FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: It looks more like a theme park than a school, and it’s not just the location. In one of Thailand’s most impoverished regions that’s unusual. The buildings are built of bamboo, a fast-growing, renewable resource, including a geodesic dome.

MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: Well, just to show that you can do things people don’t normally think can be done, such as getting underprivileged kids to be at the top of the scale of many, many things, of being good, being decent.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Mechai Pattana School is the cornerstone of an idea to attack rural poverty and stereotypes and to instill a new kind of learning.

MECHAI: This is our sex education wheel.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Wheel of Fortune game teaches about various sexually transmitted diseases.

MECHAI (spinning the wheel): Green is a safe color, of course. Aha! Oh, aha! HIV, oh boy, just missed that. Then they have a good laugh, because HIV is explained up there.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai has long relied on good laughs to explain HIV and sex education in this conservative Southeast Asian nation. He comes from a prominent family and was trained as an economist. But Mechai became a TV personality who spearheaded family planning campaigns in the seventies and, two decades later, condom use to prevent HIV. In this predominantly Buddhist nation, he invited monks to bless the efforts.

MECHAI: And in the Buddhist scriptures it said many births cause suffering, so Buddhism is not against family planning. And we even ended up with monks sprinkling holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family before shipments went out into the villages.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai is credited with bringing down Thailand’s soaring HIV infection rate and its high birth rate, work that won him numerous international awards, including the $1 million Gates Foundation prize for global health.

DR. MALCOLM POTTS: In 1960, Thailand and the Philippines had about the same population, about 60 million people, 50 million people. Today, the Philippines has 94 million people, and there’s a lot of poverty. Thailand has 1.8 children per family, it’s got about 68 million people, and it’s making progress.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Malcolm Potts, former head of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, was an early collaborator with Mechai. He says population stability has yielded many economic benefits.

POTTS: I think it’s a seamless evolution. Mechai, at least in the past, used to talk about fertility-led development, and once we had these contraceptive distributors in most villages, you know, after 3 or 5 years they were the people who had intensive chicken rearing, or who had a sewing machine, or had a microloan.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thailand is no longer considered a less developed country, but there’s a growing gap between the Bangkok area, where the factories are, and rural farming regions whose young people have to migrate to the city for work. Mechai has tried to develop sustainable ideas that would be accessible in rural settings. On a beach resort once owned by Mechai’s family—it’s now run by a nonprofit group he founded—is a garden of so-called intensive agriculture.

MECHAI: This is the new style condom. This is the poverty eradication condom!

DE SAM LAZARO: The unusual metaphor aside, he says these recycled bags of potting soil can grow produce, in this case, cantaloupes with a minimum of water and space and maximum profit.

MECHAI: You’d grow it four times a year, so that’s 24,000 baht. That’s just under a thousand dollars for this much space. Nearly as good as marijuana. Might be even better. Don’t have to share with the police, either.

DE SAM LAZARO: Joking aside, he says Thai staples like mushrooms, limes, poultry, and hydroponic produce could be grown in rural enterprises. To demonstrate, he took us to Buriram Province, about four hours from Bangkok. He’s worked here for two decades, introducing new ideas like intensive agriculture. Several older initiatives have taken off independently.

MECHAI: You have a factory in the middle of nowhere here.

DE SAM LAZARO: This shoe factory was started with international grants. It now provides work for 140 to 200 people, producing mostly for the multinational Bata shoe company.

MECHAI: We helped, from Canadian money again, to provide a loan for them to establish a factory building, and then helped to get Bata to come in, rented the machinery and then bought the machinery, and they’ve been on their own for about 15 years.

DE SAM LAZARO: A short distance away are buildings that were once used to train people to raise livestock. Those activities have since shifted to people’s backyards and, in the buildings they vacated, more factories making brassieres in this building, ice skates in the next.

MECHAI: How could you imagine an old chicken pen and an old pig pen making this stuff, or brassieres?

DE SAM LAZARO: Was it really a tough sell at first?

MECHAI: Oh, yes, took seven visits. They did it out of pity at first. Then they realized that it worked. And when we bring someone new down they can’t quite fathom it how it can be done because they’re so used to the perception that you do everything like this in Bangkok, in the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: These factories provide livable if not lucrative wages and social benefits. But to truly transform rural communities, Mechai says it will take new approaches in education, which is where the Bamboo School fits in. It is now three years old and serves grades seven through ten. Building funds came from profits from Mechai’s resort, the Gates prize money, and corporate donations. Longer term, the school is developing its own vegetable farm, a key part of the business strategy.

(speaking to Mechai): So when this is up and running and flourishing, the cantaloupes and the limes will be paying the teacher salaries here?

MECHAI: Amongst other things, yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: The motto here is “The more you give, the more you get.” Quite apart from academics, for every student there are strict work requirements.

MECHAI: The parents do community service, and the kids do community service, and for every lunch time or meal time you have to do one hour’s community service, so that payment is in providing help to other people, plus their school fees.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of their service, these students were preparing lesson plans to teach younger children in a nearby government school. It’s part of their training in leadership and critical thinking and a departure from the rote learning standard in most Thai public schools.

RUTHAICHANOK JUNPENG (Student): The teachers are here to teach us, but they’re also like friends, like an older friend that you can go to for advice, not just about what you’re learning.

PIMPAKAIN SIRI (Student): My parents are rice farmers, and I expect my future to be quite different, because I want to become a doctor, and I believe I can do that. I’ve learned new ways to help my parents, who are used to doing agriculture the traditional ways and I can help raise their income.

