Our calling

The young girl shown here is on her way to school, a rare treat for girls in her part of the world. Maybe that is why she is smiling with delight. We photographed her outside the grand mosque in Conakry, Guinea, a country in sub-Saharan Africa. The slides show her school as well as photographs we took at a nursery school when we worked in Russia on a project of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The slides also show a mischievous boy peeking through a sculpture in Bruges, Belgium and a children's soccer team in Beijing, China.

Our dream is to build a global financial institution that will catalyze prosperity in developing communities, through the support of small enterprises. Our dream is a better future for these children. We started our careers on Wall Street (we're still here) to build the skills and the relationships we need to serve a different market. It is a different road, an unconventional choice for people with our education and experience. But it is one that has made all the difference to us.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken