Andrew Oerke ‘s Tribute

One of my dearest friends has passed on to be with God.
This is a tribute to Andrew, a truly great man, who will be sadly missed.
We are so fortunate to have had him here to share our world.

Andrew Oerke
1932 to 2013)

A great spirit has passed who has enriched us all.
A very happy, loving grandfather to Cashen and Odin, a loving and enormously supportive father to Kirsten, Greta and Jared, an intensely loving partner in all works and life to Anitra, a supporting friend to his many colleagues, an Oerke family caring kinsman, and to many, a leader moving by means of acts of service toward a better world .
Andrew’s outstanding contributions created “ tipping points” for the human condition within three separate fields: 1.) microfinance; 2.) the concept and structure of the Peace Corps during the JFK Campaign as well as innovations as Director of Peace Corps in Malawi and Jamaica; and 3.) his extremely original poetry about the world which he considered the real solution to changing the mind and spirit of mankind. He also participated with Anitra in “healing the Oceans”. For these former three he won the USA Club of Rome Lifetime Achievement award in 2009

All of his highly original, creative activities stem from his penetrating insight into the human condition. Because of which he chose to act at critical “tipping points” within: language, human poverty, diplomatic relations of the people of the US with other nations, and recently healing the dying seas which Andrew’s choices of where to focus his life’s efforts. These flowed from his unusually keen ability (as a poet) to think “out of the box”. Andrew brought about changes in the human condition of hundreds of thousands of humans in 60 nations by his prodigious work and the ripples from his and his colleagues: John Schiller doing poverty alleviation in West Africa, Jerry Glenn, pursuing solutions to millennium goals, Shari Berenbach,African Development foundation, and former head microfinance USAID. His consuming quest was to better the condition of humans and nature.

1.) Andrew’s Microfinance Work: In 1966 in Kakamega, Kenya, David Skull (a Quaker) began making very small loans to village women. When Andrew as the CEO of Partners for Productivity joined David Skull at a moment in 1973 when the microloan endeavor was struggling and about to go bankrupt. Andrew brought his insight and hard work into these projects and by 1987 Andrew and his colleagues at PFP had expanded the effort to more than 60 nations in 4 continents. Lending, savings and small business start-up in the informed sector needed to be formalized and institutionalized. Above all, it needed a recognizable and replicable methodology. Skull had developed what is now known as the “Peer Pressure” methodology. In the city of Kakamega the program eventually ran out of funds, principally because the city was too large and spread out to bring sufficient peer pressure to bear on borrowers, who eventually began to default. At this point donors gave up on microfinance and asked Oerke, who had just taken over the NGO PfP to simply give the money away for micro-business start-up since it would never be paid back anyway. Oerke refused, secured a small grant and loan fund from a group called PACT, and from USAID, who financially agreed to let Oerke charge going rates of interest. Oerke then radically re-defined the microfinance/small scale enterprise development methodology and replicated it in branch offices, local NGO start-ups and training programs in more than sixty countries in the newly industrialized world. His former staff and managers continue to run many of the large microfinance programs in the world, and second and third generation PfP trainees and workers are omnipresent in what has now become a multi-billion dollar industry reaching an estimated 19 million of the poorest of the poor.

The problem of poverty which much of the human race finds itself faced with brought to him the question, why can these people not find access to capital? He now continues with the next “sustainable and self-generating model wherein microfinance could be done throughout the world without the donor input now required. Andrew felt the present microfinance movement is content with merely winning battles, when its goal should be to win the war on poverty. Andrew maintained that poverty is systemic in the present system of capital flows and that the present sustainability model, which is the correct one for the environment, is too static, not dynamic enough to solve the enormous problem of poverty, which he sees as a nexus which is the source of most of the other great problems that we face – environmental degradation, population explosions, poor health, and inadequate education.
He worked hard on creating a generative, auto-generating microfinance model (as opposed to the present microfinance model which is still heavily donor-dependent). With the new model, he believed donor money can be used as multipliers for start-ups, replication, expansions, experimentation and adaptations to differing cultural conditions.

2.)The Peace Corps Concept. The US role was falling behind in the world during the cold war in late 1950’s. Oerke brought the concept that young people were the USA’s best asset to the friendly nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America-Caribbean. The concept of ordinary citizens doing diplomacy by everyday person-to-person activities in the midst of impoverished peoples of these nations, living and interacting with them in a wide variety of nations occurred to Oerke. He went to Senator Proxmire’s office in Milwaukee, where Andrew’s father was the head of the Immanuel Lutheran Church and outlined to Proxmire and Congressman Reuss his plan for engagement of US citizens sent abroad to work in developing nations. Proxmire said, “ Humphrey has an idea to send the army to build roads and bridges” Andrew said, “That’s the wrong message.” Then Andrew cleverly added, “Kennedy is behind in the polls and this will help cement the youth vote.” This Oerke model was presented to Kennedy and his campaign by Milwaukee Congressman Reuss and Wisconsin Senator Proxmire. Kennedy chose the Oerke model based on private volunteers serving on a non-political, person-to-person, subsistence budget directly with needy people over the Humphrey plan of sending soldiers to do infrastructure projects. Kennedy announced the Peace Corps at the University of Michigan a few weeks later; the rest was history.
Oerke was an innovator and a pioneer within the Peace Corps. Sent as desk officer to Uganda and Tanzania, then as Peace Corps director to first Malawi and then Jamaica, he directed the first environmental/preventative health program in Africa. It eradicated small pox and TB from Malawi and trained the Malawi Health Ministry and Malawian villagers in sanitation, disease prevention and nutrition.

3.)POETRY. Andrew’s first passion always was poetry. Andrew said the problem of the sustainability of the human spirit is as important as any other humanity now faces. Andrew believed poetry is the important key to sustain and to energize the human spirit. It is poetry that has given voice to the great ideals that we all live by and will save us from this prosaic, linear world we live in. He frequently said it was no accident that all the great wisdom of the world was presented in poetic form: Jesus in the beatitudes and his parables, by Buddha, by other enlightened leaders until Mohammed in the Koran. “Yet we spend trillions on technology but cannot afford to financially support even one poet except part-time in University cubby holes as educators. What does this say for the future of humanity?

In 2005, Oerke was awarded the United Nations Award for Literature by the UN Society for Writers and Artists for his books “African Stiltdancer” and “San Miguel de Allende”. One of his recent books translated into Bulgarian by Valentin Khusev as part of the William Meredith US Poet Laureate’s East-West Exchange commences during the cold war was the last book of the Meredith’s series and is “The Collected Andrew Oerke” in English and Bulgarian where Andrew did a poetry reading tour in 6 Bulgarian cities last fall during the Bulgarian Poetry week (organized by his colleague and translator Valentin Khusev).

Andrew wrote Fourteen books of poetry and over 450 poems in journals such as The New Yorker, and Poetry. These poems are meant to save and nourish the human spirit from the present world.

The outstanding Literary critic Harold Bloom has said of Oerke :
“Andrew Oerke has wandered over the entire globe. His eye is shrewd, his mind capacious, and his generosity toward humankind is endless. His poems invariably offer fresh perspectives upon the reality he has encountered.

An elegiac intensity permeates his work. He refreshes the reader with a singularity that cares both for itself and for others, unlike certain other poets who attain their individualities by being indifferent.

When I consider that Oerke is very much a person who lives out in the world, and aiding other men and women to live better lives, I am profoundly moved that he should also have his sustained ability to enter, again and again, the universe of reverie and of quiet contemplation. “

William Meredith, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning poet before his death several years ago writing with his partner Richard Harteis have said,

“Andrew Oerke’s work is a window on the world, a world seen through the compassionate eyes of a fellow pilgrim. In the exquisite particulars of Africa, he sings the human condition, “in the heart’s duress, on the heart’s behalf.” He is a marvel, moving from one stunning image to the next with the ease of a chameleon moving from fire to water. Such vitality and good will, a man at home in the sweet world.”

Andrew’s life in Miami was Poetry writing , but much more. He ran a restoration of houses business with Robert Griffith as partner, Derek Dean, Michael Grant, Favio Perez as associates who renovated foreclosed or damaged homes in marginal areas then sold them to first home peoples from the Caribbean who started new lives as home owners.

He started a major wellness program at Miami-Dade community college where he served as Dean of the Medical campus.

Andrew’s last hours were spent on poetry and the magnificent concept of healing the oceans by restoring seagrasses, finishing a major proposal with Anitra for restoring seagrass to Texas coasts.

We will always remember his twinkling, loving eyes, his gentle sense of what is good and what is just, his enormous intellect integrating life’s experience, his enthusiasm for embracing life, and the Oerke tradition of service to mankind through his grandfather and father, which hopefully he transmitted to his grandsons.

A great spirit has passed who has enriched us all.

From Andrew’s favorite poet, William Shakespeare, in Hamlet

“Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! “