In Search of Decency

“Lying flat on the ambassador’s floor in Liberia, bullets shattered my understanding of life, compelling me to rethink the meaning of what I had seen over and over again, so many people suppressed across all cultures in which I had lived. People dominated by a few driven by greed and power, power enforced by those bullets now overhead that required answers from me, answers I did not have, bullets that demanded courage to search in the chaos for decency.” (from the Prologue to the Journey)

Michael Heyn’s uncommon memoir—In Search of Decency: The Unexpected Power of Rich and Poor—is a gripping and exhilarating inside story of the struggle to eliminate poverty and growing inequality around the world. It is a global perspective and analysis of the ever-widening divide between rich and poor that cut across the 15 countries, including the US, in which he lived and worked mostly in service of the Peace Corps and the United Nations.

Michael shares his experiences over those nearly 50 years, including two years spent among the poor in a village high in the altiplano of Peru, confronting warlords in Liberia, working in the slums of Kenya and Pakistan, fighting discrimination against remote ethnic minorities in Bangladesh and Vietnam, engaging to alleviate extreme poverty in Nepal and South Sudan, building grassroots alliances in Thailand, ousting of dictators in Ethiopia, Malawi and Yemen, and not least, addressing the rapidly rising and shameful disparities in America.

Michael’s book is a very personal account, full of widely varied vignettes from a life lived on the front edge of the unanticipated—not least his bracing encounters with the renowned from Marilyn Monroe to Mother Teresa. It is a lifelong tale from an unsettling yet inspiring childhood to facing the setbacks and rewards of joining an uncertain quest for equal opportunity and justice through international development.

It is a chronicle of learning from mistakes and building on experiences to find a clearer vision and realistic path to what would work. It is an optimistic journey of hard won and accumulating discovery grounded in a belief in the basic decency and potential of people to cross over what divides them and to come together for their common good. It proposes a bottom up empowerment and practical partnership of rich and poor to accomplish this.