DE SAM LAZARO: And because students at this school regularly volunteer, they feel connected to their rural communities, says teacher Nantina Saninchai. She says two-thirds of them will be able to create or find jobs here.

NANTINA SANINCHAI: So a number will stay here. They have computers, etc., similar to what they would in the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ideas from the Mechai school are catching on. On weekends here, children collect litter in exchange for spending time online in a new community center or in a toy and book library. Parents and elders prepare food for the children. The village chief says one reason this community thrives is that parents are around for their children.

CHAMLEUNG PANRIN: Eight years ago, migration was rampant. Everybody would leave, and you only had children being brought up by the grandparents. Now it has very greatly improved.

MECHAI: The only road out of poverty is through business enterprise, and this is what we’re doing. Teach them, train them, lend them the money—not give them the money —and the business skills. But probably very, very important to go with it too is community empowerment.

DE SAM LAZARO: And you need to start it young?

MECHAI: Yes. Yes, start them young. When you start learning how to give when you’re young, when you get older it is second nature. Just like stealing. Start young and you keep on stealing forever. Ask my politicians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai says he won’t mind if more people steal his self-help model of building community and nation.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Buriram province, Thailand.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Every day, hundreds of people gather in a makeshift worship center on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.They profess their Judaism in prayers, pictures, and words. They’re hoping to be heard most immediately by authorities in Israel, which they call the Promised Land. Many left spartan farm lives in the rural north of this ancient east African nation and moved to the city years ago in hopes that they, like thousands before them, would be taken to Israel.

Ethiopian Jew: Our members are suffering. They are destitute. They don’t have places to sleep.

Ethiopian Jew: I come to follow God’s word. He said, as I disperse you I shall bring you together. Because of that I want to go back to the Jewish home.

DE SAM LAZARO: Their pleas have fallen mostly on skeptical ears even though more than 75,000 Ethiopians, including many relatives of these people, were accepted in recent years into Israel.Their acceptance into Israeli society, however, has been difficult. Many in Israel’s religious leadership have questioned whether the Ethiopians are truly Jewish. Many were subjected to conversion rituals upon their arrival in Israel. In recent years, Ethiopians, particularly in the second generation, have taken to street protests.

Ethiopian Jewish Demonstrator: I think what we are looking here today is thousands of Ethiopians saying here to the Israeli society: no to discrimination, no for racism. All of us we came here to Israel to be equal with Israeli society.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Ethiopian Jewish tradition dates back hundreds of years—many believe more than 2,000 years.

MESFIN ASSEFA (Scholar-Activist): The origin of Ethiopian Jews dates back to biblical times when the Queen of Sheba or Magda first went to visit King Solomon, and she returned bearing a child conceived during this visit. The young prince, later King Melenik, went to Israel to meet his father when he was 20, and he returned to Ethiopia accompanied by 1000 members from each of the tribes of Israel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Other migrations followed from ancient Israel, he says, but this account has a number skeptics.

GETACHEW HAILE: It’s more of a legend than historical truth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Getachew Haile, a religion historian now in Minnesota, says there’s no evidence of any trail linking Ethiopia directly with ancient Israel.

GETACHEW HAILE: We have Greek inscriptions, Arabic inscriptions. There is nothing in the sort of Hebrew inscriptions.

DE SAM LAZARO: More likely, he says, Jews came here from the Arabian Peninsula or Yemen centuries later and settled amid certain isolated populations, helping convert them from the Orthodox Christianity that predominated.

HAILE: One possibility, this is a theory, is that some people might have migrated from over the Red Sea, come into Ethiopia, and converted them. The other is within the Ethiopian community, within the Christian community, who rejected Christianity.

DE SAM LAZARO: Through the ages, he says, some Ethiopian kings enforced a rigid conformance to the predominant Orthodox Christianity. Those outside this system, called falasha or foreigners have been marginalized.

HAILE: They are considered outcasts, and I have no doubt that they have been treated like that within the Ethiopian Christians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thanks in large part to this persecution, the so-called falasha became Ethiopia’s poorest people, and this has complicated the transition for many who went to Israel from medieval poverty to a First World economy. Still, for the Ethiopians it is a huge improvement in the standard of living. Mengistu Kebede, who’d returned to Addis Ababa on vacation recently to visit family, gave us some perspective. It was a difficult adjustment to life in Israel, he says, but well worth it.

MENGISTU KEBEDE: It’s significantly better. Everybody wears shoes, they get enough pay for work, their clothes there are nice. Everything is much better.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of earlier groups who were airlifted amid Ethiopia’s famine and civil war in the 1980s and ’90s, Kebede received a relatively warm welcome under Israel’s law of return. Today, however, the issue of economic motivation has clouded the politics of migration.

ASSEFA: I understand that there’s a perception that people coming from poor countries, from Africa, are coming for the economic benefits. But the issue is it’s the national law of Israel as well as the religious law to allow all Jews to return to Israel. It’s what God promised. As far as we know, all who have applied are bona fide Jews, and while there are advantages, the true motivation is a religious one.

DE SAM LAZARO: Amid the social, political, and economic challenges involving Ethiopian migration, Israel’s government has restricted the number it will allow in. In 2010 the government, in a move that it said should absorb all remaining Jews in Ethiopia, authorized visas for 8,000 new migrants. They’ll be allowed in in phases through 2016. Most of these worshipers did not make the cut. Deliverance to the Promised Land for these people, whose numbers are estimated in the low thousands, could take years, if it happens at all.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

WAYNE MILLER: I sold a silver dollar about three years ago for $525,000.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: The Book of Matthew says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Wayne Miller takes that scripture seriously.

