The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (16 page)

Despite these absences, I employed a short, affable woman named Rebecca to come to the apartment twice a week to clean though, in truth, there was very little to do. Even if I wasn't around, she would check up on things and water plants. Whenever I was home, Rebecca would ask for an allowance for bread, sugar, tea, and milk so that she could snack while she worked. She seemed to go through huge quantities, but I didn't pay much attention.

While working one morning in Nairobi, I drove back to the apartment after realizing I'd forgotten an important document. Though Bilo, the usually dour morning guard wasn't at his station in front, I thought nothing of it. I ran up the stairs and swung open the door to find the entire staff from the building on break in my living room, all with teacups in their hands.

"Rebecca," I said, "is this how you use the tea and bread?"

"Oh, yes," Rebecca answered sheepishly, head down at first. Then she quickly looked up, eyes shining, "But they are appreciating it so much, isn't it!"

I just shook my head and announced that teatime was over. Once everyone left, Rebecca and I had a long talk about taking things for granted. She said she understood but a minute later asked if she might still invite workers for tea, because not every employer allowed it. I shook my head again, but from then on, we had a tea allowance as long as people stayed in the living room and she took responsibility for anything that was missing. Nothing ever was.

On weekends, I would sometimes take the overnight train to Mombasa, a sleepy port city on Kenya's coast. White-gloved porters would bring bedding and dinners of Indian curry, and I would read novels through the night as the train chugged across the savanna and on to the Indian Ocean. I loved the Arab-influenced architecture of Mombasa, the swaying palm trees in the sand, and the easy pace at which everyone walked. Muslim women covered in their chadors would squabble with one another, trading their wares, their bangles tinkling against pretty wrists. At night, friends would gather at the beach to sip cold beers and listen to locals and hippie tourists singing and strumming guitars.

Along with good friends, there was still time for romance, though I remained always more committed to my work than to permanent relationships. For most of the time I lived in East Africa, my Colombian American boyfriend, dark-eyed and curly haired, lived in Addis Ababa, and we would meet for adventures every month or so in locales from the far reaches of Ethiopia to the Kenyan savannas to the volcanoes of Rwanda, where we would watch the mountain gorillas and marvel that they were so like us. Whatever money either of us earned was spent on travel, and though our relationship didn't last, our romance energized me for the harder moments in daily life.

After we broke up, for a short while I dated a Swedish-born rhino tracker raised in Kenya, a tall and willowy blond man with a gentle personality and a deep love for Africa. Sometimes we'd meet right after work to drive through the Nairobi Game Park at the edge of town with a bottle of wine and a picnic as the sun was setting. On the savanna, we'd point in awe at the graceful silhouettes of acacia trees in the fading light, smell the dirt and wind and the coming rain, and then dance slowly outside the car, besotted with the endless swirl of orange and pink sky and the slow loping of the giraffes and antelopes near the water holes, feeling the sweet ache of being so fully alive.

My life in Nairobi, as in Rwanda, was one of extremes, moving from magical adventures to the realities of life for the very poor, sometimes within a single day. On the other side of the city's tracks, more than a million people lived in slums such as Mathare Valley, Kibera, Pumwani, and Soweto, in shantytown houses made of mud and corrugated metal sheets. There were no clear streets, just winding alleyways, open sewers, the smell of trash, and wandering children sniffing glue. Men skinned goats and hung meat in open-air markets that swirled with flies. That this world existed in such close proximity to the gorgeous tree-lined suburbs of Nairobi and its spacious national park made the desperation even crueler.

Despite horrendous material conditions, enormous strength emanated from those slums. I met many women who were raising five or six children on a dollar a day, mostly on their own, often working as maids in town or selling bunches of greens or tomatoes by the roadsides. Some made charcoal from ashes and mud, others sold water or made changaa, a lethal moonshine made from grains like maize and sorghum which they sold from changaa shacks that were easily recognizable because of the fancy cars parked outside, most of them belonging to Kenyan government officials. Though women typically lived in one-room boxes with dirt floors, their homes were usually immaculate, and the dishes and pots on hand were clean and neatly stacked.

Meanwhile, I found myself frustrated once again by development "experts" who looked in from the outside and suggested clever solutions that created a lot of noise, distorted markets, resulted in systemic corruption, and accomplished little. On the bright side, the international development field had recognized the importance of investing in women, for study after study demonstrated that, unlike men, women would spend any additional income on school fees or more food for their children. Bilge had said it when we first met in Rwanda: Help a woman and you help a family.

While the importance of women was clearly recognized by most aid agencies, the actual solutions were misguided, mostly because few of the experts at agencies tried putting themselves in the shoes of the women. One of the Kenyan government's programs focused on giving grants to women's groups so they could start and manage "income-generating projects." The idea was that women worked well in groups and could earn additional income by running a maize mill or a water kiosk, a poultry farm or a crafts project. Each group would be asked what it wanted to do and then given about $500 to implement its idea. The income from the group activity was intended to amplify what each woman was already earning from her own efforts.

Initially, the program looked like a great success. Grassroots projects sprang up among women's groups across Kenya. The donors would visit, say, a group of a dozen women who had built a chicken coop for a couple hundred chicks. The women would proudly present eggs that had recently been laid and talk about how they planned to sell them to the community. They would serve the donors Fantas and, often, cookies, and sometimes sing and dance, as well. The donors would leave feeling satisfied, happy that they were making such a difference.

In reality, most donors were doing little to change lives, and in some cases, they were making things worse for the women's groups-at least that was my growing impression. Too often, 6 months after receiving their grant, a project's chickens might all die from a flu for which the women lacked proper medicines. Sometimes neglect by individual group members would leave a project in decline. There seemed neither rhyme nor reason to the ways different groups took on their projects, and no one seemed to pay attention to the actual finances.

