<p>For an organization they started as undergrads. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13530551/site/newsweek/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13530551/site/newsweek/</a></p>
<p>Benita Singh and Ruth DeGolia were still undergraduates in the summer of 2003 when they found their destiny in the village of San Alfonso, on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. Singh and DeGolia, international-studies majors at Yale, were working on their senior theses when they visited the village, which was filled with women who had fled Guatemala during that country’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. After two years in refugee camps in Mexico, the women, many of them widowed by the fighting, had been repatriated here, where there was no work and no market for the exquisite woven and beaded handicrafts they produced. “There are only so many tourists, and each one can only buy so much,” says DeGolia ruefully. But the women weren’t beggars; it was, says Singh, "the first time I’d ever walked into an impoverished [Third World] community where people weren’t asking me for money…</p>