WAYNE MILLER: I have a concern for these people when they go up, and I believe in a heaven and a non-heaven, when they go up there how are they going to explain, you know, what they’ve done with their money?

SEVERSON: Miller knows about money. He’s made enough of it. His little coin shop in downtown Helena, Montana has done more than $325 million in business since it opened 45 years ago. This is his son, Dave.

DAVE MILLER: Seriously, when they get any money their first thought is who can we bless? Who can we give this money to? I say that out of every $1,000 my dad gives $999 of it away without even thinking.

SEVERSON: Over the years, Miller has given away millions of dollars to charities all over the world, especially to the people of Helena. He knows that some have taken advantage of his and his wife’s generosity but says they would rather err on the side of love.

WAYNE MILLER: God doesn’t ask you about your ability or your inability. He asks you about your availability, and we happened to be available at a time when people were wanting to start a shelter.

SEVERSON: They called it God’s Love, and as homeless shelters go this one stands apart.

ANN MILLER: Unconditional love—you know, everybody talks about that, but what that means to us is that before they ever walk in the door the first time, we already love them. We don’t wait to see who they are or how they act or what their problem is or if they’re lazy. We already love them.

SEVERSON: Joe Wojton, one of God’s Love managers, has worked in other shelters around the country.

JOE WOJTON: Everybody who comes through our door are people with problems, not problem people, and we treat everybody with love when they come through our door because we realize the people we’re seeing—some have never been homeless before. This is a very scary experience, and we try to love them up the best we can.

SEVERSON: The shelter usually accommodates about 40 homeless downstairs and has rooms for nine families upstairs. But most of the people they feed here are not homeless. They have jobs and live in the community.

DAVE MILLER: People rely on us in the middle of the month to eat down here. They know the food stamps and the food boxes are only going to make it a couple of weeks, so they rely on us to come down, on their ability to come down and eat.

ANN MILLER: It doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to be on the street these days. I think everybody in America knows that right now.

SEVERSON: Dave Miller runs God’s Love and gives 10 percent of his salary back to the shelter.

DAVE MILLER: Yeah, we’ve seen a big change. Every day we have families that come in and say, “My husband had a great job making a lot of money. He got laid off. We can’t make next month’s rent.” Unfortunately, it used to be just couples. Now we’re seeing them with children.

SEVERSON: People like John and Krista Loweman, who is pregnant. Both were employed in South Carolina until they lost their jobs and came west looking for work and landed here.

(speaking to John Loweman): So you came here looking for work?

JOHN LOWEMAN: Yes, looking for work, anything, just a better life for me,my wife and my baby.

SEVERSON: But there was no jobs?

JOHN LOWEMAN: No, sir.

KRISTA LOWEMAN: Nothing, not even for me, and I’ve been to school.

ANN MILLER: We tell them that they can have three days no questions asked, just rest, eat, do their laundry, but after that they have to have a plan, and their plan usually is to find a job. But they can’t find a job.

SEVERSON: But if they can’t find a job, it doesn’t mean they have to leave, as long as they keep looking.

JOHN LOWEMAN: You have to put in five applications a day at least, and I do that every day but, you know, it’s kind of hard.

KRISTA LOWEMAN: It’s better than living in a car, though.

SEVERSON: Better than living in a car. You lived in a car for how long?

KRISTA LOWEMAN: Six weeks.

SEVERSON: Darcy Pfeiffer and her husband and baby boy live here. He works but can’t afford the rent. Brenda Rutecki’s husband died a year ago. She had no income, couldn’t get a job, came here while she attended school to become a certified nursing assistant.

BRENDA RUTECKI: You can’t get a job if you don’t have a phone. You can’t get a job if you don’t have a car. You can’t get a job if you don’t even have an address. So this is like our holding spot. We’re all good families. We’re all good people, but you’ve got to have a start, and that’s what they give us.

SEVERSON: One of the first things the Millers did was create a park next door to God’s Love just for the homeless. Having a homeless shelter and a park near the center of town was not exactly pleasing to local businessmen. But Toby DeWolf, owner of Bert and Ernies, says any opposition has faded away.

TOBY DEWOLF: I’ve been here 25 years, and I have never seen a better run shelter. I don’t think there’s a problem. I don’t think that anybody has seen an issue with any kind of violence or crime or anything by any means with having a shelter down here.

SEVERSON: The Millers both graduated from Catholic University in Washington, DC with master’s degrees. They have nine children, four of them adopted, and all of them, according to their father, are involved in one charity or another. There was a time when Wayne Miller, who is an expert on silver dollars, was measuring his life by the increasing value of his personal coin collection.

WAYNE MILLER: You know, I open up these catalogs, and they’ve got coins there, $30,000 or $40,000, $50,000 coins that I would dearly love to have, and I look at them and I say okay, I chose my path. If I did that I would be obsessed with that, and again, my whole measurement would be how advanced is your coin collection? And I didn’t want that to be.

SEVERSON: It doesn’t mean the Millers live in poverty. They travel, eat in the best restaurants, live in a very nice home with a swimming pool, but customers often wonder how successful a man can be if he rarely wears shoes.

WAYNE MILLER: People say can’t you afford to wear shoes, and I say I can afford not to have to wear shoes.

SEVERSON: He provides the bulk of the funding for God’s Love, millions of dollars over the years, but the shelter also receives a federal grant, money from the United Way and from other private donors.

