This is the final post in a three-part series by Joseph Paulini, a businessman and entrepreneur based in northern Virginia who recently co-led a Business as Mission trip to the Philippines, where Five Talents is seeking to deepen its work with proven micro-entrepreneurs. Click here to read parts one and two.

Two hundred and seventy-five miles to the north of Manila, after a 13-hour trip by automobile through the high mountain provinces, we had the pleasure of returning to the village of Besao.

Five Talents' former President and CEO Craig Cole and I first visited there in 2002 to witness the funding of another cooperative. It was a beautiful remote village tucked between two mountains sloping downwards into a valley filled with terraced rice paddies tended to exactly as they have been for millennia. The townspeople would gather to stand knee deep in cold water all day planting the rice seedlings. The only communication outside the village was with a short-wave radio.

Roosters and chickens roamed at will and every home had a piggery under it. We stayed in their homes, ate chicken, rice and vegetables with our hands off plates and washed up in the morning outside in the mountain air from a cold-water spigot. Surely, I thought, this would be a tremendous stretch to make anything happen here.

Oh, me of little faith.