I raised my concerns one night over dinner with Mary Racelis, for she had witnessed firsthand the extraordinary resilience of people living in slums and approached low-income communities with great respect. I told her that I was concerned that the results of the women's projects, partly funded by UNICEF, might not be as rosy as the government officials were reporting. From fellow development workers, I'd heard that many projects had been abandoned by the women.

Mary offered me a short-term contract to review the programs, counseling me to spend my next 2 months away from Kigali in the slums of Nairobi, Mombasa on the coast, and Kisumu on Lake Victoria. At the end of the period, I would be expected to recommend changes to the program if they were needed. I knew Mary would take it seriously, and I didn't hesitate to say yes.

I've met amazing individuals such as Mary inside big institutions, though her leadership abilities were a cut above those of the others. She was unafraid to seek and speak the truth, and she let young people lead. A few days after my dinner with Mary, I met a woman from another international agency that also funded the women's groups, and I voiced the same concern about the effectiveness of the "income-generating programs."

"How do you define success?" I asked.

"We want to lift women out of poverty," she told me, leaning back on her wooden chair, her hair pulled back in a tight bun, her arms crossed in front of her dark blue jacket.

"Yes, I know," I acknowledged, "but how do you know when you've been successful?"

"You can see it with your own eyes."

"But how do you know what you are seeing without real measures of accountability? And how do you know when you've failed?" I asked.

Her cold blue eyes narrowed to slits. "We have no failures. Even if things don't work out, we learn from everything we do."

Her pat answer stopped me cold. "I agree," I said, "we should learn from failures, but we have to name them first, talk about them, learn from them."

"Of course," she answered flatly, but she wouldn't cite a single mistake. Her opaque circularity flummoxed me. I thanked her and walked out.

In reviewing the women's groups' programs, I worked with a Kenyan woman from the Department of Local Government named Mary Koinange. While the department was known equally for a shameful lack of urgency and a dearth of results in the slums, Mary herself was a standout. A lively woman of about 50 who wore prim, high-collared dresses and lace-up shoes, she shined with great spirit and a fierce sense of right and wrong. Mary shared countless stories of life before independence and walked with the air of someone who knew suffering and feared it might come again. My days were filled with her questions and frank philosophies about life.

"I want to be free like you," she once declared.

I told her she was.

She shook her head slowly. "African women," she stated, "are not free. Especially not poor ones. When we dance we can be free, but life for women is too hard."

The two of us began visiting women's groups across the country on a daily basis as part of our work for UNICEF. At the time, it was illegal in Kenya to hold a meeting of more than 10 people without reporting it to the government, which is why so many groups of women were officially registered. Everywhere we found women's groups who spoke proudly of what they did, and it was only when we pressed them for details that their stories began to unravel.

At one site near Kisumu, a sleepy town on the shores of Lake Victoria, the government had supplied a women's group with concrete for building houses; however, when we arrived months later, we found that nothing but the foundations had been laid. There wasn't enough cement for complete houses and there was no money to continue construction. Mary nearly spat at the lost opportunity.

"Much poorer people in Nairobi's slums just start by building two rooms with whatever materials they can afford. Then the family rents one of the rooms and uses the income to help expand the house over time. I know families who have made a real business-big business-out of renting rooms. Why don't the agencies start by looking at how smart people already are instead of giving them things that will make them fail?" she groaned.

I sighed, looking at the slabs of cement on the ground-empty promises for a better life symbolically strewn next door to the hastily erected shanties where the women were actually living.

The slums at the outskirts of central Nairobi were some of the toughest places I'd ever been. Groups of boys sniffing glue were a common sight, and crime was rampant; open sewers ran along muddy, narrow pathways. Public services like piped water, electricity, and garbage collection missed the slums altogether, though the people who lived in those urban squatter settlements would get water usually by paying a lot more than their middle-class counterparts did to local entrepreneurs who knew how to break into mainline pipes. People survived through unyielding determination and focusing day-to-day.

It was in the slums of Nairobi that the development community nonetheless had great hopes for success due to the resourcefulness of the women, though we still found as many failures there as anywhere else. Some groups were given grants to construct legal "water kiosks," which consisted of a water pump in a little booth, where women could charge a reasonable price for water and then lock the kiosk at night to protect it from vandals.

The problem was that the pumps were often faulty, and the women were each expected to volunteer one day a week at the kiosk. They rarely showed up simply because they couldn't afford it. One group of four candidly told us it was easier earning income the way they'd always done it, whether by selling tomatoes or charcoal on the street. Besides, their water tap had broken one day, and they didn't have the money to repair it.

We saw countless examples of well-intentioned projects gone wrong: Hundreds of maize mills, an important labor-saving device, lay in disrepair because the locals weren't trained to fix them. Or the mills would lay idle because the village lacked access to the proper fuel to run them. Good-hearted people would build schools without thinking about the costs of hiring and supporting a teacher-not for months but for yearsand the schools would stand empty. Women would be encouraged to make crafts though there was no market for them, and so we'd visit homes piled to the ceilings with unsold sisal baskets.

For 6 straight weeks, Mary and I would meet at 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. and drive till nightfall, going from group to group in my sky blue, 25-yearold Volkswagen Beetle, which lacked seat belts and headlights. Its wheels were out of alignment, and when it hit potholes, a daily occurrence, the steering wheel would shake violently, forcing me to wrestle with it until the wheels spun smoothly again. Starting the car required pushing it down a hill, jumping in, and then popping it into second gear. The car's quirks kept us laughing, but both Mary and I were suppressing a seething anger at the apathy and corruption of those with power and the crushing poverty that surrounded us.

"Is corruption a cause of poverty?" I asked Mary one afternoon. "Or is poverty a cause of corruption?"