WOJTON: It’s amazing when I go out to a church or to the local college, and I speak, and I hear from people, and they say, “Oh, we just thought the Millers pay for everything,” and that’s not the case. Wayne and Ann are wonderful, and Wayne donates a lot of money to God’s Love, but we need the entire community effort to keep God’s Love up and operating every year.

ANN MILLER: And I think over the years we’ve learned to love God more and more, and he’s always been there for us. When we were thinking that maybe we weren’t going to have enough money or whatever, he’s always supplied it. It’s been wonderful—abundance, just like the Bible says.

SEVERSON: The Millers are also helping in various ways about 150 Helena families who don’t live in the shelter. Altogether, he gives away about one-third of his gross income and is firmly convinced that it’s what God wanted him to do.

WAYNE MILLER: I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like. I’m fascinated to learn what it’s going to be like, but I am as certain as I can be that there is an afterlife and that I’m really going to have fun.

SEVERSON: The truth is he’s having a pretty good time right now.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Helena, Montana.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the height of last year’s devastating famine in the Horn of Africa, Rajiv Shah, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, visited a refugee camp in Kenya. There were thousands of families who had walked for days to escape starvation in Somalia. He says one woman’s story particularly touched him.

DR. RAJIV SHAH (Administrator, US Agency for International Development): Along the way, she literally couldn’t continue to carry both of her kids, and she had to make this gut wrenching choice about which child she would carry to safety and which one she would leave behind, and that’s the kind of decision that no mother should ever have to make.

LAWTON: Shah says encounters like that bolster his conviction that the US has a moral obligation to help ease suffering around the world. It’s an obligation, he says, that’s also in America’s strategic interest.

SHAH: We’re a nation based on moral values, and when we express those values to communities around the world, we’re showing them an America that is an optimistic America, an inclusive America, and a country with whom they want to partner and not fight.

LAWTON: Shah believes faith-based groups can—and should—be key partners in the US government’s humanitarian efforts.

SHAH: We want to do our work, which is about protecting people who are vulnerable around the world and expanding the reach of human dignity, as broadly as possible. and often it is communities of faith, faith-based organizations, that are there working when the rest of the world has forgotten about people who have no other place to turn.

LAWTON: At 38, Shah is one of the Obama administration’s youngest top-ranking officials. He is Hindu and says his interest in humanitarian issues was first fostered by his parents, who immigrated to the US from India.

SHAH: When I was seven or eight years old, I don’t remember exactly when, I went to visit India, and they took me through slum communities just so I could see how people lived. And I grew up in suburban Detroit. I’d never been exposed to that before. And when you see other kids your age, when you’re seven or eight years old, living in entirely different circumstances, it affects you in a very profound way, and it has led to a constant motivation I’ve had.

LAWTON: Shah took over at USAID on January 7, 2010, just five days before the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. He was immediately pulled into managing what would become the largest humanitarian response in history. After the quake, USAID worked closely with several faith-based organizations to provide food and shelter. Shah says he saw firsthand the effectiveness of those groups.

SHAH: Partners like World Vision or Catholic Relief Services that take the time to engage with communities they’re trying to serve, that are willing to be there for the long run, that work in partnership and cooperation with governments so that they are coordinating their efforts and getting the most out of what we—the investments we make.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (delivering speech): I want to acknowledge one particular member of my administration who I’m extraordinarily proud of and does not get much credit, and that is USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah, who is doing great work with faith leaders. Where’s Raj? Where is he? There he is, right there.

LAWTON: Under Shah’s leadership, the Obama administration has increased its partnerships with religious groups by more than 50 percent. According to Shah, USAID now has 115 different partnerships with organizations of faith around the world, and he hopes to expand that even further.

LAWTON: What is it that faith groups bring to the table in these partnerships?

SHAH: Well, I think it’s a core motivation that’s driven by a desire to get results. Organizations that are committed to the outcomes, that measure results, that ensure that scarce taxpayer dollars are in fact benefiting those who are most vulnerable often are communities of faith, and we want to work with them to achieve those results.

LAWTON: Government partnerships with faith groups have been controversial. Some critics worry about the US being tied to the religious mission of a particular group or taxpayer money being used for explicitly religious activities, such as evangelizing.

SHAH: Those are not activities we support. You know, we have a very clear set of defined outcomes and results that we’re willing to finance and that we believe we can support, and, you know, frankly, if you look at the broad range of what faith community groups are doing around the world, it’s actually service.

LAWTON: Another controversial partner has been the military. Some nongovernmental groups have criticized the growing role of the US military in disaster relief, especially in areas where the US has been at war. But Shah says it can work. He cites Haiti as a model.

SHAH: Many of our NGO partners and others who had previously been sometimes nervous about working with the military came back and said, wow, they were, they were great to work with, they were so responsive to our needs and the needs of local communities and they were really there to serve. And I’m just very proud of the way American men and women in the armed services conducted themselves in Haiti, and they made us all proud.

LAWTON: Is there a concern, though, about the perception of the US humanitarian arm too linked with the military side?

SHAH: I don’t think we should be concerned about perceptions. I think we should be concerned about results and outcomes, and at times of crisis we will turn to whomever we can, whenever we can, to help save lives and protect people.

LAWTON: Shah says in an era of budget cutting, US faith leaders from across the religious and political spectrum have played an important role lobbying Congress to keep funding for programs that help the world’s poor.

SHAH: When people see that great coming together, it reminds us all that on some basic moral issues, we can stand together even in sometimes partisan environments.

