It is essential that the international community should follow up present major undertakings to help Third World countries achieve economic self-sufficiency. How ever, the ordinary man or woman, confronted with the bewildering mass of eco nomic formulations and technicalities employed in the approaches to a new inter- notional economic order, may be forgiven for wondering where the individual comes in. There is a danger that the means (international economic equality) may become more important than the ends (the satisfaction of basic human, i.e. indivi dual, needs and rights). A Third World journalist who was present at the Seventh special Session of the UN General Assembly and a participant in the 1975 Dag Hammarskjold Third World Journalists' Seminar suggests that the success of the joint endeavour will depend on the extent to which the collaborators understand the human problems involved in any exercise of give and take, and here he presents the problem in its most elemental form, in a sort of real-life allegory drawn from an experience in his own country, an essay in awakening the collective conscience of humanity.