While it may seem cliché, I’ve always enjoyed the proverb advising that "when life deals you lemons, make lemonade." The phrase was my first thought when I saw a recent story out of Ethiopia about Azmarew Zeleke’s burgeoning coffee business; in this case, replace "lemons" with "spent mortar shells" and "lemonade" with "coffee machines". It may not have the same ring as lemons-lemonade, but you get the idea.

At a time when most of the coffee-related news out of Ethiopia has to do with a nasty trademark dispute between local farmers and Starbucks, Zeleke's story stands out for its inspirational tone. He and his six staff take spent shells left over from the 1998-2000 Eritrea/Ethiopia conflict, transforming the shells' aluminum cylinders to channel water, milk, and coffee instead of explosive powder.

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Today's New York Times has an editorial "Wiring Development" that, to my mind, picks up on what is really important from the IADB remittance study, "Sending Money Home", namely the opportunity for Latin American banks to turn remittance recipients (and senders, too) into real, creditworthy customers, and to add a substantial part of the money stream into productive working capital, deepens the financial sectors of recipient countries, and begins to provide the financial literacy so critical to poverty alleviation. After a spate of mis-directed coverage, it's gratifying to see that the newspaper of record sees the positive big picture.