LAWTON: But he admits in the current climate, it can be difficult to make the argument to maintain foreign aid funding, even though it represents less than one percent of the federal budget.

SHAH: At the end of the day when you ask Americans what we should be spending abroad, they’ll say about 10 percent of the budget. Unfortunately they believe we spend 20 percent and so we have a lot to do to communicate the fact that this is a relatively small investment.

LAWTON: Shah says resources must always be allocated for humanitarian disasters. But he says the administration wants to put a new focus on long-term initiatives as well.

SHAH: It turns out that for about a tenth the cost, somewhere between one-eighth and one-tenth the cost of feeding someone for a year, you can help invest in their ability to move themselves out of poverty.

LAWTON: And he says the government is well aware that communities of faith have vast potential resources that can be enlisted in the battle.

SHAH: There are 330,000 congregations in this country that represent–I think the top ten alone reach more than 100 million people. You know, if we could just reach a small fraction of that community, that’s our vision of success.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

KATE SEELYE, correspondent: On the outskirts of Cairo, members and supporters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood celebrate the start of a new political era. With nearly half the seats in parliament, the party is set to wield significant influence in Egypt. Newly elected deputy Azza al Jarf calls Egypt’s first free election in decades historic.

The Brotherhood has been waiting a long time for this moment. Formed in 1928 to promote Islam, it was later banned in Egypt and its leaders repeatedly imprisoned. But as secular autocrats have collapsed from Tunisia to Egypt, Islamist parties have stepped into the political vacuum, and groups like the Brotherhood are now riding a wave of popular support with their calls for social and economic justice. On election day in a poor Cairo suburb, Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Beltagy spelled out the party’s goals.

MOHAMED BELTAGY: We were oppressed and intimidated for 80 years, but today we are about to embark on a long journey to meet the needs of the people.

SEELYE: Beltagy and his party weren’t the only Islamists voted into parliament. The Noor Party, which advocates a more fundamentalist agenda, won nearly a quarter of the seats. Together, Egypt’s Islamists make up more than 70 percent of the new parliament. Liberal and youth parties account for the rest. Blogger Mahmoud Salem, who ran and lost in a district of Cairo, says youth candidates like himself didn’t stand a chance against the better known and funded Islamists.

MAHMOUD SALEM: The issue is that if you’re a party that only started three months ago you don’t have the chance to create the groundwork that is necessary. You know, as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood who’s been around for 80 years, you know. So people vote for whoever they see in front of them.

SEELYE: It was young, secular Egyptians like Salem who sparked last year’s protests with their demands for justice and freedom. They were been sidelined in these elections, but Salem say he has no regrets.

SALEM: Now we get to play the role of the opposition, which is so much more fun, you know: Hey, Islamists, you wanted power? Fantastic. I want social justice now. Get it done.

SEELYE: But others worry democracy has been hijacked by parties they say have little respect for personal rights and freedoms.

PROFESSOR SAID SADEK (Professor of Political Science, The American University in Cairo): It is scary on many issues, especially the social issues, minorities, Christians. Also the status of women, civil liberties, personal liberties in general. What are they going to do with them?

SEELYE: Sadek says Egyptians have legitimate concerns about this parliament’s intentions, given the poor human rights records of Islamist-run countries like Sudan and Iran.

SADEK: Islam has many variety of readings and many interpretations. If they are going to adopt a moderate version, we all support them, but if they are going to adopt a very strict interpretation and they want to impose it on others, we’ll have trouble.

SEELYE: But in this working-class Cairo neighborhood, shoppers have other things on their mind. Many are struggling to get by. At this local food bank shoppers are snap up macaroni and lentils at wholesale prices provided by the Muslim Brotherhood. Nearly half of Egypt’s more than 80 million citizens live on less than two dollars a day, and economic despair fueled last year’s anti-government protests. For decades, the Brotherhood has provided for the poor, offering free health care, education, and other services. Now voters are hoping that the Brotherhood’s history of charitable work and its promises to improve people’s lives will lead to real change.

RAMADAN (Man at Food Distribution): The past government was dishonest. We hope the future will bring reforms.

SEELYE: Egypt faces many challenges. Buildings burned during last year’s protest are reminders of the country’s ongoing instability. Investment is down dramatically, as is tourism, which employs more than 10 percent of the population. Unemployment is surging. Corruption is rife. Given the country’s deep problems, the Brotherhood’s leaders say their priorities will be rebuilding Egypt’s economy and infrastructure, not pushing religion. Ossama Yassin is a Muslim brotherhood deputy in parliament.

OSSAMA YASSIN (Member of Parliament): We don’t want what’s known as a religious state. We want a modern, civil, democratic state belonging to the people.

SEELYE: Sensitive to concerns about an Islamist agenda, the Brotherhood has been moderating its religious language and emphasizing its respect for the rights of other religions and groups.

YASSIN: There is no basis for the liberals’ fears. The state we seek will guarantee freedoms and rights, like the freedom of religion and speech, the right to form groups and political parties, and the right to demonstrate.

SEELYE: By contrast, the Noor Party is calling for a religious state. This summer many of its fundamentalist supporters, known as Salafists, gathered in Cairo to demand an Islamic caliphate. Salafists once shunned democracy, claiming it gave the laws of man precedence over those of God. But today democracy offers them a chance to press for harsh religious legislation. Tarek Shaalan is a founding member of the Noor Party and holds a PhD from the University of Central Florida. He says his party seeks social justice and the strict application of Islamic law, including banning alcohol and segregating the sexes on Egypt’s beaches.

