One of the parlor games when Asia experts gather at embassy parties is to trade horror stories about the futility of life and order in some of the sickest countries on earth.

Bangladesh usually makes it someplace on the list in the first round. This is a country of 140 million people packed into a land area the size of Wisconsin. Somebody said if you want a picture of simmering calamity, imagine 140 million Wisconsinites. Henry Kissinger, who carved out a career as a lone cowboy of international politics long before the current White House occupant brought his boots and saddle act to Washington, is said to have called Bangladesh a basket case. This is an impressive statement considering the high level of competition around the world for the rank of political basket case. It's a field in which the government of the United States itself is sometimes an active candidate.

I want to offer a lonely rebuttal in behalf of Bangladesh. A country racked by floods, cyclones, earthquakes and poverty probably could have been spared the rhetorical acid of Henry Kissinger. And why? Something is happening in this struggling and often wretched little country that deserves the world's attention and its applause. It deserves more. It deserves emulation. Bangladesh has something to teach us, something that may conceivably save us from our myopia in our search for some semblance of order and security. It can also bring us a little closer to the grail of fairness in how we treat a less favored humanity in a deranged world.

My wife and I spent a couple of weeks in Bangladesh last month as part of our interest in the worldwide phenomenon of microcredit, which makes small loans available to the ambitious poor and about which we've written a book, The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism.

What's happening in Bangladesh and in much of the Third World is a powerful story of millions of people pulling themselves out of the dead end of poverty with their own hands and ambition and their trust in each other. With this has come a realization that has transformed millions of their lives. Somebody believed they matter and backed up that belief by literally giving them credit -- a small loan to build a tiny enterprise in some of the poorest lands on earth. That loan has to be repaid, at interest. And it is, at a startling rate of 95 per cent around the world. And when the loan is repaid, they receive another. Their business grows. There is food for their children, and then three meals a day, and then clothes they never had, and then schooling they might not have dared imagine.

More than a hundred million people are living better lives today than they were a year ago because they have been given the same choice that you and I have had since we became adults -- the access to credit. That is the right or privilege to borrow money to build our homes, our families and to achieve whatever it is that we call fulfillment in our lives.

The lesson is this: The most beautiful, durable resource on earth is the human being motivated to build a better life for himself or herself and for family. Rich countries, even the generous ones, lament the despair and stagnation of the poor countries, the corruption, the civil war, the anarchy. And out of that toxic mix -- should we wonder why? -- comes hate-driven and envy-driven terrorism. And we ask, how many billions have we wasted trying to get rid of poverty and to put these people on their feet?

We're asking the wrong question. What we should be asking is: "What's the best way?"

There's an answer. It is given by the very people we say we want to help. Their answer is this: "Open a door for us. Give us the same chance you have. Give us a chance to help ourselves." The chance they're asking is to be independent. For them it means self-employment. A little business, selling grain, buying some chickens, opening a kiosk to sell their bakeries. To do that they need start-up money. Small money. A $35 loan.

Bangladesh is where much of this began, called microcredit or microfinance, the inspiration of an economics professor, Muhammad Yunus, who is a tough-shelled visionary with the mentality of a streetfighter. How tough? Tough enough to face down a generation of skeptical bankers who scoffed at the idea that poor people could be trusted with a loan. Yunus called these bankers dinosaurs. He said, "I'll show you that these people can manage money. If you won't lend them the money, I will." And so he began what became a global phenomenon in just a few years. He may be seen some day as the man who launched the most benign revolution of our time. This is a global structure of hundreds of nongovernment lending organizations that bring together ambitious poor people who borrow and bank in solidarity groups of 20 or 30 villagers or neighbors, 90 per cent of them women. The money to get them going comes from foundations or government agencies or in low-interest loans from private combines.

