The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (21 page)

Though I had a difficult time even holding the spoon, the soup was the best I'd ever tasted.

We thanked Alphonse, jumped in the car, and sped for the border, making it through with no time to spare. Hit by altitude sickness, I threw up all the way back to Kigali. The next day, we could barely walk. But I recovered, and both of us were euphoric about what we had done, even if the volcano had humbled us to our cores.

I came to Africa similarly unprepared, with no road map, no tools, insufficient gear, and no protective layering. The mountain beat me up, tested me, and tested me some more. And after nearly killing Charles and me, it sent us a blue sky with a gorgeous sun shining on our faces, followed by the kindness of strangers.

Like the volcano, Africa can stun you in an instant. It can throw floods and drought and disease at you, sometimes all at the same time. In the next moment, it will tease you with its magnificent beauty, so even if you don't forget, you can find a way to forgive. Ultimately, it keeps you coming back for more.

CHAPTER 8

A NEW LEARNING CURVE

"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."

-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

`he holiday season in Kigali made me long for family and snow, Christmas trees and caroling. The December I knew I was leaving felt different-bittersweet. I knew how much I would miss the beauty of Rwanda, the women with whom I worked, great adventures, and the simplicity of life in general.

My friend Ginette and I hosted a holiday party for all of our friends. We taped snowmen we'd made from butcher paper on her wall, which was papered with a tropical scene from floor to ceiling-a popular decorating approach at the time. We baked cookies and made punch with vodka and passion fruit juice. Friends and colleagues came decked out in their finest and danced. Boniface, the driver, was hardly recognizable without his blue UNICEF uniform. Dieu Donne, the artist who had designed our logo, danced the entire night, dressed in Zairian attire. Prudence and Liliane were there, too, and would have danced all night had I not broken several of my fingers.

I was leading a group of children in a line dance of sorts, trying to translate the words to Simon and Garfunkel's "Cecilia" and looking over my shoulder as I sang. When I noticed a number of the kids widening their eyes, it was too late: I was already tumbling off a little bridge that stood about 5 feet over a makeshift canal in front of the house. I landed smack on the back of my hand and knew I'd broken bones the minute I landed. Ginette called her next-door neighbor, a doctor, to see if he could help. Arriving quickly, he held my hand in his, forcefully yanking one of my fingers and sending a shock of pain through my body. When I yelped and pulled back my hand, the doctor told me that I must be "a very delicate woman."

"You are not like Rwandan women, who are so strong," he said. "They don't even make noise during childbirth."

I stared icily at him.

He pulled a second finger, I thought I was going to vomit. "Please," I whispered, "it must be broken."

As if he hadn't heard me, he pulled my middle finger. This time, on cue, I threw up. Finally, he suggested I see someone in the morning.

With one day left in the country, I found myself in the Kigali hospital, waiting among patients suffering from AIDS and malaria. After the doctor x-rayed my hand, he showed me the three bones with neat breaks right through the fingers. He then created a humongous cast that stretched from my fingers to my shoulder and charged me a total of $2 for the service.

That evening, the women of Duterimbere held a going-away party for me. Wearing a maroon dress, Prudence presented me with a gold fertility necklace and a blessing that I would bear many children. The rest of the women gave me a beautiful quilt sewn with bright-colored renditions of my favorite scenes in Rwanda. In the center was Duterimbere's logo and along the sides were scenes from the blue bakery, children learning to read, the rolling mountains of Rwanda, the marketplace, and even a group of prisoners dressed in pink-in recognition that I thought it so strange that the government had decided on pale pink to dress those who had committed crimes.

"We've done something wonderful together," Prudence said to the whole group. "We've built an institution that will show Rwanda and the world what women are capable of accomplishing. This country will grow stronger because of this work and because of women's solidarity."

For a moment, I wanted to cancel my trip home to the United States and stay to see these dreams completely realized, though I knew that in reality this would take decades. A big part of me didn't believe I was leaving Rwanda, leaving Africa, anyway. Ginette told me that I might as well count on not leaving it for long, for it was clear the continent had gotten under my skin. I shook my head and said it would be at least a few years before I returned.

I found myself quietly weeping on the flight back home and thought of my younger self crying on the plane when I had first come to Africa. The places I'd been had changed me more than I'd impacted them, but I'd also seen what a small group of people could do to change the world. I wouldn't have given up the experience for anything.

BACK HOME IN VIRGINIA, in January I learned I'd been accepted at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and had 9 months before classes began. Though being with my family was divine, "home" felt foreign to me-my interest in African politics was shared by few, and I would watch the eyes of friends glaze over as I told too many stories about the people I'd known there and the places I'd encountered.

I began searching for a short-term consultancy, something that would take me back to Africa. Through a number of connections, I secured a contract at the World Bank to focus on agriculture, women, and West Africa. Within weeks I was assigned to a project in Gambia, an anglophone country located in francophone West Africa. The nation is a sliver of an isthmus right in the middle of Senegal, along the strategically important Gambia River, a stark indication of how the colonial carving of territory in Africa had given no thought to what might make sense for the Africans who lived there.