TAREK SHAALAN: The reason I want to make it segregated so I want to make the woman feel more comfortable, you understand me? Don’t look at Islam that we’re bringing a problem. No, we bring the solution, not the problem, okay?

SEELYE: Hard-line Salafist views have proliferated on religious channels here. It’s not uncommon to hear preachers like Yasser Borhami, a founder of the Noor Party, accuse Christians and Jews of being infidels. This kind of talk deeply worries Egypt’s Coptic Christian community of more than four million. Over the past several years, attacks on their community have grown. Churches have been burned and Copts killed. Salafists have been blamed for inciting sectarian violence, a charge Shaalan denies.

(speaking to Tarek Shaalan): You acknowledge that there have been growing attacks on Christians in this country?

SHAALAN: Well, I don’t want to see it this way. It’s not because of religion. It’s because of lots of other things, you know?

SEELYE: The Noor Party’s positions have been criticized by the Muslim Brotherhood. The two Islamist parties are rivals, but in Cairo cafes where Egyptians debate the future, some worry that Noor’s ultraconservative agenda may pull the Muslim Brotherhood to the right. The best protection for minority and women’s rights lies in the drafting of Egypt’s new constitution, according to Coptic community leader Mona Makram Ebeid, who is also an advisor to Egypt’s ruling military authority.

MONA MAKRAM EBEID (Member of Advisory Council to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces): I think the biggest battle now that we all must focus on is the constitution.

SEELYE: Makram Ebeid says parliament will appoint an assembly this spring to draft the constitution. She insists it must address the concerns of all of Egypt’s communities.

MAKRAM EBEID: I hope that the majority of the Muslim brothers, who are much more moderate and much more professional, will be able to have a fair constitution which takes into consideration the rights of every individual in this country, of every citizen in the country, whether it’s economic rights, social rights, political rights, religious rights, cultural rights.

SEELYE: In Tahrir Square, where the protests began just over a year ago, demonstrators continue to demand those rights. Democracy is very fragile here. Egypt is now run by a heavy-handed military which took over when Mubarak stepped down. The generals say they’ll transfer power after presidential elections this summer, but some have doubts. Nevertheless, Islamists long banned in Egyptian political life have new responsibilities and a new sense of accountability. And Makram Ebeid believes that will have a moderating effect.

MAKRAM EBEID: So I don’t think that they will be able so much to impose their own views or change the personality of Egypt as they wish, because I think that this will make them lose their popularity. The more there is an opening to democracy, the more the process of democratization will be, will go ahead, and the more they will come more to the center.

SEELYE: While some might disagree, few dispute the importance of Egypt’s democratic opening. The test will be safeguarding the process so that future voters can choose to re-elect their parliamentarians or not.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Kate Seelye in Cairo.

KRISTIN CORNWELL (Teacher, Hanley Elementary School, speaking to students): All right, I am going to give you five seconds to be settled.

BOB FAW, correspondent: In Memphis public schools, where only a small  percentage of students go on to college, Kristin Cornwell tells all her fourth graders they can be “college-ready.”

CORNWELL: The expectations haven’t been set before necessarily even that high, and they live up to it. One of the biggest delights is when I hear kids sitting in their groups, and they’ll whisper to each other, “Get college-ready,” and they’ll sit up straight, and they know exactly what that looks like, and they want that for themselves.

FAW: In a public school system where failure is common…

ERIN SVOBODA (Teacher, Kingsbury Middle School, speaking to students): Where’s the right angle in that diagram?

FAW: …Erin Svoboda’s goal is that 100 percent of her students pass the state math exam.

SVOBODA : A lot of my students are a little bit jaded, and they maybe feel a little bit even cheated. They understand that maybe they haven’t received the education that they should have. So I hope to maybe renewing their faith in their education and the schools and in what they can do with that later.

FAW: In this poor neighborhood, where reading scores are abysmally low, Katelyn Woodard praises her students for trying to find the right answer.

KATELYN WOODARD (Teacher, Hanley Elementary School, speaking to students): It’s by itself beautiful. Good job, Demetria.

Students: Good job, Demetria!

FAW: Katelyn, Erin, and Kristin are graduates of MTR—Memphis Teacher Residency, a  three-year-old program designed to give poor inner city students the same opportunities as students in wealthier areas. David Montague is the director of the school.

DAVID MONTAGUE (Memphis Teacher Residency): It’s absolutely an injustice, because there’s such a large academic achievement gap between students that are generally poor and minority relative to students who generally live in the suburbs and who are white.

FAW: Funded mostly by foundations and private contributions, this program takes college graduates and gives them housing, training, and tuition, even awards them a master’s degree. In return, they agree to teach in an inner city school here for four years. The program is faith-based.

MONTAGUE: What we’re doing here we’re doing within a Christian context. We believe in God’s word as revealed in Scripture, and that faith informs how you think about students. It informs your efficacy. It informs your belief that every child can learn.

FAW: There is something about this work that draws people of faith. Erin, for example, planned a career as a hospital pharmacist until her faith made her decide otherwise.

SVOBODA: I feel like this is absolutely where God wants me to be. I had much different ambitions for my life and much different aspirations. But I feel like the Lord kept putting this in my path.

(speaking to students): Remember what this page is called? What’s this page called?

FAW: Katelyn also sees what she is doing in the classroom as a kind of ministry.

WOODARD: How I want to live out my faith in the classroom is by constantly looking at the Lord and looking at how he deals with the world and reflect that in my classroom. If I treat them with that respect and that love that I really believe the Lord has for everyone, then they feel that.