"We don't want to survive on charity," Muhammad Yunus will tell you. “We can’t. Microcredit is business. It has to be good enough and big enough to stand on its own without donors. It's getting there. The trouble has always been that rich people, industry, banks, the whole commercial apparatus and most of the world have this idea that poor people cause poverty. They don't. What causes poverty are the institutions and the banking practices that keep people poor, keep them in a box all of their lives. We've shown that poor people can be trusted. Those repayment rates have been constant for 30 years. I don't know what more these people have to prove."

His Grameen Bank, the model for the microcredit industry, is still proving it, though. It numbers more than 3 million clients in Bangladesh serving tens of thousands of villages. There are some microcredit institutions with even more clients, beyond 4 million. What those organizations need now is recognition that they are banks in themselves with license to operate as banks, to take public deposits and expand their capital. Grameen has that. It stopped taking donations eight years ago and has branched remarkably into high tech companies, fisheries, a trust and its own foundation. A few years ago it pioneered a showpiece of microcredit -- the telephone lady of Bangladesh. What the small borrower in the village needs today is not only access to credit but to communication. Poor villages don't have any landline telephone systems. So Yunus went to the bankers and said, "we want to equip a woman in each village with a cell phone. She'll take a loan to buy it. The villagers will come to her to make calls. She'll dial the number." They said Yunus was crazy. Some of these women were illiterate, the phone ladies. "There are only ten numbers," Yunus said. "They can memorize those in five minutes." They said he was crazy, again. But today there are more than 30,000 cell phone ladies in Bangladesh, they're making money, a few cents from each call, and the villagers are going wild making cheap calls to the next village -- or to their cousins in San Francisco.

About Bangladesh, you don't have to be needlessly harsh on Henry Kissinger. His judgment wasn't wildly off target. The country is only little more than 30 years old, having valiantly liberated itself from Pakistan in the aftermath of the end of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent in the mid-1900s. It's grossly overcrowded. It's vulnerable to natural catastrophes that sometimes put half of the country under water. It has fertile land but virtually no export and a primitive infrastructure. Its politics is unstable and laced with corruption. Its capital, Dhaka, may be the world's only city of 10 million that absolutely refuses to condone traffic rules. Its leading export of years ago, jute, was replaced by plastics. Its leading export today, garments, is going to be gobbled up in couple of years by China.

But last month more than a thousand people -- the managers of microcredit, its practitioners, brain trust, advocates and government aid administrators from 46 countries gathered in Dhaka to assess what microcredit has wrought in the 30 years since it has spread from its cradle in Bangladesh, and another in Bolivia in South America. The conferees determined that today some 70 million families are directly tied in to microcredit around the world, receiving loans regularly in amounts from $35 to hundreds of dollars, saving money, securing new loans, paying interest, taking loans for houses that would cost $400 in American money. But for hundreds of thousands who worked and fought their way out of poverty, those modest but sturdy three-room houses are the deliverance of their lives, the culmination of their hopes.

Microcredit today can mean insurance for health care, loans for college educations, building little business like selling milk, fattening goats, making clothes, mending clothes and a hundred others. For the poor, it's a new and often marvelous world. Hardly ritzy. But what's priceless is the dignity in their eyes and their walk.

We got out of the convention hotel and drove into the villages. But first we went to a drop-in center for street children in Dhaka. They were attractive kids who had been abandoned or orphaned, who might have been forced into prostitution or sold drugs to stay alive, or scavenged garbage piles, or died in the street, as thousand do. But these kids were taking classes, or aided by guardians they were learning to borrow small amounts to buy bicycles or rent rickshaws. We drove 20 miles out of Dhaka. A women's group was meeting in one of the villages. There was fatigue in their faces. Life isn't easy in Bangladesh, even if you can borrow money. The repression of women over the ages was drawn into those faces. But there was also a quiet and solemn understanding.These people knew who they were, and what had happened in their lives. Rumela told us. Her husband and she were now partners. She brought money into the house. She could make decisions. What does that mean, we asked.

"I can stand on my own feet. I have cows. I'm buying chickens. My children are going to school. I like my life."

This movement, this benign revolution, has power and it has grace. It works. It may be time that the world's governments -- and you and I -- take it seriously.