Thanksgiving. The start of the season of
good cheer: parties, shortened workweeks, year-end bonuses.

For me, though, this season is also one
of guilt- over what I actually give back to the world. I know that if I flew to Somalia,
I could keep a little girl from stawing by personally feeding her each day. Likewise, if I spent every aftemoon after school with an underprivileged 9·year·oId on the brink of joining a gang, he would probably stick to his studies. I can do a lot of good in the world, but instead, I spend my time working at jobs that dont save anyone.

I once tried to salve my guilt by way of my government surplus business. We planned to expand to a catalog business,
but the cost to organize the data was so
astronomical that it wasn't economically
feasible. But then someone mentioned India. 'Data entry is cheap in India, and everyone speaks EngIish,” he said.

I crunched the numbers on Indian labor, and even when I accounted for a few U.S. managers, prohtability for the catalog business was 85 percent. Too high, actually. I knew my board wouldn't believe it. They would say my assumptions were wrong. So I spent evenings combing through the details searching for cost categories that I might have missed.

Then I read an article about sex slaves
in India. I thought, “Here is my big chance
to save a group of girls from a terrible fate.
I added another 20 people — they would be young girls - and then I included housing for them (above the rooms used for data entry) and money for a school  next to the cafeteria. I even increased staffing so that each data-entry clerk could spend an hour a day teaching the girls. One-on·one tutoring. Art classes. The