FAW: Is there any such thing as an unteachable child?

SVOBODA. No.

FAW: To these teachers their students are not potential dropouts, but God’s creatures.

CORNWELL: I’ve seen kids who everyone said, “There’s no way. There’s no way that child is going to be successful.” And I’ve seen them overcome that when someone believes in them, when someone takes the time to sit with them and work with them and pull the assets that we can see from them, and they start to believe, “I can do this.”

MONTAGUE: What we still have particularly in urban education is what some people often call soft racism or soft bigotry, which is this idea of teachers at times having very low expectations of their students because of the race or class that they come from. So what we’re trying to do is say absolutely every single child can learn, and we’re going to have very, very high expectations for those children.

FAW: In this school, presided over by principal Rosalind Davis, the teachers from MTR have already had a huge impact.

ROSALIND DAVIS (Principal, Hanley Elementary School): They’ve changed the culture of the school. Their approach to the work, their work ethic, and their strategies, the way they interact with the students.

FAW: Because, says Davis, these teachers with strong faith bring something many other teachers often lack.

DAVIS: Sometimes what’s missing from a teacher’s belief system is a belief that something supernatural and miraculous could happen in schools. They might get knocked down one day, but they come back fighting the next because they prayed about it, they reflected and, you know, they get up.

FAW: Don’t be misled. The MTR program is not some roundabout way to impose doctrine, much less to proselytize, as Montague explains.

MONTAGUE: If you do a Bible study, and you explain why Jesus is the son of God and the only way to heaven, what you’re doing is you’re creating a very unhealthy and non-safe environment for every child in that classroom that doesn’t come from a Christian family, okay, and so you’re inhibiting your children, your students from being able to learn.

SVOBODA: I might not be able to necessarily tell them that I believe that they’re God’s children and that he loves them, but I’m trying to show that love to them.

DAVIS: Your faith isn’t something that you walk around beating people on the head with. People should be able to tell that you’re a Christian without you saying a word.

FAW: It is grindingly difficult work. Children coming here test well below students in more affluent areas. What is accomplished in the classroom is often offset by what they experience outside. Dealing with all that is a real test of faith.

(speaking to Erin Svoboda): You’re swimming upstream.

SVOBODA: That’s what it feels like most days, yes.

FAW: Your faith keeps you going?

SVOBODA: Yes. I will be honest. I don’t know how other people do it. Without that or motivating you have no ideal how anyone would willingly wake up and come to this every day. I don’t mean to make it sound that terrible, but it is hard.

FAW: The program is so new it is hard to measure its success. But test scores are climbing, and students are responding.

(speaking to student): She pushes you?

TEAVIKA JOHNSON: Yes.

FAW: You don’t mind the discipline? You like it?

JOHNSON: No, because it helps me more so I can understand more.

FAW: (speaking to student): The goal up there says 100 percent. So she really inspires you?

WENDY CABAERA: Yes. Actually, for me she is one of our best teachers.

FAW: And if the cynic were to argue that here they can make only the smallest of inroads, that progress will be scant and short-lived; that goals like Erin’s 100 percent target are not likely to be reached—if so, their faith, they insist, will not be diminished.

CORNWELL: I walk here in knowing that I come with my five loaves and two fish, my meager here’s my best that I have, and God’s going to have to multiply that. Whether he chooses to do that now or 20 years from now in urban education, that’s up to him.

WOODARD: What you come to learn through doing this job and through your faith is that there’s a deeper joy and peace and contentment than you could ever imagine that comes from knowing that you’re doing God’s work.

FAW: As they answer a calling and live their faith one student, one classroom at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Memphis, Tennessee.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: For decades, religious organizations such as the National Council of Churches, the Catholic bishops, and others have been working with labor organizers to try to improve conditions for farm workers, and there’s been some success, most recently in the tomato fields of south Florida, where immigrants harvest nearly all the winter tomatoes this country grows. Our report is from Saul Gonzales in Immokalee, Florida.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Florida may be better known for its oranges, but it’s tomatoes that rule in the farm fields surrounding the small town of Immokalee. In fact, during the winter months, nearly all of America’s domestically grown tomatoes, still green when they are picked, come from this part of south Florida, and it’s a large and poor immigrant workforce that’s essential in getting that crop from plant to plate.

Tomato harvesting is still very much a “by hand” work? There is no machine that exists that does this?

STEVE MCHAN: That is correct.

GONZALEZ: Steve McHan is harvesting manager for Pacific Tomato Growers, a major producer in Florida.

MCHAN: The production volume from here is somewhere around 1,200 to 1,400 boxes per acre, and we pack 25-pound boxes is what we’re averaging.

GONZALEZ: So it’s industrial scale?

MCHAN: Industrial scale, correct.

GONZALEZ: However, Florida’s tomato industry is a business that’s long been accused of exploiting its workforce through overwork, underpay, and mistreatment. That’s turned these fields into the frontlines of a high profile national campaign to improve the lives of farmworkers.

JORDAN BUCKLEY: People who work in agriculture are among the least paid, least protected workers in the whole country.

GONZALEZ: Jordan Buckley and his colleagues are with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, CIW, and the Interfaith Action Network, which works with faith groups to help farmworkers.

BRIGITTE GYNTHER: For people of faith, for us this is a moral issue. You know, how the people who pick our food our treated.

GONZALEZ: Now to understand the plight of farmworkers you have to know something about their place in America’s industrial food economy.

