Sachs began his career far, far from here, with a more top-down approach toward economic crisis. In 1985, as a brash 30-year-old Harvard professor (he was tenured at 28), he advised the crisis-prone Bolivian government to dose its imploding economy with what was later called "shock therapy"—tight monetary controls as well as austerity measures, which meant sacrificing the economic well-being of the man in the street in order to stabilize the national economy and allow the country to enter the global market. It eventually worked, ending hyperinflation and paving the way for years of sustained growth.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sachs went to Poland and Russia, where he strategized with presidents, finance ministers, and labor leaders in the midst of political and economic upheaval, and cobbled together draconian economic austerity and debt cancellation plans. In Russia, his shock therapy methods came under fire after measures to convert the country from communism to a capitalist market economy in 1991 backfired. Virtually overnight, Russia's reformers released price controls and ended state subsidies, created markets and stock exchanges, and opened the country to the global economy. In the aftermath, Russian society fell into a swamp of corruption, crime, poverty, and hunger. Some of the people on Sachs's team there were charged with corruption. Sachs blames the collapse of his Russia program on lax implementation of his policies.

"The reason shock therapy—as they call it—didn't work in Russia," he says, "was because the policies were not really carried out. People who criticize my work in these places don't read the data. They don't look at data because they are not interested and because, I am convinced, they can't read it. Whereas I live on data. I love data."

Indeed, some academics blame the failure of shock therapy in Russia on Sachs's reliance on statistics at the expense of sociology and politics. One well-known specialist on Russia, Stephen F. Cohen, then at Princeton, recalls plunking himself down next to Sachs on a plane headed for Moscow when Sachs was working with the Russian government. When Cohen asked him what he was reading about Russian history and current affairs, Sachs reportedly looked at him blankly and announced that economists did not need that kind of background, because, since the laws of economics were universal, data and statistics could tell them all they had to know.

But at the Toya inauguration that morning, there is no sign of shock therapy. Sachs is greeted by drums and by men and women doing a powerful barefoot, sole-stomping welcome dance. Some of the men have swords and goatskin shields. In khakis, blazer, and turban, Sachs joins in, stamping his loafers against the sand and bending in imitation of his African counterparts. One fears for the top-heavy turban.

"Your usual start of the day," Sachs says, laughing, when it is over.

We are then seated beneath a tent festooned with the name of one of Toya village's biggest donors to date, Matt Damon's H2O Africa Foundation, which helps provide water wells across Africa. FINANCIAL SUPPORT FROM THE MATH DAMON FOUNDATION, a banner (mis)reads, in French. Sachs is already planning a trip for Damon to Toya once the project is fully up and running.