For bank manager Miki Yoshida, her desire to do volunteer work in rural India started from an unlikely inspiration on an American expressway.
"It was a defining moment in my life, when I realized that I wanted to help people," says Yoshida who, while working at Shinsei Bank, Ltd., in Tokyo, also runs an embroidery job training center in West Bengal, India. The center has created career opportunities for more than a dozen rural women so far.
"I set out on the expressway in Philadelphia to the shopping outlets after I completed my MBA, excited because the state does not tax clothes. But I suddenly realized that the expressway was built using Americans' taxes, while I, as a foreign student, was not paying a cent and driving on it as a matter of course. Then it struck me that I had led my life so far with so much help from others. I felt, there and then, that I had to do something to reciprocate."