My mission was to work with Gambia's Department of Agriculture on a $15 million soft-loan package from the World Bank. Highly paid consultants had been working for months with the Gambian government to craft the proposal, but despite hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees paid, neither the Gambian government nor the Bank itself thought the final product was adequate. I was asked to review and complete the proposal to the satisfaction of both the Gambian government and the World Bank. Having seen Duterimbere run for more than 2 years for a fraction of what was paid to the bank's consultants made me resolve to do things differently, but I wasn't sure where to begin.

The consultancy started in the plush offices of the Bank in its Washington, DC, headquarters. I loved seeing people from all corners of the globe walking the halls-learned men and women, all focused on helping the developing world. I knew the Bank's shortcomings-its top-down approach and need to lend directly to governments, which had led to too many failed projects-but I also could see the potential of a powerful institution with the sole mission of supporting countries that had significant development needs.

Since my task was to revise a proposal for women agriculturalists in Gambia, I started by researching everything I could find on what the Bank had done previously in that country, especially with regard to women farmers. One project stopped me in my tracks: The Bank had spent more than $20 million over the course of more than a decade to implement an irrigation project for rice production. Early memos discussed how investment in an irrigation technology would greatly enhance productivity for the country's major food crop, rice, thus enhancing child nutrition as well as increasing farmers' overall income levels. The idea made good sense. Despite Gambia's being a coastal country, irrigation was needed for better production, and early cost-benefit analyses showed a likelihood of raising yields tenfold or more.

I could understand how experts initially might have determined this a sound proposal, but many years of investing in the irrigation program had yielded nothing but disastrous results. Rice production had actually declined, and the health of women and children in the area had only worsened; indeed, early death rates among children had risen. Despite the logic of irrigating land to improve agricultural productivity, tens of millions of dollars had been spent with little to show for it.

The story of what happened is textbook for traditional aid and how not to do it. Imagine the 1970s, when this project started. Well-intentioned agronomists and engineers from the World Bank arrived in Gambia, ready to help set up sophisticated irrigation systems that would improve food production. These men (most of the World Bank staff were men at the time) would interact with the government, which would identify farmers to work on the project. The project's farmers were typically men, though in Gambia women were responsible for growing rice while men cultivated the country's major cash crop, peanuts. So why focus on men? Because irrigation used technology, which was considered a man's domain.

The farmers laid the irrigation pipes and worked the land, ignoring their own fields, and rice production actually declined over time-not because irrigation wasn't needed, but because it was managed by individuals having experience neither with rice nor with the new technology. What is surprising is not the poor results, but that so little was done to address the project's problems for so many years.

Reading the proposal I was to work on did little to make me feel better: The money was mostly designated for giveaway programs that I thought would undoubtedly fail. For instance, $1 million had been allocated to purchase maize mills to reduce women's labor. Traditionally, West African women worked for hours milling maize by hand. By reducing this grueling work, women would have time for other things, including earning income. In theory, it made sense to provide technologies to reduce labor needs, but theory isn't enough. I'd already seen dozens of well-intentioned programs exactly like this fail miserably.

Typically, aid workers would help install the mills, and local communities would operate them until, inevitably the mills would break down. Few people knew how to repair them, so the mills would sit broken and useless. Other villages suffered a lack of diesel to fuel the mills. On top of these problems, the Japanese government had just donated thousands of maize mills to women's groups and villages across the country. The notion that the Bank's new initiative might provide thousands more mills seemed absurd.

Of all the initiatives in the document, one stood out: an experiment to more effectively sell fertilizer on credit to women farmers. I'd seen the importance of household food security in Kenya and Rwanda; individual farming families needed the tools to feed themselves through farming or earn enough income to buy food. The Green Revolution in India had demonstrated how better inputs-seeds and fertilizers-could improve agricultural production dramatically, but these options were rarely made available to smallholder farmers. The idea of combining access to credit with an input that could improve farmers' productivity was powerful.

I still had a lot of questions about the proposal, but I knew the next step was to go to Gambia and see for myself. In truth, I had missed Africa and was excited to be returning only months after I'd left Rwanda.

The nearly empty jet flew over the West African coastline and landed in Gambia's sleepy capital, Banjul, in a cloud of dust. All I could see were flatlands to my left and right and, in front of me, a tiny airport with a single terminal. A wave of thick, hot air hit my face the second I walked onto the tarmac, reminding me immediately of how much this tropical, flat part of Africa differed from the mountains of Rwanda and the dry savannas of Kenya.

A friendly taxi driver took me to the Bungalow Beach Hotel, a lovely place situated right by the palm-fringed ocean. The main house was painted white, and I had my own little apartment near the water, making it necessary to walk through beautiful tropical gardens to reach my room. A small restaurant under a thatched roof stood beside the swimming pool, and the hotel grounds were filled with beautiful, colorful birds. Outside my window was a tree full of yellow weaverbirds singing playfully and building their nests. I felt free again the minute I arrived.

I met my teammate a few days later; Duncan was a tall, slender engineer with dark hair and glasses. He always wore short-sleeved shirts with pencils in his front pocket and carried an enormous briefcase. Seated by the pool, we discussed our "mission" to craft a realistic proposal for the World Bank's $15 million soft loan to Gambia. I'd been appointed leader of the mission and shared my concerns about the task we'd been given and the work that had already been done. I didn't like the lack of accountability and felt that another $15 million loan, even with no interest, would do no favors for this country unless we were confident of seeing real changes in productivity.