BUCKLEY: They are some of the poorest workers here in our country, and yet not for a lack of hard work. It’s not some dearth of industriousness. In fact, the reason is because the increasing consolidation of purchasing among retailors. So where you have the fast food and food service and supermarkets squeezing their suppliers and demanding ever cheaper costs for their tomatoes, that’s resulted in growers squeezing their farmworkers, and that’s why farmworkers haven’t seen a real wage increase in upwards of three decades.

GONZALEZ: Florida’s tomato workers are usually paid by how much they pick, traditionally getting about 45 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they fill. That means to make a day’s minimum wage, each worker has to pick two-and-a-half-tons of tomatoes a day. What does that kind of work pay mean for the daily lives of farmworkers and their families? Twenty-eight-year-old Darinal Sales struggles to support his wife and two girls on what he makes in the fields. Because four other farmworkers live in the same dilapidated trailer, his whole family shares one small room.

GONZALEZ: Ustedes viven aqui?

DARINAL SALES: It’s because of the situation at work that we live like this. Our pay just doesn’t last and allow us to live in better way.

GONZALEZ: Immokalee is a town full of young men from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti, many undocumented, who have come here to scratch out a better life for themselves by harvesting Florida’s tomato crops. Some of them end up victims of the industry’s worst abuses, including incidents of modern day slavery.

BUCKLEY: There have also now been nine federally prosecuted slavery operations in just the last 14 years here in Florida agriculture.

GONZALEZ: Slavery?

BUCKLEY: Yeah, literal slavery. Right here on Third and Boston we go down four blocks. That’s the site where workers were locked in the back of a cargo truck, literally shackled. We saw bruises on their wrists where they had been literally restrained by their employers.

GONZALEZ: Yet despite the dangers and pay, farmhands are eager to work. To see how eager, you’ve got to get up very early. Every morning in the pre-dawn hours this parking lot in downtown Immokalee becomes a giant open-air labor market. Hundreds of farmworkers come here looking to make contact with labor bosses. If they’re lucky they’ll be picked for another hard day of work in the tomato fields. The men and women selected are the ones boarding buses that take them to the fields. It’s in this parking lot that we met Aurelia Hinajosa, who’s worked in Immokalee’s tomato fields for nearly 30 years.

AURELIA HINAJOSA: Americans really like their vegetables and fruits, and who is going to pick it? The people born in this country have better kinds of work, and they’re not going to go to the fields.

GONZALEZ: But things are slowly starting to get better for Florida’s tomato field workers. Last year, after more than a decade of patient organizing work, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers reached a landmark agreement with growers and corporate tomato buyers like McDonalds and Burger King. The agreement gives farmworkers a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but that one cent increase translates into an additional 32 cents for every bucket picked by workers. That in turn will boost each farmhand’s pay by about $5,000 a year.

BUCKLEY: We are basically on the threshold of entering into this new industry in having rights protected and their being this consensus among buyers that we demand humane labor conditions in our supply chain.

GONZALEZ: The agreement has also made some in Florida’s powerful tomato industry question their past actions and attitudes.

SARAH GOLDBERGER: Historically, it has not been the poster child for good behavior and good treatment of its workers.

GONZALEZ: You admit to that?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Sarah Goldberger is a spokesperson for Pacific Tomato Growers. She says the agreement between workers and the tomato industry has replaced tension with cooperation.

GOLDBERGER: It has been so non-adversarial. It is a pleasure, quite honestly.

GONZALEZ: That’s a big change?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Other changes in the fields, like this one owned by Pacific Tomato, include greater access to drinking water and more rest periods, regular bathroom breaks, and a zero tolerance for verbal abuse and sexual harassment by field bosses. Now that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and it allies have an agreement, they’re spreading the word about it. The small community radio station they run in Immokalee regularly tells workers listening about their rights, pay, and future organizing plans.

Radio (In Spanish): The campaign to improve the work conditions and pay in the state of Florida.

GONZALEZ: Worker advocate and former field hand Lucas Benitez met us at the early morning labor gathering to talk about how important these changes are to the men and women who pick America’s tomato crop.

LUCAS BENITEZ: That’s what we want, work with dignity. Where every worker, every person who goes to the fields feels pride in being part of the agricultural industry that is putting food on millions of tables every day and that the worker is getting paid enough to put food on the table of his own home.

GONZALEZ: However the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its allies in religious and faith groups say they have much work left to do. That includes a new national campaign focused on  supermarket chains which have declined to  participate in the penny-per-pound pay agreement.

BUCKLEY: There are three principal sectors of tomato retail: fast food, food service, and supermarkets, and now the leaders of the fast food industry are on board. The leaders of the food service industry are on board. All that remains are the supermarkets.

GONZALEZ: To keep pressure on the stores and to make sure gains are protected, farmworkers regularly reach out to religious leaders and congregations.

And so I’m joined by Darinal and Oscar from the CIW.

GONZALEZ: This morning, Jordan and workers from Immokalee, including Darinal Sales, are addressing a Presbyterian church in Naples, Florida. These speaking engagements are part of a sustained campaign to get people of faith thinking about their fairness and justice when they sit down to eat. Brigitte Gynther of Interfaith Action has been working in Immokalee for eight years on behalf of workers.

GYNTHER: You know, there are many times when we say grace we are grateful for the food on our plates. But where did that food travel? Who picked it? How did it get to us? And that is something we don’t often think about. But I think as people of faith we are called to think about the connections between us and the people who toil in the fields day in and day out to put food our plates.

GONZALEZ: For the men and women who pick Florida’s tomatoes their most important harvest has been some measure of justice and respect.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Saul Gonzalez in Immokalee, Florida.