dr. James W. Jackson, Founder of Project C.U.R.E.
“At that moment I was slammed by a wave of unexpected compassion. I had crossed over a line. No longer was I a foreign economic visitor observing at an arm’s length distance. All the hurt and tragedy of what I had previously seen at the free clinics in the favelas with Lorena came crashing in. I saw not only the hurting people in front of me and heard the crying of the babies there inside Dr. Neves’s sparse clinic, but I felt the hopelessness of the millions of people in Brazil who were ragged squatters; the people who lived in the squalor and poverty of shanties with open sewers and impure drinking water; who faced the daunting and discouraging task of eking out their survival on the streets of the Brazilian cities. I hadn’t experienced the scorching flames of passion and empathy like that before. Nothing in the ego-centered churches of entertainment and comfort where I had spent my life had ever ignited the compassion I was feeling standing in that ramshackle house of a clinic in Brazil.” ~ An excerpt from"The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist."