In 1992, when I was 21, I lived in St Petersburg. It was just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it was hard. Food was in shortage because workers had walked away from the communal farms and all the crop was rotting in the fields. It was spring and cold and ice fisherman were drowning and floating ashore after fishing when the ice was thin. We lived with Russian flatmates who were disillusioned. We were millionaires compared to our friends but there was nothing to buy. We had to search to find food in the empty supermarkets, just like our Russian friends.

One day my flatmate got sick, really sick, with a serious infection. I thought she needed some vitamin C, so I went to the Beryozka, which was a black-market hard-currency store, most often frequented by Russian mafia or tourists. I found a liter of orange juice there for about $20 and was standing in the queue to buy it. In front of me, there was a middle aged American woman, who was looking for matches. She had come to Russia to see the palaces, she told the Russian man at the till. She had run out of matches and wanted a cigarette. Being the kind of store it was, the Beryozka didn’t have any matches.

I was behind her, the 21 year old student, with my OJ. I said, "I saw some matches this morning in the Russian supermarket across the street. I am a student here, I can take you over there and help you buy them." She said "Oh great! I’d like to get some fruit too." I shook my head in skepticism. "You won’t find any fruit there, I’m afraid. It’s a Russian store, and everything is in shortage. It’s pretty empty. But I did see matches and it would give you a chance to see what it’s really like living here at the moment."

"Oh no," she said, shrinking back. "I don’t think I want to do that. I came to see the palaces." She left without her matches and without any perspective on what it was really like to live in Russia.

I am just back from a week in Lima, Peru, where I was working on Front Lines, a leadership development experience where our company’s executives consulted with strategic customers on complex business issues. Last year, we ran a similar program in Kenya.

For me, Front Lines is like showing the American woman the Russian supermarket. We will never know what it’s like to live without water, in a desert, in a home with a tin-corrugated roof. But if we can get a window that we can look into, to reflect on what we have, we’ll have more empathy, more reason to care.

In Lima, we worked with partners whose common objective is to eradicate poverty. It may seem inappropriate to some that we sit by the pool in the beauty of Miraflores working on challenges like this. I was thinking about this last week myself and it bothered me. But what I realized was that we all can and should be working on these challenges from wherever we are. And if all of us take that step–visit the supermarket, buy the matches–we can make a difference.